Mastodawn

Working solo right now and I've really missed the mentoring that I used to do when I had a team. I've been planning to live stream coding sessions to scratch this itch, and have been practicing that to an audience of 0.

It's kind of amazing how productive I've been when I'm vocalizing my thought process to this imaginary audience.

I've dubbed it rubber duck live streaming and it's my new go to when I'm stuck on something.

Jesse 6d ago

I'm not completely satisfied with this, but I've been mulling over this post for too long and needed to get it on the page.

My thoughts on #ai in software engineering, but hopefully a slightly different approach that's helpful to someone out there.

https://til.io/posts/2026/03/16/how-im-navigating-an-uncertain-future/

How I'm Navigating an Uncertain Future

Some general thoughts on navigating an unsettling time where it's hard to know what is real.

til.io / jesse tolj

Jesse Feb 19

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Terry Godier Feb 7

@manton all of my chips are on being a real human, writing code by hand, with experience and strong opinions. The era of personal software I think is here. And that is both personal as in folks will make their own, but also to be a person behind the software. there’s never been a more important time to have beliefs and make opinionated software that a robot wouldn’t.

Jesse Feb 2

Larry Garfield Feb 2

I may regret this at some point, but I felt the need to put down in writing how I feel about this moment in the tech industry.

It is not kind. You may well be insulted by it. If you are... then you really should question yourself.

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/selfish-ai

#AI #LLM #Programming

Selfish AI | GarfieldTech

Jesse Jan 31

If you confidently share your predictions about the future every single day despite 100% of your previous predictions being wrong, you might be a (tech|crypto|ai|) bro. Just fyi.

Jesse Jan 19

I think the saddest thing I'm seeing from heavy LLM usage is the gleeful deskilling of people who used to be pretty okay at their jobs.

There's a nearly complete delegation of reasoning followed by a quick gut check ("LGTM") before committing the code, sending the email, etc. I think it's doing something very bad to the brain compared to reasoning it through yourself.

I feel very fortunate to be working solo this year and to have a lot of control over how and when I interact with this stuff.

Jesse Dec 2

Aram Sinnreich Dec 2

Imagine having a billion dollars and wasting your time doing anything other than:

1. Reading novels in the bath
2. Making art
3. Traveling
4. Cooking and eating
5. Giving heaps of cash to awesome people and institutions who need it

Jesse Nov 19

If you're in the small intersection of #wezterm and mise-en-place users who eschew tmux you might find this post useful - https://til.io/posts/2025/11/19/multi-pane-dev-tasks-with-mise-and-wezterm/

Multi-Pane Dev Tasks With Mise and WezTerm

A handy way to run multiple development tasks in a single terminal window using Mise and WezTerm.

til.io / jesse tolj

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Jesse Oct 7

For context, I'm choosing htmx because I want this software to live for a long time and the hope is to reduce the dependencies it's built on top of.

I've spent a lot of time managing "dependency rot" in large applications and I'm kind of over it. This is a completely greenfield solo project and I've already written some simple utility classes for managing HTMX requests/responses. Everything degrades gracefully to a regular full-page request/response cycle if HTMX is disabled.

Jesse Oct 7

I'm going to be staring a new project soon with #htmx and #laravel / #php. Does anyone have tips or footguns with that stack? Thanks in advance!