I finally got through the Lex Fridman DHH interview. I'm not particularly familiar with Fridman, but I was struck by how similar my formative computing experiences were to DHH's. 11 My first grown-up job was building Rails applications, too.
My first memory of computing is being sat next to my Dad as we typed out BASIC games, line-by-line, into a Commodore 64. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to do. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed up.
Now, typing out 1,500 lines of code and hitting enter to discover a typo on line 250 that you can't go back and edit is… not great. But the formative lesson of "it does what I want it to do" bit hard. I moved through the Amiga BBS scene and into PCs. I doubt I was even 15 when the guestbook I'd written for my first website evolved into a proto-social media site that spread across the school. I recall immediately ripping off Microsoft's groundbreaking new IntelliSense feature for a HTML editor a la the incredibly named HoTMetaL Pro and HotDog editors. The project fizzled out, but not before I had friends demo it and give me feedback, from a cute little install package that may also have contained a BackOrifice dropper. Oops.
Early 2026, when we hit the point of "okay, models can code now", I felt a sense of fairly deep sadness. Code can, and should, be art. I still believe this. Every program carries part of the author; it's an expression of someone's vision and desires. The program does what the author wanted it to. Mitchell Hashimoto changed that mindset for me with a tweet promoting slop, in the sense of allowing you to prototype 5 new UI designs. To see how your system scales with 50 working plugins loaded. To iterate, test, and explore quicker than was ever possible before. You may not be writing all of the code, but it's still your direction and name associated with it.
I've been working on a couple of projects in my spare time. Trawl is probably the most interesting: I was in the process of having Opus 4.6 rebuild my homelab away from manual configurations to Terraform and Ansible-managed GitOps. In the process of hacking up Splunk's Ansible roles, and realising I was stuck for the next couple of days waiting for someone to approve my dev/test license, I decided to write my own. You can just do things, as they say. This has been a surprisingly fun project: I have Opinions about log management platforms and with relatively little effort, I can will them into existence. I wrote a Splunk-like DSL that's transpiled to DuckDB, and in the process learned a shitload about search internals. I now understand why certain things in Splunk are slow—because I've built and tested three different implementations! Turns out the stochastic parrot can teach you a hell of a lot.
I've been building Trawl for about the last six months. Hilariously, I had the first version working in an afternoon. The craft of software engineering apparently includes more than "clone Splunk, make no mistakes" though. The core of the app has been working for a long time now, and I'm enjoying using it every day. I think I'm going to open-source it and I'm sure you'll be surprised to learn that the march to 1.0 remains quite familiar.
The models have hoovered up thousands of years of writing and developed emergent properties that are remarkably good at generating code, and remarkably good at concerning people. Am I alienated from the codebase? To an extent—there are entire domains I have never looked at once, even as a PR. I have zero desire to write a TUI app myself. Yet I still feel connected and protective of it. Architecture, constraints, and taste remain deeply creative acts.
I never knew how the 6510 chip worked, I've never written an IP stack. Personal computing has always meant standing on the shoulders of others. 22 Unless you're, like, the BMOW guy.
I moved my development workstation to Linux back in January. I can play my Steam library with astonishing fidelity and performance. (Bravo, Valve.) Large compile jobs scream compared to my MacBook Pro. Agents monitor my k8s cluster for real-time alerts, automatically correlate events against Trawl and Prometheus, and ping me with proposed remediation options. They lint and tag my GitHub issues every night. I do most of my work from an iPad. The artisan still labours, but the loom now requires 500 megawatts and redundant fibre instead of a foot pedal.
I haven't hand-edited a single configuration file on this box, yet the idea of personal computing feels more relevant now than ever.