I got off the Marker waitlist on a Saturday and planned to poke at it for an hour. It’s a writing tool built by a small team in London that deliberately won’t write for you, which sounds like a limitation until you use it, and what it does instead is read what you’ve written and ask you questions about it. I’ve spent a number of sessions with it now across about two weeks. ...
I finally opened one of the tabs I’d left sitting since I started studying for the AWS recert, a trigger.dev post on Claude Code tips I’d flagged months ago as worth coming back to. Of the ten tips, two were things I didn’t already do, and a couple of the others described features that had changed or gone entirely since it was written. The post wasn’t wrong when it was published, it had just aged, and I’d saved it at the point where saving it felt close enough to reading it. ...
I had Sora because it came bundled with my ChatGPT subscription, and I used it to make short clips for internal PowerPoints when a slide needed something more than a stock image. Not for anything serious, never built into any work I was doing. When the shutdown announcement landed on 24 March I read it the way I’d read a Microsoft deprecation notice, which is to say I assumed the date would move once enough customers shouted. ...
When McDonald’s replaced counter queues with big ordering screens, and Starbucks and Costa let you order through an app and just pick up, the reason those changes stuck was not only that the technology worked. It was that they were genuinely faster and easier than what they replaced, and most people who use them now would not go back. Some newer Starbucks locations have removed the counter entirely, which only makes sense if the replacement has already cleared that bar. COVID forced a lot of chains to get there properly because they had no choice but to get it right. ...
The Register reported that UK entry-level tech roles fell 46 percent in 2024, with projections hitting 53 percent by the end of 2026, based on figures from the Institute of Student Employers. Most of the commentary points at AI as the cause, and AI is doing something, but the ladder into architecture has been eroding for over a decade and the AI piece is just the wave you can see right now. The earlier waves were quieter and they did most of the damage well before agents showed up. ...
Most migrations don’t start because someone planned one, they start because half the organisation is already using something unsanctioned and you’re formalising it before it turns into a compliance problem. I’ve seen that across different types of tech, and the failure mode is always the same: the pilot gets all the investment and the rollout gets whatever’s left, which is usually not much. That gap is the rollout version of the question I came back to in Better Than What It Replaces: is the new thing actually better for the person who has to use it? ...
I’m recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time right now, so when I decided to build a personal site the temptation to go straight to Route53, CloudFront, S3, and Terraform was real. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini what they thought before starting, and while they disagreed on a few things they all said to use GitHub Pages and not overthink the hosting. Gemini included a cost comparison that had an EKS cluster as one of the options at £150-200/month, which is overkill for basically any website, but it helped make the point that GitHub Pages with a custom domain was the obvious starting point. I could have spent weeks on infrastructure before writing a single post, or I could just start writing. ...