I wrote and contributed to a few tech books between 2004 and 2009. One of them was obsolete before it hit the shelves, thanks to changing versions and APIs. In another case, I joined the company I'd written about and personally outmoded whole chapters. Great for my career, terrible for book sales!| blog.lmorchard.com
I wrote and contributed to a few tech books between 2004 and 2009. One of them was obsolete before it hit the shelves, thanks to changing versions and APIs. In another case, I joined the company I'd written about and personally outmoded whole chapters. Great for my career, terrible for book sales! This experience comes back to me as I read pieces like Dusty Phillips' My AI-Driven Identity Crisis: So what am I good for anymore? Writing code? Vibe coding hasn’t successfully commodified softwa...| blog.lmorchard.com
2025| blog.lmorchard.com
Why bother sharing anything on the open web if it's just going to be fodder for extractive, non-reciprocal bots?| blog.lmorchard.com
I've been trying (and often failing) to be careful about my language around the current wave of LLM-powered tech that folks are calling "AI"| blog.lmorchard.com
Hello world! I printed an Owlcat, but I wanted to try the photo gallery in a different post. A "nice" side effect of running up against the token limit in Claude Code is that it's often a good time to, like, take a break. Been playing Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom before bed. I'm really digging it, about 2 dungeons in.It seems to use an advanced version of the game engine from the Link's Adventure remake, where everything looks like a tilt-shifted world of vinyl toys. And the thing is, I'...| blog.lmorchard.com
I've been following this 3D artist for awhile who runs a Patreon called "Happy Flexi Pets". Last night, she posted this ludicrously adorable Owlcat. So, I practically lunged to download the models, get them sliced up, and started the printer running overnight. The result was pretty great. Look at those beans! 🐾 Sometimes, I love living in the future.| blog.lmorchard.com
Hello world! Spent a chunk Sunday doing inadvisable things with my Nintendo Switch to back up all my downloaded games and game saves.I think this risks getting the console banned from Nintendo's online services? But, the gist I've gotten from Reddit and elsewhere is that they seem to reserve that hammer for folks who actually pirate, hack, and cheat in multiplayer games. Me, I just want to dump stuff to my NAS for later restoration if Something Bad happens. I did this with my 3DS, back when t...| blog.lmorchard.com
Still thinking about that METR study and I saw John Whiles write this: The developers could provide chunks of that mental model to their AI tools - but doing so is a slow and lossy process that will never truly capture the theory of the program that exists in their minds. By offloading their software development work to an LLM they hampered their unique ability to work on their codebases effectively. This feels to me like a good take on why AI assistants slowed down developers in that study. ...| blog.lmorchard.com
Hello world! Trying to decide if this is a "still alive" or a "beware, I live!" kind of day? Either way, I've been down a hole of busy-ness for the past few weeks and been wanting to climb out to emit some reports here. Still trying to find a good balance while spinning plates across multiple projects. But, I've gotten a lot done without quite going entirely insane. Feel like I've suddenly become a cyborg over the past few weeks. Been working across multiple instances of Claude Code all day, ...| blog.lmorchard.com
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity - METR: We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. I'm seeing plenty of "I told you so" as this makes the rounds. But, having spent the past month deep in ...| blog.lmorchard.com
I've been procrastinating getting back to it, but I finally threw some hours into a substantial overhaul of my Pebbling Club web link sharing project—the first real efforts since December! Migrated from SQLite to Postgres, switched to uv for dependency management, and moved deployment from fly.io to my basement machine running Docker Compose. I built my own git-push deployment post-receive hook because I'm a masochist—er, I mean I wanted complete control over the deployment process. It's ...| blog.lmorchard.com
2025| blog.lmorchard.com
Hello world! TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck - YouTube Now, with over five decades of programming experience, Kent is still pushing boundaries—this time with AI coding tools. In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with him to talk about what’s changed, what hasn’t, and why he’s more excited than ever to code. This was a really neat interview. I'm a bit behind Kent Beck in years and industry contributions, to say the least. But, it's cool to hear how someone with hi...| blog.lmorchard.com
Since I'm bouncing between multiple teams' projects, this LLM agent-assisted coding thing reminds me of multi-box mining in EVE Online.| blog.lmorchard.com
Jason Santa Maria, Large Language Muddle: As someone who has spent their entire career and most of their life participating and creating online, this sucks. It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it. The part that stings most is they didn’t even ask. They just assumed they could take everything like it was theirs. The power imbalance is so great, they’ll probably get away with it. ... I imagine there w...| blog.lmorchard.com
Hello world! It continues to be kind of a perfect storm to bring a halt to my recent rapid-fire blogging. 😔I'm pitching in on two teams at work, which really cuts down on time to stop and smell the RSS feeds to find things to write about. Even though I'm doing a lot of LLM-assisted coding lately, I'm doing it for more projects than usual. But also, my homebrew RSS feed reader just broke and I've been too busy to fix it. So, I haven't been, you know, reading feeds much lately. I did just re...| blog.lmorchard.com
TL;DR: In my previous post, I used APIs from OpenAI to roughly cluster ideas by named topic. In this post, I'll try that again, but this time with local models on my own hardware.| blog.lmorchard.com
TL;DR: FigJam has a feature where you can automatically cluster sticky notes by topic. I wanted to see if I could glue some things together to implement this myself.| blog.lmorchard.com
TL;DR: I like deploying robots to include more of the team in our core development loop| blog.lmorchard.com
TL;DR: Why bother sharing anything on the open web if it's just going to be fodder for extractive, non-reciprocal bots?| blog.lmorchard.com