I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers’.

Lately, I have started noticing examples of not just where the debt is being accrued, but who then has the responsibility to pick it up and repay it.

Too often, an LLM doesn’t replace the need for thinking in a group setting, but simply creates more work for others.

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Never mind Cloudflare; the electricity has gone out in our street.

It’s actually kinda nice, playing mandolin by candlelight.

I find Brian Eno to be a fascinating chap. His music isn’t my cup of tea, but I really enjoy hearing his thoughts on art, creativity, and culture. I’ve always loved this short piece he wrote about singing with other people. I’ve passed that link onto multiple people who hav...

Front page of the BBC right now.

Reading The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

Closing out #ffconf with Erika’s chickens.

Kicking off #ffconf!

All I’ve ever wanted from life is a genuinely great SVG vector illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle.

— Simon Willison, What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?

Technology isn’t destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.

— M. Mitchell Waldrop

I’m definitely going to be sent on a side quest.

This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!

Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.

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I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

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Hanging out with Coco.

I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.

There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:

A blog without comments is not a blog.

That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:

Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.

That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.

I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.

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The generative AI industry only exists because some people decided that it’s okay for them to take all this work with no permission, let alone compensation for the original creators, and to charge others for the privilege of using the probabilistic plagiarism machines they’ve fed it to.

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Tuesday session

’80s BASIC type-in mags are back, but this time for HTML!

10 wonderful web apps, including games, toys, puzzles and utilities

No coding knowledge needed, you just type

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Gatehouse

Dan, Sue, and Jessica on Brighton beach.

How often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web’s most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.

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We’ve arrived at an industrialised process, one that’s like an assembly line for applications. Frameworks like React have become the machinery of that assembly line. They enable us to build efficiently, to build at scale, to build predictably. But they also constrain what...

Thursday session

If you’re building software, it’s generally a good idea to avoid the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. This is when you insist on writing absolutely everything from scratch even if it would make more sense to use a third-party provider. Need your app to take payments? Don’t try t...

“Fáilte go Knocka, fáilte go Knocka, gaelteacht nua i dtuisceart na cathrach!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH772P6YbMQ

(Tá Kneecap ceart go leor, ach is fearr liom Kabin Crew!)

When you think about it, the phrase “earning a living” is really quite vile.

Reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

Bhí RÓIS ar fheabhas anocht! Guth den scoth!

Can you ship AI-generated code without creating a maintenance nightmare six months from now? Can you debug it when it breaks? Can you modify it when requirements change? Can you onboard new engineers to a codebase they didn’t write and the AI barely explained?

Most teams haven’t realized this shift yet. They’re optimizing for code generation speed while comprehension debt silently accumulates in their repos.

One team I talked to spent 3 days fixing what should have been a 2-hour problem. They had “saved” time by having AI generate the initial implementation. But when it broke, they lost 70 hours trying to understand code they had never built themselves.

That’s comprehension debt compounding. The time you save upfront gets charged back with interest later.

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UX London will be back in 2026. It’s on June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th: Each day features a morning packed with inspiring talks followed by an afternoon of practical hands-on workshops. It’s the perfect blend! As with last year, each day will be themed: 2 June 2026: discover...

England is criss-crossed by routes that were originally laid down by the Romans. When it came time to construct modern roads, it often made sense to use these existing routes rather than trying to designate entirely new ones. So some of the roads in England are like an early...