Links #155

Kristie De Garis on the misplaced desire to find a system that makes writing faster. “Speed is an industrial value. It belongs to assembly lines, logistics, and shareholders, it is a measure designed to optimise throughput. When speed becomes the dominant value in writing, something fundamental shifts and something fundamental is lost.” And this: “When speed becomes the focus, writing will tend toward already established shapes, simply because those shapes are easier to produce.” Slow is not an enemy.

Jason Gorman on how coding is not necessarily the most productive part. This line especially resonated with me: “And if we’re producing code faster than we can validate it — either by exploring the problem ourselves, or learning from user feedback if our release cycles are fast enough — then we’re piling assumptions on top of assumptions.”

Jeremy Keith on frontend libraries and frameworks and LLMs. “Is it really all that different? With npm you dialled up other people’s code directly. With large language models, they first slurp up everyone’s code (like, the whole World Wide Web), run a computationally expensive process of tokenisation, and then give you the bit you need when you need it. In a way, large language model coding tools are like a turbo-charged npm with even more layers of abstraction.”

Marcin Wichary on Roger Wong’s post about Anthropic’s findings that using AI to write software seems to lead to less understanding of the code. Which makes sense, at least to me.

Elizabeth Goodspeed on analogue creative work. “As a longtime fan of all things analogue, I should be thrilled. There have always been contemporary artists committed to doggedly tactile work – more of them would be even better! But when I look closely at much of the purportedly handmade work floating around these trend reports, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is made by hand at all.” I don’t try to pass my digital art off as being actually handmade, but trying to make digital pieces look analogue? Guilty. Very guilty. For me it’s been a matter of convenience and familiarity and back pain, but more and more I find myself wanting to make real things instead, physical things. Maybe 2026 will be the year where I finally make the leap. Also, I love Goodspeed’s “doggedly tactile” phrase, which I’m taking as a reminder that making things by hand is good, hard work.