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I recommend this post on vibe coding.

There's a lot more to development than coding.

I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.

I think people find it amazing that they can create code, not just that the machine can create it. I know what that's like because I get a rush from creating images, something I never had a skill for, so all of a sudden being able to express myself with drawings was a breakthrough for me. ;-)

I've spent a few decades making commercial quality software in a variety of contexts, and so far I wouldn't rush to get rid of my dev teams based on the idea that the bots can do their work.

I think more realistically we have powerful new tools that we as yet have not learned how to use, but it's pretty exciting to see what may be possible.

Abandoned reading: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist. What an infuriating endeavor. McGilchrist seems to think that he he makes a claim stronger by giving, not three, not five, but forty-seven supportive examples — and that he can’t say what he wants to say about the hemispheres of the brain without pausing to articulate a Theory of Truth. I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 📚

“Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.” — @paulg Anytime anyone underestimates or tries to do an end run around @sama, I remind myself of this golden nugget from PG, the man who knew him best before …

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, February 2026.

From the video Photographing a snowstorm in Jackson, Wyoming.

I've had a number of people ask me about this: A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities - by Ted Gioia. I’ll just say that my version would be, not 52 assignments in a year, but one assignment in a year. Pick one vital book and read it slowly. Pause to think. Re-read difficult passages. Take your time, and be willing to set it aside for a while. And remember what Auden said: “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit.” 

Every few years a startup comes along that dominates the headlines and grabs all the attention. For all the right and wrong reasons. I have been following the industry long enough to see that pattern repeat itself. Netscape, Amazon, Facebook, and more recently, OpenAI. The headlines are driven by the curiosity of the masses. And …

Donald Trump, sitting president of the United States, on his blog: Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Pra...

Favorited AI Policy and Human.json by Claudine Chionh Favorited Adding human.json to WordPress by Terence Eden Claudine Chionh and Terence Eden both mention human.json, a data file that lists people and sites you know are written by humans, as opposed to generated by AI. A rekindling of FOAF? In these days of needing to assume […]

Favorited I used AI. It worked. I hated it. by Michael Taggart An excellent post by Michael Taggart on how it felt to him to make a much needed bit of code with the help of Claude Code. The results worked, but he hated how it made him feel. He explores those opposing outcomes without […]

Favorited If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems by Andrew Murphy Good blogpost on how ‘speeding up’ code production (x lines committed this week, yay!) by using AI, will likely cause more trouble in an organisation. Because the theory-of-constraints bottleneck in an organisation will never be […]

I love all the new discourse about WordPress. It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape. I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you c...

And from six years ago, on my old Buttondown newsletter: Easter with Arcabas.

New from me: “Welcome to the party, Christmas and Easter Christians!”

Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After that, the next opening remains the week starting July 27.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 and Q4 2026, and over half of those weeks are already sold.

One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when...

My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.

Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat. Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.

See for yourself how Material scales.

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google.”

Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode.” That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a “sham.”

Everything about Perplexity looks like a scam.

Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.

Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close to saying it. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn...

Tech CEO asks
Chatbot why it is frozen.
Chatbot: “You’re frozen.”