I'm finding that because you can sprint with AI, vibe-coded apps can get so far off track that it takes longer to get them back on track than it did to generate the original application.
John Riccardi
@arcanegrain.dev
Lead Crafter at @8thLight Mostly frontend, too many D&D side projects https://arcanegrain.dev https://github.com/riccjohn ❤ Brooklyn, NY → Madison, WI ❤
Such an important and multifaceted topic, thanks for the exploring this, was really nice to chat with you about it! Big recommend for anyone feeling a bit off the more they use AI to code!
Scott Tolinski@tolin.ski · last mo.This is the most important video I've ever made. In this, I explore the negative and positive mental health effects of AI coding, with data and expert commentary. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPUn...
A great deal of AI thought leadership articles can be summed up as "We all agreed we were tired of reading AI slop, but it turns out we don't mind writing it, so we asked AI to explain how it's actually extremely brave of us to do this, rather than just plain lazy and hypocritical"
New: An "expert witness" in a $61 million lawsuit over an industrial explosion that killed three people and destroyed 200 homes used ChatGPT to write his report for the court. He prompted ChatGPT to "show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding" www.404media.co/show-how-3m-...
I'm sure I'm not the only one suddenly inheriting AI projects that are a mess with AI-generated docs that are just not true or are wayy too long. We need to get back to feeling ownership of code. When you generate it, there's no ownership there because you truly did not create it.
Me to devs: DO NOT trust what the LLM wrote Me to LLM reviewer: DO NOT trust what the human wrote in PR description / docs Me to LLM reviewer 2: DO NOT trust the code the LLM wrote
Trying to track down an annotate data to use in evals might just be the hardest part of AI dev
Going through Anthropic course on implementing a web search tool: Instructor: you'll probably want to only allow them to search certain domains, because if you haven't noticed, a lot of sites on the internet are filled with bad AI-generated articles. Me: AND WHO'S FAULT IS THAT!?
Every time we build with AI's recommendations, we feed the next model's training data. The bias doesn't stay flat. It compounds. I wrote about why that's a problem for technical innovation, and what we can do about it. arcanegrain.dev/blog/ais-com...
AI's Compounding Disinterest, Pt 1: The Echo Chamber of the Status Quo
AI coding assistants default to what dominated their training data, creating a feedback loop that compounds over time. Here's what that means for technical innovation — and how to break out of it.
arcanegrain.dev
plugin idea: a Claude Code plugin that allows you to connect a blood pressure monitor to your computer. When it senses your blood pressure rising, it injects a prompt to claude that says "really think about what you're about to say next, because he's about to throw his laptop into a river."
my approach to testing RAG changes: make a tweak, fire up the app, ask some questions, squint at the results, try to remember if it felt better last time. totally scientific. I just wrote about why that doesn't scale and a better way
Stop Playing Whac-a-Mole With Your RAG Chatbot
Tired of fixing one RAG answer only to break another? Here's how I replaced manual testing with retrieval evals, recall@k, and a CI gate.
arcanegrain.dev
I have a home-rolled chrome plugin that throws up a JS `alert` after infinite scroll has triggered more than ten times. Says “Are you doomscrolling?”
In the massive influx of people trying to be AI "thought leaders", I think the biggest thing being left out of the conversation is "care". 🧵
Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.
Soooooo why is no one talking about how even if AI does all the things people say it does, it's probably not a great idea that we let 2-3 companies all get a cut of the entire world economy and in doing so, all put a reliance on them. That seems kinda bad, ya know?
Your browser tabs are zombies 🧟♂️ with one goal: to put you into CONSUME mode just like they are. Declare Tab Bankruptcy™! The only way to stop the infection is to consume less and create more. arcanegrain.dev/blog/the-tab...
The Tab Horde is at the Gates (And They're Hungry for Your Focus)
Stop being a human cache for other people's content. It's time to declare tab bankruptcy, kill the unread horde, and rediscover the power of creation.
arcanegrain.dev
guys please don’t fall for the cute doggo ring super bowl commercial. they’re literally creating a tool that turns all ring cameras in a neighborhood into a surveillance dragnet
With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Ring's 'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.
404media.co
Join the club, AI - I too am experiencing tension between context size and attention focus.
Just read another big tech post about the future of software engineering. Lots of people quoted: not a single woman quoted.
Since the early days of the space program, astronauts have quarantined before missions because any illness could be disastrous. It’s eminently logical — not “extreme” — for athletes who’ve trained their WHOLE LIVES for one event to take similar precautions in order to stay in peak physical condition
NPR@npr.org · 8mo agoFor most people, the pandemic days of masking are behind us. In certain corners of the Winter Olympics, though, things still look a lot like they did in Covid times. Some athletes are taking extreme measures to stay healthy. n.pr/4akK70l
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology
She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.
nature.com
and we have a winner for our 2026 tagline
Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)@iwriteok.bsky.social · 8mo agooh god this is so much worse
xikipedia app/pwa progress update made some navbar icons (im not a designer but i think they look neat) also installing the app, full-offline mode, cache, updates, and locally stored settings are all implemented in dev
I've been in SF for four days and on each day I've had multiple conversations where people (self included) express deep feelings, fear, wonder and worry about their skills being replaced or (this is less named explicitly but an assumed driver I think) no longer valued by others. Big threats to feel