Les Orchard identifies a split among developers that AI tools have revealed: the craft people versus the results people. He's observing something real, but the line is drawn in the wrong place. The split isn't between two kinds of developers. It's between two kinds of tasks. The same person crosses that line constantly, and where the craft actually lives might not be where anyone expects.
I own $5,500 worth of GPU hardware for local inference and I use a Claude Max subscription for nearly everything that matters. Both are correct decisions. This piece explains why, with real power measurements, real electricity costs, and an honest accounting of what local inference is and isn't good for.
Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year. This essay examines what distinguishes useful AI-generated content from hollow output, drawing on Clement Greenberg's kitsch theory, the MINT Lab's taxonomy, and the author's daily experience shipping real work with AI tools. The test is simpler than you'd expect: does the text commit to a claim that could be wrong?
A deep dive into how the Freerouting autorouter actually works: A* search on free-space polygons, rip-up-and-reroute optimization, and the architectural limits that make copper pours impossible. Includes the mathematics of A* and why it appears everywhere from game pathfinding to PCB layout.
A walkthrough of batch-processing 20 years of photos (51,414 JPEGs and Nikon RAW files) on an AMD Strix Halo APU. Covers EXIF-based orientation correction, horizon straightening with OpenCV, AI captioning with BLIP, and cataloging everything in SQLite. Includes the EXIF parsing bugs that cost a day of debugging.
Part one of a two-part series on redesigning an Arduino Giga R1 level-shifter shield using Claude Code and open-source EDA tools. Covers replacing TXB0108 auto-sensing translators with SN74LVC8T245 driven shifters, generating PCB layouts with Python, autorouting with Freerouting, and producing Gerber files, all driven from a terminal with AI assistance.
