A more personal set today, how people are actually thinking about and living with these tools right now.
Chris Coyier’s AI Is My CMS is a short, genuine post about using AI to handle the publishing workflow, formatting, metadata, deciding where a piece fits, moving content around. He’s not having the AI write for him; he’s using it as the organizational layer that used to be a content management system. The distinction matters and I think he articulates it clearly: authorship is still fully his, but the administration of publishing is now a conversation rather than a series of interface clicks.
Sean Boots’ Generative AI Vegetarianism uses the vegetarianism metaphor to describe a nuanced ethical position on AI tool use, not categorical refusal, but a set of personally drawn lines based on values rather than performance. He’s a developer in Canada’s public sector, which gives the piece real institutional grounding. The vocabulary it provides is useful: you can draw lines without having to defend an absolutist position either way. The essay is thoughtful enough that I find myself returning to it when I’m trying to articulate my own position to someone new.
Justin Jackson’s LLM Struggles is a grounded post about the real friction points in working with LLMs daily. His list is honest: they forget context across sessions, they hallucinate confidently, they produce volume that requires significant human review, and they flatten style. None of this is a reason to stop using them, he hasn’t, but it’s a useful corrective to the “just vibe code everything” energy that’s everywhere right now. Worth keeping around for when someone asks you why you still review AI-generated code.
Jamon’s Night Shift is a personal essay about coding after midnight, the focused quiet of it, the way the absence of interruptions enables a different kind of thinking, and the nostalgia for a period when that was just how software was made. It’s reflective in a way that doesn’t try to resolve into a productivity tip. I found it worth reading just to be reminded that there are different rhythms to creative and technical work, and that some of them only work when the rest of the world is asleep.
The Bear Blog Carnival Boredom Roundup is a community curation from the Bear Blog writing platform. Contributors wrote about boredom, what it is, what it produces, why it’s undervalued, and the roundup collects the highlights. Some are lyrical, some are practical (boredom as a signal to change direction, boredom as necessary dead time before creativity), some are simply strange. It’s the kind of piece that only exists because small-web blogging communities still do this kind of thing, and it’s a pleasant reminder that they do.