Greg Herlein

Most people think of a BrightSign player as a thing that plays - you load it with content, point it at a screen, and it pushes pixels.

I disable the cloud on every Shelly plug in my house.

I wanted a cheap, low-power, always-on person detector.

I ran five different coding agents at the same local model, on the same task, with the same frozen test suite — and then I counted why they failed.

There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers.

The lamp on my office shelf glows solid red the instant my camera goes live, and turns off the second the meeting ends.

Here’s a question worth more than most of the AI hype takes clogging your feed: what happens to your velocity the day your frontier provider changes the deal?

Here’s a result that surprised me: the reasoning model wrote more correct code than the plain one — and still lost.

A room full of CTOs and architects met in a Swiss village this summer and, without quite meaning to, gave a name to the thing I’ve been quietly building for months.

Two and a half years into my whale song project I’ve killed one platform, walked away from a $13K dev kit, gotten my ham license, and pivoted to (water-borne) drones.

My experience is that Claude Code is great with Foundation Models, but way too heavy for local inference.

I’ve written before about what a BrightSign extension actually is and about why edge AI has to run locally on signage.

XDA ran a piece that stopped me mid-scroll: a 27B open-weights model reverse-engineered a commercial application’s license check — recovered a deliberately obscured crypto key out of ARM64 assembly, caught and corrected its own mistake without being told,…

I use more than one coding agent.

You can’t lead From hehind anymore.

I have two 128 GB unified-memory machines on my desk.

I left Twitter before it became X.

Right now, as an industry, we are running almost entirely on COGS and calling it innovation.

There’s a command line in the gofi post I wrote ten days ago that has been quietly bugging me ever since I hit publish: gofips -H 10.20.30.1 -k --get > hosts.conf Look at that -k.

Here’s a tiny, stupid problem that has stolen an embarrassing amount of my life: I plug a BrightSign player into my network, it grabs whatever dynamic IP the UniFi controller feels like handing out, and now I have to go find that IP before I can SSH in and

Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again.

Here’s a thing I’ve quietly hated for years: managing static IP assignments and DNS names for the little fleet of gear on my network.

Most people think of a BrightSign player as the little box behind a screen that loops a video.

I’ve been teasing this for a while.

Python won because it was easy.

Last post I showed off the chainsaw I built myself — my build-autonomous loop, the padded room, the whole rig — and cut down a little tree with it: a Go CLI to boss around a smart plug.

People keep asking me how I actually work with Claude Code now.

I just spent a few days at a retreat on the future of software development.

Here’s a question I can’t stop chewing on: why is some software so damn good, and most of it so… not?

A couple weeks ago I wrote that your organization has to learn as fast as your best AI adopter.

Everyone is asking the wrong question.

Next week I get to watch one of my favorite things: see a room full of smart people handed a hard problem and watch them figure it out in real time.

A response to “LLMs are Eroding My Software Engineering Career and I Don’t Know What To Do” - and to everyone I keep hearing this same anguish from.

There’s a thing going around the engineering blogs and Hacker News right now: AI killed Agile, Waterfall is back, write your specs up front, welcome to “Waterfall 2.0.”

I’ve been dorking around with local AI coding agents for a while now.

In recent years, digital signage has become a solved problem: push content to screens reliably, at scale, on schedule.

A recent industry retreat of senior engineering practitioners published their findings on where software development is heading.

The era of fixed-fee AI spending just ended.

There’s a reckoning coming for a specific type of software engineering manager.

Look, I’m going to be direct here.

One morning I opened my HP ZBook Ultra G1a and the trackpad was dead.

Open source is about to get a lot messier.

I’ve been thinking a lot about excellence lately.

I have a confession.

The AI models are good enough.

Grace Hopper built the first compiler in 1952.

From a certain point of view, there are two kinds of people in the world: builders and not-builders.

AI has made code cheap and abundant.

Guest Post by Luca Herlein The artificial divide between robotics and drone ecosystems made sense once.

A Scottish football manager once said, “Some people think football is more important than life.