Dudley.Codes

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing It turns out a lot of people ask Google when the sun will set.

Two recent (opens in a new tab) stories (opens in a new tab) about Silicon Valley are hard to read without wondering if everyone involved has lost their mind.

It’s fifteen years ago (bear with me, I’ve been in this industry since the late 90s, most of my good stories start this way), and you’ve got two senior developers at a SaaS company.

With apologies to Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat”.

Paul McGowan makes stereos.

This isn’t a joke, and it’s becoming a big problem I’m an AI tool junkie.

There’s a frequent lament of missing the “old” Internet.

A few months ago, J.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I called you all here today.

Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something.

Every open source maintainer I’ve talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile.

You can’t open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like “agentic engineering” or “openclaw” into your beautiful but disapproving face.

Ask a trial lawyer if AI could replace her and she won’t even look up from her brief.

After watching a Veritasium video, I feel a surge of intellectual confidence.

Thinking about doing the thing is not doing the thing.

When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s.

I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title: Only a slave quantifies its existence through productivity I grew up in the San Jose Bay Area.

First, it was cottagecore, filling our feeds with sourdough starters and rustic linen.

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.

“Wikipedia, the constantly changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dumbing down of world knowledge.” – From the book Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge by Edwin Black…

I have long wanted to write about how root cause analysis is a crap technique for learning from failure.

I’ve been spending more of my spare time in recent years studying the Linux source tree to try to build a deeper understanding of how computers work.

What happens when something we enjoy doing that took effort becomes effortless?

I once had a job interview for a backend position.

Remember when we used to buy software on physical media for a fixed price and we’d own that software forever?

One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally.

Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating?

2025 was the breakthrough year when software creation became easy.

Nobody should voluntarily call themselves that.

I read to forget.

Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers?

In 1567, an Ottoman court physician assures Sultan Selim II that the grape liquor he adores is harmless.

Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C.

Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced “special supplement” that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot.

In the mid 90s, when Java and its virtual machine started making the rounds outside of academia, the reaction from the Serious Software People™ was swift and predictable: this is a toy.

It’s August 2, 216 BCE.

Anthropic has a new paper, On the Biology of a Large Language Model, that reveals what these AI models are internally “thinking” in a way that could not be analyzed before.

Contrary to what some policymakers seem to believe, whether naively or maliciously, encryption is not a crime.

I noticed something interesting the other day: I enjoy using AI to build software more than I enjoy using most AI applications–software built with AI.

“People are package deals; you take the good with the confused.

Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things.

At a recent MacSparky Labs event, a few folks started asking about career change—how to do it, when to think about it, and what it feels like to make a big shift.

In the rapidly changing world of front-end development, few areas have evolved as dramatically as CSS and web styling.

You just finished giving your best presentation performance.

I.

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise.

Legacy is an overused toxic word in Software Engineering.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.

During the Product Bubble, venture capital investments grew from $45 billion to $620 billion.