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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
bobbie.net/2026/03/06/craig-mod-were-probably-doing-a-lot-of-things-the-wrong-way/
Bobbie says:
Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into him at a party in a back yard in Brighton…
That was my party!
whitep4nth3r.com/blog/i-am-in-an-abusive-relationship-with-the-technology-industry/
The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.
I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:
There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.
terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted-for-simplicity/
You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.
Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.
Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.
Brilliant!
Sunday morning kitchen session in B
Thursday session
If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.
But if, say, you’re a “writer” and you’re using an LLM to “help you” “write” or “think” because it’s easier and takes less time and thought, then I stand my ground; I can and do fault you.
Wednesday session
An open source project that has already produced a great app for learning Irish—programmed in a language called Draíocht (sin “magic” as Béarla)!
I’m supporting this on Open Collective.
Tuesday session
Monday session
Reading A Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Large language models help you build the thing faster, which is the primary end goal for your company but only sometimes for you. My primary goal might be to build the thing faster, but it also might be to learn something durably, to enjoy the work, to look forward to Monday.
I don’t like the mental fragility of not fully understanding how my own code works, where AI-generated code is “mine” in that it’s attributed to me in the git blame and I’m its maintainer going forward.
Curse you, Betteridge’s Law!
But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.
— Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You
Birthday session
There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.
denodell.com/blog/constraints-and-the-lost-art-of-optimization
The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.
Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.
The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.
The principle of least power expressed nicely:
Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
anthony.noided.media/blog/ai/programming/2026/02/14/i-guess-i-kinda-get-why-people-hate-ai.html
To be clear, I think AI will be ultimately extremely helpful. I still am using it on my projects. I am going to use it at my next job. I, personally, don’t hate AI.
But I can’t deny that the vibes right now are awful.
Not just bad, awful. It’s not just the “chat we’re cooked you’re the permanent underclass” stuff influencers say. It’s not just the “everybody is fucked” hyperbole CEOs sprout. It’s the actual, day-to-day experience with the technology. I’m a programmer—AI actually helps me a lot. But for normal people, their interactions are profoundly more negative, and none of the people behind this technology seem to care.
You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.
This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.
The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.
Streetwise
