Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦
@kirahowe.com
Canadian software/data engineer and yoga teacher from the East Coast Writes about: Clojure, data, open source, community, yoga Loves: dinner parties, live music, violin, my dog
If you are a product engineer adding "AI" to things, please consider your users and their experience! kirahowe.com/2026/aug/31/...
AI "features" and integrations should remove friction, not add it — Kira Howe
My personal space on the internet
kirahowe.com
TIL that TypeScript declaration emit can fail on types that type-check fine. Turns out the world is just one big mutable state and there's nothing we can do about it.
There are increasingly many cool ideas for things to do with AI but so far most of them seem to barely work. Turns out software engineering is just hard. kirahowe.com/2026/aug/8/i...
Is it all just vapourware? — Kira Howe
My personal space on the internet
kirahowe.com
It is always, always a mistake to build a text editor. You will not “not need” the features you think will make it simple enough. Save yourself the time and tokens and skip to the part where you realize you do, in fact, need a real text editor and that you don’t actually want to build one of those.
Everyone's talking about the $20k C compiler that doesn't work but the tone is excitement, not a huge collective eye roll -- what am I missing? This seems like a classic case of real harm and imaginary benefit. This is a well and truly solved problem if there ever was one.
Writing "agents" is like writing a book on good software engineering practices.
Stop Citing AI
A response to ‘But ChatGPT said…’
stopcitingai.com
Jon of The North@krauza.bsky.social · 11mo agoChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching.
What if we did a single run and declared victory
This is one of my favourite conferences I’ve ever been to. Really high quality and genuinely interesting. Plus Berlin is one of the coolest cities in the world! Well worth checking it out if you can: bobkonf.de/2026/en/
BOB - BOB 2026
BOB Konferenz, Best of Breed Konferenz für Software-Entwickler und Entscheider in der Softwareentwicklung.
bobkonf.de
So since they removed launchpad from macOS and you can only launch things from spotlight now, does that mean you can't open an app until spotlight finishes indexing?
The world is being cleaved into people who overuse AI and people who deal with the fallout of people overusing AI. Frustratingly, I don't really like being in either of these camps. Where do we go from here?
I don't want non-deterministic, randomly wrong answers to my vaguely worded spoken-language requests. Do people really want this? I want tools that reliably do one thing well and consistently.
My boss: Can't you get Copilot to validate the info in the spreadsheet? Me: Well, do we want it to be accurate or not? Because either I check it myself or I ask Copilot and then check its output *and* the spreadsheet, so... Boss: What's the point of Copilot then? Me: Exactly.
Working with AI assistants/LLM-driven development feels like coaching a really dumb, belligerent, and obsequious intern _all day_. It's exhausting and no fun. Super curious how other people are working with these tools for positive outcomes How do you use LLMs in your day to day, if at all?
Narrator: The machine had not, in fact, found the source of the error.
The frequency with which front-end developers are expected to _completely_ re-architect fundamental aspects of their apps, like state management or data fetching or caching is sheer madness.
📢 Amazing job alert! 📢 Seeq is hiring for a few different engineering roles (some of which may have us working together 😄). I've had a really great experience working here the last few months and happy to chat anytime. If you're interested let me know! apply.workable.com/seeq/
Seeq
Seeq is a global leader in advanced analytics for process manufacturing industries. We’re transforming the way companies do business by harnessing the power of unused manufacturing data to generate fa...
apply.workable.com
LLMs might just be the thing that convinces developers that good docs and well described APIs are worth writing.
Tim Pratley’s summary of the Scinoj Light conference is excellent, check it out for a great take on the main themes plus overviews of each talk. Thanks to everyone in the community who made this happen and who’s contributing summaries and responses like this clojurecivitas.github.io/conferences/...
The Hallway Track: SciNoj Light #1 Data Analysis Stories – Clojure Civitas
clojurecivitas.github.io
Shared mutable state is a curse. Writing software doesn't have to be terrible. Do not use shared mutable state.
After a long bit of toiling, we're proud to announce the launch of Gander Social—a project to bring a new kind of social to Canadians. Canadian owned and hosted, a feed you control, privacy-first, consent-based, respectful by default. Join the Early Access program: gandersocial.ca
Gander: The Social Media You Want, Built for Canada
Fun, private, and ethical. We're changing the way social media is done around here, all without your data taking an unexpected trip south.
gandersocial.ca
