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  "You might not need… a service worker" by Jay Freestone https://www.jayfreestone.com/writing/you-might-not-need-a-service-worker/ Service workers are incredibly powerful but also incredibly complicated. I feel like a lot of people went through the journey of "This sounds nice, but it caused an incident and I couldn't wrap my head around it, so I just ripped it out."

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  "Goodbye, forever, probably" by Salma Alam-Naylor https://whitep4nth3r.com/blog/goodbye-forever-probably/ There's a vibe shift going on, and I don't think enough people are talking about it honestly. This is raw and brutal but it's a good read. I was never in DevRel, but I used to get a lot of joy out of "here's how you do X" -type blog posts. I don't see the point in it anymore. Just ask your agent to do something if...

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  "The Dark Night of Mathematics" by Kirwin Hampshire https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics This is similar to what I was getting at in "We mourn our craft." Seems mathematicians are going through the same stages of grief.

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  "Understanding is the new bottleneck" by Geoffrey Litt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkBPX-oDMnA One of the most useful talks on AI coding I've seen. I've been using the explain-diff-notion skill for a week, and it is *awesome*.

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  "Big Tech’s War on Human Achievement" by Gregory Conti https://www.compactmag.com/article/big-techs-war-on-human-achievement/ "Soon we may have less reason to care who 'wrote' a paper with an AI’s help or who inaugurated a theory by prompting Claude than we do about who was riding Secretariat when he won his triple crown."

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  "The mean means nothing" by Farid Zakaria https://fzakaria.com/2026/07/27/the-mean-means-nothing This is the kind of stuff you learn when you go really deep on performance. The visualizations are excellent too.

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  "What Is Your Job Now" by Farhan Thawar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByOF8qByGHU This almost perfectly matches my thoughts on the topic. The most important part is the slide showing that the time spent writing code is compressed, but the time for planning and validation has increased.

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  "Understanding is the new bottleneck" by @geoffreylitt@mastodon.social https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck.html I'm going to try some of these techniques. If you don't understand the code, you won't get shower-ideas or dream-ideas that make the code better.

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  "The Short Leash AI Coding Method For Beating Fable" by @taoeffect@crib.social https://blog.okturtles.org/2026/07/short-leash-ai-method/ Great advice in here. I don't really understand the idea of "software factories" where you're completely hands-off. Seems like a great way to no longer understand the codebase.

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  Just discovered this excellent resource about which CSS features work well in shadow DOM and which don't: https://shadow-dom-css.adobe.com/ Honestly this is the part I miss least about working with web components. It broke so many parts of the web platform, and plenty of new web APIs seem to be just plowing ahead and hoping "somebody will figure out this shadow DOM stuff later"

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  As part of my Twitter detox I'm learning how to use RSS (for the first time, yes, I'm a n00b). I'm trying out NewsBlur and it seems quite nice. What I'd like though is a way to follow some small number of Twitter users *as if* it were RSS. (It seems Twitter doesn't expose Atom endpoints like Mastodon does.) Any advice?

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  "The Death of Civility in the Digital Age" https://newrepublic.com/article/147276/death-civility-digital-age

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  Finally did something I should have done years ago, which is extract the core heap snapshot-parsing logic from fuite into a standalone package: https://github.com/nolanlawson/heap-snapshot-toolkit I found that 99% of my maintenance effort for fuite was just keeping up with Chromium updates, so I figured I might as well extract this into something others could find useful. Maybe someone will build a memory leak tool even better than fuite!

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  This is a great example of why the web rocks. Safari and Chrome disagreed on the spec, so we ended up with a third, better spec. This wouldn't happen if one company controlled everything: https://webkit.org/blog/16587/item-flow-part-1-a-new-unified-concept-for-layout/

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  I have an incredibly stupid solution for reviewing vibe-coded PRs: - Run Cursor Bugbot - Run Claude - Run Codex - Ask each of them to find functional bugs - Ask another Claude to review the 3, check the code, and rule out hallucinations Sometimes a true bug will be found by all 3, sometimes only by 1 (often by Codex for some reason). It finds incredibly subtle bugs, and avoids the agent fixing a bug only to introduce a new one. It sometimes takes a few rounds, but it's surprisingly eff...

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  "Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail" by Lalit Maganti https://lalitm.com/post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-projects-fail/ No notes, 100% correct on all counts.

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  New post: "The <time> element should actually do something" https://nolanlawson.com/2025/12/14/the-time-element-should-actually-do-something/ A modest proposal for a forgotten HTML element.

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  "News from WWDC23: WebKit Features in Safari 17 beta" https://webkit.org/blog/14205/news-from-wwdc23-webkit-features-in-safari-17-beta/ Genuinely impressed with all the stuff landing in Safari lately. The pace has been kind of unbelievable.

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  I've read a lot of articles saying "I'm so tired of talking about The Thing Everyone's Talking About." I imagine my own feed is pretty boring to some people. I don't feel that way at all. I feel like a meteorite just struck the earth and little green men started spilling out, and now suddenly they're popping up everywhere you go, and it's like… I'm supposed to talk about something else? Like gee, some weather, huh?

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  New post: "The diminished art of coding" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/03/22/the-diminished-art-of-coding/ I'm still exploring the themes from "We mourn our craft." This post could maybe be summarized as "go touch grass," or more precisely: "go touch poetry."

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  "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI" by Lalit Maganti https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/ Lots of good advice, and matches a lot of my experience.

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  "Comments" by Alan Jacobs https://blog.ayjay.org/comments/ "90% of those who comment do not read your post at all: maybe the title reminded them of something they want to say on a related or semi-related subject, or maybe they’re just hanging out with other people who comment and you have nothing to do with the occasion." Absolutely blistering, and largely true in my experience. Especially true of Hacker News comments.

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  "The top-line takeaway is chilling: sites that are explicitly designed as SPAs, and which have intentionally opted in to metrics measurement around soft-navigations are seeing one (1) soft-navigation for every full page load on average." Amazing research and analysis as always from @slightlyoff https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-2026/

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  "The Structure of Engineering Revolutions" by @johnallsopp https://webdirections.org/blog/the-structure-of-engineering-revolutions/ I feel like I've been waiting half a year for someone to write this essay. This makes more sense out of everything I've been reading, thinking, and feeling for the past few months than just about anything else I've read.

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  "The phenomenology of agentic coding" https://neonvagabond.xyz/articles/the-phenomenology-agentic-coding.html An incredibly dense but rewarding read that makes me wish I had taken more undergraduate philosophy courses. It's amazing to me that people still write like this on the internet.