Danny Smith - Articles & Notes

This article by Mitchell Hashimoto very closely describes how I tend to work with AI tools to “vibe code”.

I used to read The Oatmeal religiously, but somehow stopped years ago.

As I’m getting older a lot of my social circles are becoming ever more conservative.

Previous generations mainly experienced productive shame, a form of competitive pressure that drove young people to differentiate themselves for social success, whether rightly or wrongly.

I found Matt’s website today and had a lovely couple of hours exploring his writing.

And that suggests another risk we don’t talk about enough: every time we hand work to a wizard, we lose a chance to develop our own expertise, to build the very judgment we need to evaluate the wizard’s work.

The fundamental problem lies in misaligned capabilities and understanding.

When a billion people have access to advanced AI, we’ve entered what we might call the era of Mass Intelligence.

So seven years hence I’m re-reading this, and… this paragraph applies even bloody more in 2025 if we replace googling and stackoverflow with “talking with Large Language Models”.

Learning is not the product of teaching.

This is a great (short) article on using booleans.

I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response.

I appreciate Andy taking the time to write this because I think we need a more balanced view of how to use LLMs in the tech industry.

Programmers still build castles in the air, but they first have to discover what physics apply.

Teaching is not about assignments, textbooks or authority.

While building Astro Editor I learned a fair bit about Tauri and how to develop simple macOS/React apps with it using Claude Code.

I’ve been a big fan of Loom for a long time now.

This is very cool.

I now spend more time talking to my laptop than I do typing into it.

I finally lost my shit at Warp yesterday.

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading.

This one really made me laugh. 100% worth a read.

When I have had engineers who were 10x as valuable as others it was primarily due to their ability to prevent unnecessary work.

It is clear that such bans will do little in the way of making the internet a safer space for young people.

I’ve long wanted to start my day by having a Morning Chat with Claude Desktop.

Interesting analogy here with compilers.

I have little understanding for people using large language models to generate slop; words and images that nobody asked for.

I just read this article, and it inspired me to see if I could post new notes to my website using the ChatGPT mobile app.

This reminds me so much of the old UK MoD File Reference system (some of which is still in JSP 441!)

My friend Vicki’s “mate have you considered maybe youse got ADHD” was the first time I remember this topic coming up.

However, over the course of the last five years, I’ve grown increasingly worried about what Figma is doing to the field of design by pushing designers toward an engineering-centric way of working.

AI transformation inside existing tech companies is going to be brutal.

On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr.

Calm Companies Here is my list of Calm Company attributes: Profitable: Calm Companies have a strong financial engine working with good margins.

I paid a 12-month subscription for a Personal CRM called Clay because I need help “managing my personal and professional relationships”.

Tim Feriss’ 5 Bullet Friday today included this quote… To roughly paraphrase my friend, who’s a fan of minimalist packing, “I would rather have one pair of footwear that does everything well enough than carry a bunch of specialist footwear that does things

A little while ago I bought a Caldigit Thunderbolt 4 Dock to connect my M2 Macbook Pro to my monitors and peripherals.

For a long time I’ve believed that organisational health is a hugely undervalued ingredient for success – especially for startups that are scaling fast.

I pretty much finished designing the article pages back in Part XI, and after deciding on a typeface and some general design rules for the rest of the site it’s time to finish it off by adding a header and footer to the article pages.

I’m making quite heavy use of the jekyll-redirect-from plugin.

When I started this redesign I already had a fairly clear idea of the aesthetic I wanted, based on the existing design.

Figma is one of my new favourite tools.

I’m now pretty happy with how the essays on here look, so it’s time to turn my attention to the rest of the site.

The last time I built a content-heavy website, responsive images weren’t really a thing.

I spent a long time [deciding on a typeface]({% post_url 2020-06-20-website-redesign-v %}) for these essays and I don’t want to spend nearly as long on code snippets.

Hyperlinks are what makes the web special.

Lists are incredibly useful for certain sorts of article.

The last part focussed on setting up a basic typographic system using margins and heading styles.

Having settled on a typeface for my essays, it’s time to set up some basic typography.

After much messing about with typefaces, I think I’ve narrowed the choice for essay copy down to two contenders: Literata and Lora.