Mark

Maintaining Flow with Changelogs Keeping track of your AI pairing sessions

open.substack.com/pub/markferr...

I don't want an AI that renders images that vaguely resemble Ghibli films. I want an AI - or just a regular I - that informs everyone the man's name was Yoshifumi Kondo, he's the guy who designed the characters you think of when you think of "Ghibli", and he died in 1998 at age 47 from overwork

I listened to a podcast with the windsurf devs and they nodded at some vscode plugin api gaps. The latest version of copilot is very agentic and similar to cursor but only runs on beta builds so I’d guess these gaps are getting fixed since copilot team can’t really get away with forking vscode

At srecon this week so you all might get a break from my constant AI musings while I focus on my day job.

“Any security professional, military, government or otherwise would be fired ON THE SPOT for this type of conduct, and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information.”
Pete Hegseth

Only on Bluesky would I find sci-fi authors through their cat pictures

“Thank you for the sandwich it was very yummy” text with heart reaction

My other teenager will probably be texting soon to let me know I forgot the avocados

Setting everything else aside I’m a little impressed they were smart enough to use Signal

Spray-Painted Penis Only Thing Holding Cybertruck Together

Spray-Painted Penis Only Thing Holding Cybertruck Together

I definitely don’t use mine to make falling asleep at 9pm while everyone else is awake easier

Removing all the copy paste steps. Everything integrated in one window rather than jumping between an LLM and an editor. More context about the project structure and ability to edit to multiple files from one prompt. I’m on windsurf but essentially the same thing.

The one thing I’ve seen that makes a marked difference in the quality of results is a really good README with build and testing instructions and a breakdown of the expected project structure. It’s like we’ve forgotten every best practice in the race to adopt these tools.

So much talk about AI coding tools, vibe coding, AI agents

So many complaints of these tools “breaking down” above some complexity / context length

So little - basically no - talk about software architecture that makes for code devs can easily maintain/evolve. Or AI tools!

A lot of pushback on using AI tools for software development is starting to look like old fashioned gate keeping.

The things we know are unlearnable and only possible for experienced people to continue to produce.

AI-assisted Coding Tools: A personal journey and retrospective. A path through woods with cute robots hiding behind trees and peeking out.

How my use of AI tools for programming has evolved over time.

open.substack.com/pub/markferr...

After years of Amazon Prime it’s interesting how much more excited I am for a package that took one week to ship and will take another week to arrive.

The Constitution is clear: the President can't arrest people he disagrees with.

By detaining Mahmoud Khalil — a legal permanent resident whose American wife is 8-months pregnant — Donald Trump seeks to undermine basic freedoms.

We must oppose this move toward authoritarianism.

Really enjoyed Electic State, perfect time for a little escapist reminder not to put the country in the hands of an unhinged tech oligarch.

Annoyed that Walgreens pushed out all the community pharmacies in San Francisco and has now decided that it’s inconvenient to do business here.

Leaves large swaths of the city without access to a convenient pharmacy.

Let Go and Let Copilot: Developing healthy detachment from your code

How can AI help us become less attached to our code?

open.substack.com/pub/markferr...

Thank you moderators for all your hard work, it really makes it feel different over here

“the future of cars”

Book cover: Careless People, a cautionary tale of power greed and lost idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

My contraband has arrived!

Thanks Meta legal team for calling my attention to this book.

Pro-Israel group says it has ‘deportation list’ and has sent ‘thousands’ of names to Trump officials Betar US is among far-right groups supporting Trump effort to deport students involved in pro-Palestinian protests

Threatening activists with deportation because you don’t agree with their speech is counter to every value this country holds.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Saying you shouldn’t use AI because of the environmental impacts is equivalent to telling all Java engineers to switch to Golang because they use too much CPU and Memory.

My child just asked if the x in SpaceX stands for explode. 😭

I want a weather app that just averages the results of all the other weather apps.

Rain currently stopping in 15, 35 or 48 minutes.

Makes frozen chicken nuggets and steamed broccoli while reading Food and Wine

If You Push It You Own It Ownership in an Agentic World

Finally some action on my personal Substack. Two posts in two weeks feels pretty good after a years-long drought. open.substack.com/pub/markferr...