Danny Smith - Articles & Notes

I just asked Claude to make a mini-website explaining how Napoleonic-era sailing ships worked.

I sometimes find myself vibe coding single-page HTML tools and “microsites” for specific use cases like my little biggles books site.

When I’m doing visual work on this site with an AI agent, the agent needs to see what it’s built.

I’ve been using Opus 5.5 for the last couple of days and boy am I impressed.

Jim Nielsen added a calendar view to his blog last month and I liked it so much I’ve pinched the idea.

This is very cool ❤️

Software quality = How much team uses it themselves x How similar team is to users x Taste for making good decisions

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Atproto apps over the last few months and at some point stumbled across BookHive, which is essentially an Atmospheric version of Goodreads.

Inspired by this article from Waldek Mastykarz, I’ve recently added the ability for readers to add their own annotations to the side of articles on this website.

This is an interesting take on Agent memory as a portable file format from Cal Paterson.

I haven’t read much about how interface designers are approaching AI stuff recently, so it was great to stumble across this excellent article from Aurélie Radom the other day.

We tend to talk about AI literacy as if it were one skill, but there are at least two.

Your product didn’t get worse.

Amazon recently tightened scrutiny on AI-generated code pushes.

Writing the Skill is a learning exercise, not just a documentation exercise.

A couple of days ago Rick Brewster made a post on Bluesky about how he’d used AI to help him get paint.net working on Linux and my goodness was there a negative response.

It’s my hope that one day better AI tools might be able to help us think, but until then I fear that using AI to write does the exact opposite.

AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster.

After improving the Twitter cards on this site the other week, I wanted to do something similar with my more generic BookmarkCard components.

It’s going to be funny if the network effects the AI labs have been searching for end up looking just like the network effects of the SaaS era.

A few months ago I threw together denv as an interim solution to sandboxing local Claude Code sessions.

Another excellent article from Kyle.

Theo’s thinking here is pretty interesting, and it’snice to see a video from him about AI stuff which is more like his old engineering videos in it’s tone 😉

It’s gotten so bad that innovation-drunk MBA types are now having to come to terms with the fact that automation software is neither sentient nor magic, contrary to the claims of Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

However, the task of making something good — of arriving at a solution that is obvious — is often met with a kind of ambivalence, like “Nice work…I guess?

You can discover ai’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine.

Before today I was using astro-embed to handle tweets.

Doomerism always feels to me like a psyop designed to keep people dispirited.

LLMs don’t just do things for you, they do things instead of you — and the doing is a huge part of the point.

Paul Ford on the Aboard podcast, speaking on the state of the software industry, how projects get funded, and how to think about OpenAI and Anthropic: “What it feels now is two or three monoliths have showed up, and everyone is sort of like in [2001: A Sp…

Great little read from Jason Grigsby.

What we call programming today is not the same activity it was two years ago.

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

My introduction to LoomClone was pretty sparse on technical detail so I’m gonna dive into a bit of that here, specifically how the mac app and backend API work together for the lifecycle of a recording.

As a longtime student of WWI this is a poignent reminer that not everybody understands the scale of that horrowshow until they somehow learn about it.

Over the last month or two I’ve been trying to finally get this site to a place where it feels finished enough for the moment.

As Chris explains in this video, Tesco are clearly trialling a new QR code which can replace traditional barcodes and also contain info for stock management like the expiry date.

One of my ongoing projects is The Toolbox, a collection of practices, tools and advice which I’ve seen to be effective in helping teams work better together.

I mentioned a satteriMermaid plugin in my note on Upgrading to Astro 7 and switching to Sätteri and wanna expand on that briefly because this site now supports themed mermaid diagrams!

I’ve just upgraded this site to Astro 7, including the switch from remark to the new Astro default, Sätteri.

Visiting danny.is/using has always redirected to a public Notion page which details the kit and software I use.

I’ve made a few little additions to this site, the biggest one being a new page at /making which shows some of my side-projects.

AI coding agents aften want to use the timeout command which isn’t available on macOS.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been building a personal video-sharing platform to replace Loom, partly so it works how I’ve always wanted Loom to work and partly so I have long-term control over my own videos.

This note was created and published from the share sheet on my phone, using the app I discuss in this article!

When I released Astro Editor in January, the website was a hastily vibe-coded single HTML file full of the purple gradients that LLMs love so much.

I currently publish two kinds of content on this site: articles and notes.

Interesting discussion about bookmarks.

I finally took some time to add a somewhat-proper styleguide to this site.