Danny Smith - Articles & Notes

For the last few months I’ve been tinkering with improving this site for AI agent consumers and after reading Dachary Carey’s article on Astro’s removal of llms.txt I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, finding Joost de Valk’s “agent-ready” piece along the…

I gave this site’s OG Images a makeover a few weeks back.

I’ve just added a few new pages to this site, linked from the footer.

I write most of my content in Astro Editor, which is intentionally designed to leave all code-like things alone and just help me write prose.

When I first started moving this site to Astro I decided that I wanted a truly statically-generated site.

I hadn’t heard about sizes="auto on images with an srcset until reading this.

Just kicking the tyres on the standard.site setup I wrote about yesterday — if this note made it onto the AT network on its own, the whole pipeline works end to end.

I’ve been poking around the edges of the Atmosphere for a while now, because ATProto is mega interesting for all sorts of reasons, both technical and philosophical.

Last autumn I wrote about moving this site to Astro and have shared a few notes about little features I’ve added since then, but over the last few months I’ve picked away at a lot of little bits and pieces here which I haven’t really shown off.

Whatever you think of DHH’s takes on other things, for me he’s consistently had good takes on Computer Things for a very long time (perhaps because they often echo my own).

Having recently switched from Cursor back to VSCode, I figured it was probably worth taking another look at Zed – if only so I have a second text editor configured how I like it.

When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.”

I switched from VSCode to Cursor as my main editor sometime in early 2025, primarily for the much better tab completion it had at the time.

I recently bought a Roberts Revival iStream 3L radio having wanted one for some time.

I agree with this point of view.

But we want AI agents to solve coding problems quickly and in a way that is maintainable and adaptive and composable (benefiting from improvements elsewhere), and where every addition makes the whole stack better.

TL;DR: Start with people, not code.

For the last few years I’ve shared a survival minecraft world with my friend Cam.

Thirty-odd years ago I borrowed some Biggles Audiobooks (on cassette tape) from my local library and enjoyed them so much I asked the librarian if they had any more.

We’ve always had this tension.

The spec-driven engineering movement that’s been gaining momentum in the AI-assisted development world gets closer to the right mental model.

I had Claude resurface texts I forgot to respond to, and realized that the real blocker—obviously—was that I didn’t want to reply.

I’ve just been using Claude Code and my task management skill to work through my current life areas and projects and help me define next actions.

This entire article is a fantastic introduction to Atproto (and also an examples of why I consider Dan to be such a brilliant technical writer).

Most strikingly, we’re back to single-threaded computing : one conversation, one task, one at a time.

This is precisely why natural language isn’t a good fit for programming: it’s not very precise.

I’ve launched Astro Editor, a desktop app for authoring and editing Markdown and MDX content in local Astro Content Collections!

The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code.

I spent a few hours today consolidating my sprawling Claude Code files into a Claude Plugin which is published in a personal marketplace.

I use Raycast Snippets to insert text wherever I’m typing.

This is a great read.

Do whatever it takes to have a stable and reliable developer environment.

Tauri Template is a batteries-included template for building production-ready desktop applications with Tauri, React and TypeScript.

I read Simon Willison’s blog religeously, and occasionally he references a post he wrote way back in the dark ages of 2005.

A lot in this article chimes true to me.

This is an interesting read. 27% of Claude-assisted work consists of tasks that wouldn’t have been done otherwise This is one of the huge advantages of LLMs for me.

Thoughtful guidance on using LLMs at work.

Maybe you just hate or don’t get AI Au contraire!

Tree growth responds to its environment and integrates with its ecosystem.

The band Public Service Broadcasting put those speeches to music in a wonderful concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You Stop working for humans.

I absolutely love everything about this website.

This is a fantastic interactive tutorial.

The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP.

This is really cool

How the best teams avoid comprehension debt The best teams I’ve seen solve this problem before any code gets written.

Akerlof asks us to imagine ourselves buying a used car.

I started on a redesign of this site back in May 2020 after deciding I wanted a simpler, content-first statically generated site.

I recently added a little feature to articles and notes on this site to make things easier to share.