Jeremy Keith

It’s the 25th of February and it’s a beautiful day here in Brighton. I had lunch sitting outside—that’s how unseasonably warm it is. Like a little whiff of Summer to remind us of what’s yet to come.

It’s also my birthday. The beautiful weather is an auspicious augery.

Mozilla also released a new version of Firefox. I was hoping for cross-document view transitions and scroll-driven animations for my birthday, but alas I may have to wait another year.

Later, Jessica is going to take me out for some excellent Japanese food before we head on to a session in a cosy pub. I can think of no better way to celebrate my birthday than playing a rake of jigs and reels.

I’m 55 now. It feels like a meaningful number. I think I’ve moved down an option in the select menus that ask for your age range.

I got letters in the post from my pension provider reminding me that 55 is the age when you can technically start taking money out of your pension. Something that retired people do.

I have to admit, this birthday has me entertaining retirement options. I’m already down to just three days a week. It wouldn’t take much to wind that down over the next few years. There’d be even more opportunities to savour the sunshine on a sunny day.

Anyway. Just pondering. You know, the kind of thoughts a 55-year old has.

Webspace Invaders · Matthias Ott

There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.

Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization — Den Odell

The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.

Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.

The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.

Smaller and dumber - daverupert.com

The principle of least power expressed nicely:

Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.

I guess I kinda get why people hate AI

To be clear, I think AI will be ultimately extremely helpful. I still am using it on my projects. I am going to use it at my next job. I, personally, don’t hate AI.

But I can’t deny that the vibes right now are awful.

Not just bad, awful. It’s not just the “chat we’re cooked you’re the permanent underclass” stuff influencers say. It’s not just the “everybody is fucked” hyperbole CEOs sprout. It’s the actual, day-to-day experience with the technology. I’m a programmer—AI actually helps me a lot. But for normal people, their interactions are profoundly more negative, and none of the people behind this technology seem to care.

blakewatson.com - I used Claude Code and GSD to build the accessibility tool I’ve always wanted

You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

Performance-Optimized Video Embeds with Zero JavaScript – Frontend Masters Blog

This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.

How to raise children

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.

Training your replacement | Go Make Things

I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”

For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.

And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.

AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.

Permacomputing principles

Here are some design princples I can get behind: long-term thinking, resilience, flexibility and seamfulness.

A considered approach to generative AI in front-end… | Clearleft

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

An in-depth guide to customising lists with CSS - Piccalilli

Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

A programmer’s loss of identity - ratfactor

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, “heirloom programmers”?

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

Deep Blue

My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:

…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt

I recently wrote:

The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code.

That’s the difference between technical debt and cognitive debt.

John has written lots more on this.