Chip Morningstar

My first Habitat Chronicles post in a very long time: After a year and a half using AI tools for software development, I have Thoughts. habitatchronicles.com/2026/02/adve...

For personal projects, the Claude Pro rate limit actually makes a nice balance - it only takes me 20-30 minutes before having to wait til the next 5 hour window opens. Then I go for a hike or spend time with my family. Yet I'm still knocking away tons of stuff from my vast unfinished projects list.

Annoying business jargon: don't call a cascade of filters a "funnel", e.g., N million ad impressions, 50% read, 2% clicked, 5% converted = 5N thousand sales. Dude, that's not a funnel. In an actual funnel, everything you pour into the big end comes out the small end. That's literally what it's for.

That metaphor has always bothered me because lasers mostly don’t need to be focused. It’s one of the things that make them useful.

It’s the paradox of the Internet. Nothing ever goes away and nothing ever lasts.

Uh, the usual?

That’s awesome. The Garamendi family name carries a lot of weight in the Sierra foothills country.

At first I misread that as “eradicate fiction” and my mind went all kinds of weird places.

I’ve known a number of military people who emphasize the importance of having empathy for the enemy, as understanding someone’s emotional reality is critical to being able to fight them effectively. This perspective is definitely not about being “nice”.

This was fabulous, but now I really want to see Chihuly’s Cthulhu.

Or can that can only be revealed at a risk to the oh-so-flammable flag?

Is your drunken gender different from your regular gender?

Tom Lehrer’s passing called up a high school memory—I had a chemistry teacher who offered extra credit to anyone who could memorize and perform Lehrer’s song The Elements. That was 50 years ago and to this day I can still recite it if you allow me a few minutes of mental rehearsal. RIP sir.

This has real Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote vibes, but with the coyote in the role of the Roadrunner.

Dallas Fort Worth has today replaced Frankfurt as my least favorite airport.

The Sensory Order is definitely the most difficult read of anything Hayek ever wrote, but it prefigures the entire field of cognitive science quite accurately.

This mode of misreading Hayek seems to be very common among certain segments of the left, for reasons I find entirely baffling. However, in this case the author makes a number of ahistorical accusations that smell to me of bad faith rather than common misunderstanding.

Very reminiscent of what one of my longtime colleagues, Rich Mironov, refers to as The Software Development Deli Counter mironov.com/deli/

I can’t help but be reminded of the old saying that diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggy, nice doggy” until you can find a rock.

My preferred formulation is “Nihilism should commence with one’s self.” That covers a lot of useful ground.

I have to deal with at least 3 of these:

Navan: corporate travel agency
Navant: M&A firm
Naven: women’s clothing brand
Navent: property mgmt company
Navian: FSA admin
Naviant: mgmt consultancy
Navien: tankless water heaters
Navient: student loan servicer

I know naming is hard, but seriously?

I feel seen

You *could* provide a simple system with a programmable escape hatch, but that would require people to program it. By instead having an ultra sophisticated configuration mechanism you can make believe you aren’t making users write code.

This seems to be a recurring pattern. Most users’ needs are simple, but many still have 1 or 2 edge case complications to deal with. Products trying to appeal to the largest possible market end up subjecting each user to the zillion irrelevant complications of all the other users.

It’s a good thing that most musical instruments were invented before modern design sensibilities took hold.

The Mythical AI Minute Who Needs a Man-Month?

This is a really good point. It captures a key disconnect between those appalled by all the slop and those seeing real transformative potential. This article by an AI researcher friend of mine on using AI for software development might be of interest zerothprinciples.substack.com/p/the-mythic...

I once fixed a dead DVD drive with a saw. That was a pretty awesome experience.

I’ve noticed successful platform businesses (e.g. Microsoft in many cases, Sun/JavaSoft in its heyday, many others) want to spend the fruits of success to improve the product but they don’t know how, so instead they just spend on making more of it. Thus you get perpetually growing APIs and the like.

Doesn’t a cold nose mean you’re healthy?