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Articles & Rants
Every now and then I write up my thoughts on the projects I'm building and how the way I work has
changed over the years. Nothing official, just one programmer's opinion. 12 articles and counting.
Vibe Coding loony-downloader: Idea to Shipped in an Afternoon
Posted July 2026 |
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loony-downloader is the newest thing on my GitHub, and it's also the fastest I've ever
gone from "I want this to exist" to a working tool. Instead of scaffolding the project by
hand, I described the shape of what I wanted, let an AI assistant draft the first pass, and spent
my actual attention on the parts that mattered - the edge cases, the error handling, whether the
output was actually correct. It felt less like typing and more like editing. I'm not going to
pretend every AI suggestion was good; plenty weren't, and knowing which ones to throw out is most
of the skill now. But the boring 80% of the work - argument parsing, retries, logging - got out of
my way so I could focus on the 20% that was actually interesting.
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Pure Skill vs. Vibe Coding: What Actually Changed For Me
Posted July 2026 |
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A few years ago, every line in every one of my repos was typed by hand, argued with, and debugged
by staring at the screen until my eyes hurt. That's still true for the projects where I'm trying to
learn something. But for the projects where I just need a working tool, my workflow has
completely changed - I describe what I want, review what comes back, and steer. People call it
"vibe coding" like it's a shortcut for people who don't know what they're doing. I'd argue
it's the opposite: you need more judgment to review AI-generated code well than to write
mediocre code slowly by hand. The honest version of my take is this - I ship loony-downloader
and pdf-to-markdown-sized utilities in an afternoon now instead of a weekend, and I spend
the time I saved going deeper on the projects that actually teach me something, like
rust-atomics-and-locks. Efficiency didn't replace craft. It just freed up room for it.
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pdf-to-markdown: A Weekend Utility That Actually Stuck
Posted June 2026 |
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Most of my weekend projects get written, used twice, and forgotten. pdf-to-markdown is
the rare exception - I built it vibe coding end to end because I was tired of copy-pasting out of
PDFs into notes, and I still run it almost every week. The whole thing came together in a single
sitting: I described the input/output I wanted, iterated on the table-handling edge cases (PDFs
are never as structured as you think), and shipped it. No grand architecture, no tests I'm
proud of, just a tool that solved a real annoyance fast. Sometimes that's the whole point.
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Writing a Book About Programming Languages, One Chapter at a Time
Posted June 2026 |
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programming-languages started as a note-taking repo and turned into something closer to a
book - a comprehensive rundown of the programming languages I've used or researched. This is one
where I lean on AI for a first draft of an explanation, then rewrite it in my own words once I've
actually verified the claim myself. I don't ship a paragraph I can't defend. It's slower than pure
vibe coding, but writing about a language is different from writing code in it - the reader is
trusting my judgment, not just compiling my output, so the bar for what I let through is higher.
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since March 3, 1998
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Hacking since 2018
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July 31, 2026
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