Ready or Not

Ready or not, here I come / you can’t hide / gonna find you / and take it slowly / and make you want me

– Fugees

There’s something the ocean teaches that no classroom can: you cannot negotiate with a wave.

You can read it, anticipate it, position yourself for it—but you cannot rush it, and you cannot hold it back. The wave arrives on its own terms, shaped by storms thousands of miles away, by seafloor topography. Your job is simply to be ready when it comes.

This is a different kind of patience than waiting. Waiting is passive—you sit somewhere and endure until time passes. What the water asks for is active stillness: fully present, reading the horizon, feeling the current, neither grasping nor checked out. The surfer who paddles frantically for every lump on the water catches nothing. The one who waits too long, always second-guessing, watches the best sets roll through unridden. The sweet spot is a state of relaxed readiness—attentive without tension.

Timing, when it comes, isn’t really a decision you make. It’s more like a recognition. The wave and the moment align, and something in your body knows before your mind does. You commit. That commitment—unhesitating, full—is what transforms a lump of water into a ride.

Nobody talks about positioning. Because current and wind make it so hard to stay in the right place. You can do everything right—read the swell, time your paddle, stay present—and still find yourself twenty meters out of position because something invisible moved you there while you were waiting. You’re never as fixed as you think you are. The ocean is moving you even when you’re sitting still.

Miss your positioning, watch it peel perfectly down the line—and you want it in a way that’s almost painful. The wave doesn’t need you. You need it. That longing is what sharpens your reading of the horizon, what gets you up before dawn, what keeps you honest.

And yet even desire and discipline and presence aren’t enough to fully master this. The ocean doesn’t know you’re there. It’s not testing you, not indifferent to you in any meaningful way—you’re just not part of its calculation at all. A tiny human on a plank, recalibrating against forces that have been running since long before humans existed and will keep running long after.

Being put in your place by something that doesn’t even notice you—that’s a very particular kind of humbling. Clean. No judgment in it.

Just scale.

March 8, 2026 · 408 words

LLMs Are Savants

It’s like having a savant colleague who can solve differential equations in their head but forgets where they parked their car.

– Claude

I just watched Claude make the same mistake three times in five minutes. I was updating my /now page, mentioning that Xcode 26.3 finally made agentic coding possible. Claude “corrected” it to Xcode 16.3, assuming I’d made a typo. I fixed it back to 26.3. Claude apologized and changed it to 16.3 again. I explained that Apple switched to year-based versioning in 2026. Claude understood, fixed it back to 26.3, then immediately asked me what typo I’d introduced.

The thing is, I don’t care. While Claude was having this small cognitive crisis, it had already helped me implement a complete sitemap.xml endpoint with proper ETag caching, fix Makefile portability issues, and refine the prose on my now page. The version number confusion was annoying, but it didn’t matter because Claude isn’t my memory—it’s my encyclopedic technical reference and code generator.

This savant quality is precisely what makes LLMs so useful for coding. You don’t need them to remember conversational context perfectly. You need them to generate correct Swift concurrency code, understand REST semantics, follow architectural patterns, and recall obscure API details. They’re brilliant at structure and terrible at continuity.

The division of labor is clear: the human provides sanity, continuity, and judgment. The LLM provides encyclopedic technical knowledge and execution. It’s a partnership where both parties contribute what they’re actually good at. You stop expecting the AI to “understand” you and start treating it like what it is—a savant colleague who’s invaluable despite (or because of) its limitations.

The future of coding isn’t about AI replacing developers. It’s about developers learning to work with savants.

February 28, 2026 · 284 words

AI Will Do It All

a generation of developers skipping learning and just prompting AI, leaving us with critical systems nobody understands.

I’ve been appreciating Matteo Collina since early Node.js days, here he gives a cohesive summary of his recent thoughts about AI and software development.

If you’re making decisions about AI tooling in your organization, read this. I could not have said it any better.

February 18, 2026 · 63 words

On the Next Move

It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note—it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

– Miles Davis

Herbie Hancock shares this anecdote

In music, as in life, a single moment rarely defines anything. What matters is the movement that follows. A step that feels misplaced, a choice that seems off, a hesitation that interrupts the rhythm—none of these are final. Meaning is created in the continuation, in how you choose to respond to what just happened. What we call a “mistake” becomes part of the texture once we treat it as material rather than failure.

Longboard surfing works exactly the same way. You cross-step, but maybe you plant your foot a little too far inside, or the rail catches earlier than expected. The board wobbles. For a split second it feels wrong—but the wave hasn’t judged you yet. What decides everything is what follows: how you adjust, how you shift your weight, how the line evolves. A misstep isn’t the problem; refusing to flow through it is. Good longboarding isn’t about perfection—it’s about recovering with style, using the unexpected to guide the next move.

Life, like a wave, doesn’t freeze on your mistakes. It keeps unfolding, giving you the chance to respond, reinterpret, and turn tension into direction. The art lies in staying open enough to make the next move meaningful. A wrong step only becomes wrong if you stop. If you keep moving, it becomes part of the story, part of the rhythm, part of the line you’re drawing through the world.

So the real skill—whether in music, surfing, or living—is to treat the imperfect moment not as a verdict but as an opening. Everything depends on how you keep moving.

December 7, 2025 · 286 words

The Quiet Activism of Living Pleasantly

Because think of the amazing people that you see every day. Think of the quiet activism of living pleasantly. There’s more good than bad. I always will believe that. I always will believe that the odds are in our favor.

– Jon Stewart to David Remnick at the New Yorker festival

November 9, 2025 · 55 words

Approachable Concurrency

// In '-default-isolation MainActor' mode

struct Image {
  // The image cache is safe because it's protected
  // by the main actor.
  static var cachedImage: [URL: Image] = [:]

  static func create(from url: URL) async throws -> Image {
    if let image = cachedImage[url] {
      return image
    }

    let image = try await fetchImage(at: url)

    cachedImage[url] = image
    return image
  }

  // Fetch the data from the given URL and decode it.
  // This is performed on the concurrent thread pool to
  // keep the main actor free while decoding large images.
  @concurrent
  static func fetchImage(at url: URL) async throws -> Image {
    let (data, _) = try await URLSession.shared.data(from: url)
    return await decode(data: data)
  }
}

By running async functions in the caller’s execution context, concurrency is more approachable now with Swift 6.2.

October 9, 2025 · 18 words

When Should You Use an Actor?

You need a) non-Sendable state that requires b) atomic mutations which c) cannot be done on the main thread. If you are missing any one of these qualities you should be looking at other options. And if you cannot tolerate asynchronous accesses, then you must.

– Matt Massicotte on when to use actors

October 5, 2025 · 57 words

Brain Rot Dot Com

Pay attention to The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes.

An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.

– New York Times

October 3, 2025 · 36 words

What Drives You Nuts?

Clutter, dirt, noise, wasting time, being bored, uncertainty, people standing too close, being looked at, having to do things, sitting still, not knowing when something will end, high noon, meetings, surprises, fascism.

– Liane Finck, who drew the cover of the August 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books

August 21, 2025 · 53 words

Craftsmanship in the 21st Century

Knowledge and execution, science and technique, depend on the skills acquired by hand through the repetition of motions and their assimilation into the mind; the aim is a close connection between art and craft.

– Richard Sennett, The Troubled Craftsman

June 6, 2025 · 43 words