Our bucket overflows with news about the exploits of “vibe coding,” and journalists are now (apparently) paid by how many times they can fit the word “agentic” into a piece, because no other explanation makes sense to me.

As I’ve written before (somewhere, maybe not here), I use AI and I like AI and I think we’ll come out the other end of this with some really interesting and useful new stuff, but at the moment it feels like the hype machine has shifted into overdrive.

I can’t shake the feeling that in some ways, we’ve seen this before… With Ruby on Rails.

The enshittification of the tech industry is reaching a fever pitch, and it’s all thanks to AI. Not what AI can do, but what people seem to think it can do.

It’s really hard to get a job in tech right now. Surely our industry has gone through its ups and downs and hiring waxes and wanes alongside interest rates and how sweaty the many perpetually damp men in the Silicon Valley VC scene are on a given day. But things are getting rough out there, friends.

AI is not going to replace the majority of programming jobs, full stop. I roundly reject any argument that presents AI as a solution to converting a set of business requirements into functioning software.

But, if you don’t learn how to use AI, and stay abreast of what it can do, it may very well replace YOU. Let me put that differently: it will be the reason your boss replaces you.

I have a few blogs, including this one, and over the years I’ve used a few different platforms. My first ever blog was on WordPress, but now all of my blogs use Hugo, a static site generator written in Go.

The one “downside” to using a static site generator is that you can’t easily do some of the things that a server-based system can do, like cross-posting to other places. This is a post about why I chose to use Hugo and how I post to Mastodon and Bluesky (mostly) automatically.

I’m a bit of a home automation hobbyist. I bought my first few Philips Hue lights before anyone knew what Hue was, and I wrote one of the first couple hundred Amazon Alexa integrations (they even gave me a t-shirt for it!)

My house isn’t as jammed with sensors and self-made IoT devices as some of the folks I’ve seen on YouTube, but I do run Home Assistant and appreciate the occasional well-designed automation. Almost all of the wall switches in my house are “smart” and “does it connect to Home Assistant” is now a question I ask about every new connected device I consider buying.

Recently I had a couple “problems” (we home automation nerds tend to see “minor inconveniences” as “major solvable problems”) and decided to solve them with Shelly relays. This is that story.