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.

adactio.com/links/22438

Wednesday session

If you wanted to make a really crude approximation of project management, you could say there are two main styles: waterfall and agile. It’s not as simple as that by any means. And the two aren’t really separate things; agile came about as a response to the failures of wate...

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.

adactio.com/links/22435

Tuesday session

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This knocked me for six when I read it back in 2022: It’s like a slow-building sucker punch. Like my other favourite book of that year—A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa—it’s hard to classify. I think it’s autoficti...

Monday session

I went to State Of The Browser in London on the weekend. It was great! I mean, it’s always great but this year the standard felt really high. All the talks were top quality. I’ve been at events with ticket prices a literal order of magnitude greater but with quality nowhere...

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.

adactio.com/links/22429

Curse you, Betteridge’s Law!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c1d6q1l5r6do

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

It’s the 25th of February and it’s a beautiful day here in Brighton. I had lunch sitting outside—that’s how unseasonably warm it is. Like a little whiff of Summer to remind us of what’s yet to come. It’s also my birthday. The beautiful weather is an auspicious augery. Mozi...

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.

adactio.com/links/22424

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.

adactio.com/links/22423

The principle of least power expressed nicely:

Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.

adactio.com/links/22422

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.

adactio.com/links/22421

You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.

adactio.com/links/22420

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.

adactio.com/links/22419

Streetwise

This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.

adactio.com/links/22417

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.

adactio.com/links/22416

I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”

For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.

And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.

AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.

adactio.com/links/22415

Here are some design princples I can get behind: long-term thinking, resilience, flexibility and seamfulness.

adactio.com/links/22414

Thursday session

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

adactio.com/links/22412

Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

adactio.com/links/22411

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not...