Firehose

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.

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.

I have a magnet in my hand.

That magnet sticks to my fridge.

Am I a fridge magnet?

(To the tune of ABBA’s Money, Money, Money)

I write all night, I write all day, to craft the guides they toss away.
Ain’t it sad?
But praise is cheap and tickets close, for all this thankless, perfect prose.
That’s too bad.

A new feature ships, all sleek and grand,
But no one seems to understand.
I wouldn’t be writing docs at all;
I’d fool around and have a ball.

If you can’t be bothered to write alt text for it, then it must not be worth posting in the first place.

I, for one, would never jump the gun and start playing with shiny new features on my website before proper browser support is available.

Never. Nope. Not me…

My tech stack? I call it Jenga for reasons that will become apparent next outage.

A decent portion of my time on GitHub is now addressing meaningless AI comments.

Come on. This is open-source work made free for the benefit of humanity. This AI slop just wastes the time and money of the perpetrators and maintainers alike.

I am unfortunately seeing a lot of stylised text on social media. They are horribly inaccessible. Don’t use them!

These aren’t actual fonts, merely a collection of Unicode characters.

For example, a screen reader will read 𝐁𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐭 as: ‘Mathematical Bold Capital B Mathematical Bold Small O Mathematical Bold Small L Mathematical Bold Small D Mathematical Bold Capital T Mathematical Bold Small E Mathematical Bold Small X Mathematical Bold Small T’.

This isn’t an issue with screen readers – they’re performing exactly as they should. This is an issue with people misusing these characters.

If you need it phrased in a business sense, by excluding so many people who are trying to read what you’re writing, you’re limiting your reach and hurting your growth.

Conspiracy theory: Part of Apple’s goal with Liquid Glass is to make PWAs look further out of place.

While you can somewhat recreate the glass effect on the web, it is difficult, likely less performant, and isn’t 1:1. This will enforce a stronger separation between native apps and web apps.

Icons also presumably won’t be dynamic and adaptive to Liquid Glass’ styling, like they aren’t with iOS 18’s light/dark/tinted variants. This’ll make them stick out and feel more different than they already do, as well as look bad on the home screen.

Taking time away from something and then returning to it later often reveals flaws otherwise unseen. I’ve been thinking about how to gain the same benefit without needing to take time away.

Changing perspective is the obvious approach.

In art and design, flipping a canvas often forces a reevaluation and reveals much that the eye has grown blind to. Inverting colours, switching to greyscale, obscuring, etc, can have a similar effect.

When writing, speaking written words aloud often helps in identifying flaws.

Similarly, explaining why you’ve done something – à la rubber duck debugging – can weed out things that don’t make sense.

I went to a bank and put a really high negative margin on all the money inside. This offset was enough for it to appear outside the bank, allowing me to abscond with it.

Of course, banks can easily avoid this situation by applying overflow: hidden to their vaults, but they very rarely remember to. It tends to be an operational oversight.

Learn more neat tricks like this in my upcoming book, CSS for Crime.

Spent far too long looking blankly at the docs for the <dialog> element while wondering why my <details> element wasn’t working right.

Y’know, when I started getting into development proper, I read so many blog posts and publications from fantastic people.

If you’d told me as a youngster that as a 19-year-old I’d be writing for these publications and chatting with figures whose work I admired, I simply wouldn’t have believed you.

I know you should ‘never meet your heroes’, but I’m ecstatic to get to meet so many of my inspirations.

There are a lot of fields out there, and I’m so glad I found myself doing web/front-end development. I can scarcely think of communities so kind and open to sharing knowledge.

Thank you to all.

Sometimes I scroll through all the possible align-* and justify-* permutations to find the one I need.

Not for lack of knowledge, but instead because my brain has simply run out of compute.

I think it is important that you make sure everything you publish on the web is equally accessible to all.

Thus, my content is unusable no matter your abilities. In fact, you might be better off with a screen reader because then at least you don’t have to look at it. Shit’s fucked.

I’ve used Lexend as my go-to for years, but its lack of OpenType features is really bothering me. I can’t find anything else quite like it, though.

It has a heavy default weight, wide letterforms, and is very legible. Fira, IBM Plex, and Manrope aren’t it.

Any suggestions?

I’ll be interested to see if there is a statistically notable uptick in clients reporting prefers-reduced-transparency as a result of Liquid Glass once iOS 26 releases.