Firehose

Today I launched a new blog for my Revolt bot AutoMod! Given the many thousands of users that rely on the bot, I decided that a central location for news, updates, technical details, and general information was necessary.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out visually, though I’m sure I’ll be tweaking and refining it for the rest of eternity. The rainbow mesh gradient behind the header came out particularly nicely, in my opinion.

https://automod.vale.rocks/blog/introducing-the-automod-blog

Spot the typo in this line I wrote today.

‘…or these media queries we’ll be breasted to graceful degradation.’

Many people agree that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term that is vague and has existing connotations. People use it to refer to a whole range of different technologies.

However, I struggle to come up with any better terminology. If not ‘artificial intelligence’, what term would be ideal for describing the capabilities of multi-modal tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT?

I’m convinced that newsletters are just blogs for people who think they’re too cool to have a blog.

Born to type script.

Forced to TypeScript.

Just because ‘a picture means a thousand words’ doesn’t mean your alt text needs to be a thousand words long.

‘It has taken a huge amount of effort, but we’ve fought against the existing web platform and our website is all the worse for it.’
— [Company Name Here], 2025

Just wanted to say that everything is going really well with development of new features for my Revolt bot AutoMod.

To the many thousands of users that rely on it, you didn’t see anything, and everything is fine.

Much like how some known elements aren’t shown on the periodic table, some HTML elements aren’t recognised due to their synthetic, extremely unstable, or fleeting existence.

We talk and think a lot about echo chambers with social media. People view what they’re aligned with, which snowballs as algorithms feed them more content of that type, which pushes their views to the extreme.

I wonder how tailor-made AI-generated content will feed into that. It’s my thinking and worry that AI systems can produce content perfectly aligned with a user in all ways, creating a flawless self-feeding ideological silo.

I put my hand in the machine and watched through the MutationObserver as three extra fingers sprouted out from my hypothenar eminence.

Had to dive into someone else’s old, abandoned project today to grab some screenshots.

Nothing like trying to lubricate the cogs of a Next.js 8, React 16 site from 6 years ago and all its dependencies to get it back into motion again.

The wonders of dependency rot.

I just tried to back out of a page with my browser, but the site I was on hijacked the browser navigation action and showed me a list of other articles to read. Yuck.

For those of you that read my writing, any feedback?

Anything from tone, to structure, to clarity, to length, etc – whatever stands out (good or bad).

Thanks!

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity _{(Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes, David Rein)} released with the observation that completion time of PRs is 19% longer when using AI, but that developers think that it reduced completion time by 20%.

A few notes from me:

• This is on large-scale, mature repositories and conducted with maintainers intricately familiar. It is mentioned in the paper _(C.1.2) that ‘developers note that AI is much less helpful on issues where they are expert.’ It is also mentioned that ‘LLM tooling performs worse in more complex environments.’ _(C.1.3).
• They were provided with web interfaces or Cursor Pro but usually opted for the latter. In some cases this differed from their usual tooling, and I personally find this an annoying and unproductive way to code.
• Being in a study, developers may have felt pressure to use AI in situations that would otherwise be unnecessary.
• I would be interested in a similar study where developers are put in smaller repositories they aren’t familiar with.

Super interesting paper, and I look forward to future studies and whatever further findings come from it. I don’t look forward to seeing the discourse as AI advocates dismiss these results and AI haters take them at face value, despite the paper’s cautioning against overgeneralising.

I love how, of my two favourite writers performing self-experiments, one hates blood and the other hates needles.

Both spend non-negligible amounts of time working around their fears.

What if we and then we did? Thoughts?

I’m sick currently, and I wish to advise against watching The Twilight Zone whilst in a state similar to mine, for it will penetrate your fever dreams and take you to a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into an incoherent land whose boundaries are that of imagination.

(Watching Neon Genesis Evangelion instead was not the best call I’ve made.)

Curse that strict tsconfig.json I configured. Where does it get off forcing me to write proper, actual, organised code?

A story in three parts:

1. Sketchy email from ex-employer yesterday
2. Sudden increase in spam calls
3. Email from ex-employer with the subject “Unauthorised Email Alert”

Coincidence? I think not.

Some write on LinkedIn,
A corporate stage,
With line breaks and stanzas,
Performing wisdom for wage.

Though prose might suffice,
For their thoughts to engage,
They craft it with short lines,
For reach at each stage.

Is this engaging?
Or just pretence?
Poetry on LinkedIn–
Lacking in sense.

A personal website is a small but meaningful form of rebellion.

Someone featured my writing in their newsletter, then signed me up for that newsletter using the email on my site.

At no point did I ask for or consent to this. Huurrrrrrr

User Agent Styles are out because today we are introducing all-new AI-driven User Agentic Styles.

That is right; they arbitrarily change while you use the website, elevating the developer experience.

They will also try to forcefully align elements for you.

Emojis In Text Are Inaccessible

I see many social media posts including emojis and hashtags in sentences. This is inaccessible!

Screen readers read things out, and that includes your emojis.

For example, ‘I drink tea 🍵 from my teapot 🫖 to relax.’ might be read aloud as ‘I drink tea teacup without handle emoji from my teapot teapot emoji to relax.’

That is confusing and difficult to understand.

Instead, keep emojis to the start or end of your sentences. Like this: ‘I drink tea from my teapot to relax. 🫖’

Remember, the more accessible your posts are, the more people they can reach, which helps growth.

Hashtags are treated similarly but are also generally distracting mid-sentence. They’re best put at the end of posts.