The checklist for building agents assumes a human is in the room at every step. Evaluating the output. In agentic workflows that step gets optimised away. When something goes wrong in a chain of automated decisions, what does the trail look like? Who owns the output?
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
You didn't build a dependency on an API. You built it on a company. Its ethics, its political exposure, its CEO's willingness to say no in public.
Most risk assessments didn't cover that.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
A contributor opens a PR. The code is clean, the tests pass. The reviewer asks a question. The author can't explain it because they didn't write it. The reviewer approves it anyway. One PR like this is a minor risk. A year of them is a codebase nobody actually owns...
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
If someone writes clean, well-structured code, AI can accelerate them. If someone writes spaghetti, AI just helps them write it faster.
AI doesn't fix fundamentals. It amplifies them. And that's widening the gap inside teams, not closing it.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
"Create a caricature based on everything you know about me." People are celebrating how accurately AI can profile them and nobody finds that strange...
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
You write something useful, AI trains on it, six months later it gives someone your answer with zero attribution and zero traffic back. The open web ran on: create value, get found, benefit. AI runs on: create value, never get found again... medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Looks like Microsoft have just launched a new Inclusive Design website which has been built through co‑design with disabled and neurodivergent collaborators, the new experience focuses on adaptability, usability, and real‑world inclusion... 😍 inclusive.microsoft.design
If you're leading a team or function: how do you know people are telling you the truth?
Not in theory. Not because you have an open-door policy.
In practice. In the actual moments when you propose something that won't work...
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Sharing this because I think Buttered Crumpet is the best typeface name ever, and also because Wallace and Gromit are awesome.... 😊 jamieclarketype.com/case-study/w...
Radio buttons are built into browsers. Why are we using a UI library that wraps another library to rebuild them? How did a native browser control become this complicated? 😢
paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shad...
Trying to keep up with AI is exhausting...
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Why do we keep deferring to whoever sounds most certain in technical decisions? Why does admitting "I don't know" look like weakness instead of intellectual honesty? And what are we teaching every engineer who's watching this play out?
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Seventeen men walk into a ski resort and write a manifesto about human-centred development. Twenty-five years later we're still blaming teams when it doesn't work. Still sending people on scrum master courses. Still pretending the problem is the people, not the framework.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
My creation for this weeks @codepen.io challenge, something that evokes a feeling of wintertime coziness.
There is nowhere I would rather be in the middle of Winter than curled up with a good book and a cup of tea...! 📖 🤎
codepen.io/GemmaCroad/p...
CSS Wrapped 2025 has dropped! 🥳
It’s the annual recap of all things CSS and Web UI that landed in Chrome over the last year. This year was massive, 22 new features made it into the browser to help us build beautiful and better UIs…. 🫶
chrome.dev/css-wrapped-...
I did spot that shirt in the front row of the live stream 😁
We don't talk about the fact that every time you ask ChatGPT to write a poem about your cat, you're contributing to a climate crisis we all claim to care about solving.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Technical interviews filter for people who are good at technical interviews, not people who are good at engineering.
We all know this, but we keep doing it anyway.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
This is very cool!!! It's a CSS terrain generator that leverages stacked grids and 3D transforms. Apparently inspired by Transport Tycoon, Sim City and other '90s isometrics classics, it's built with Vue and Nuxt 😍 terra.layoutit.com
A little bit of fun for this weeks @codepen.io challenge using CSS shape() and corner-shape, a random kaleidoscope generator... 🥰 💠
codepen.io/GemmaCroad/p...
We tell ourselves we're optimising. Making things more efficient, more scalable. But what we're actually doing is quietly redesigning human work to fit AI's limitations one "optimisation" at a time.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Measuring productivity makes everyone less productive. We optimise for what gets counted, and the work becomes producing metrics.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
When you start with "we need to use AI" and work backwards to find problems, you're not solving technical challenges. You're avoiding uncomfortable conversations about what you're actually trying to accomplish.
The hard part isn't building AI, it's knowing when not to.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
We're practising how to talk to something that never challenges us, never misunderstands us, never requires us to deal with messy human communication.
The more we practice that, the worse we get at the real thing.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
AI uses more confident language when it's making things up than when it's actually right.
We're dealing with pattern-matching systems that don't know when they don't know something.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Drawing explaining the JS execution model and event loop
💥 did a small drawing explaining the JS execution model including the event loop. I hope it’s helpful to folks. Debugging is always easier when the underlying implementations are understood.
I created this vintage colour theory poster for this weeks @codepen.io challenge! It's a loving tribute to those beautiful scientific colour wheel prints I was obsessed with as a child (and honestly still am)... 🥰 🌈
codepen.io/GemmaCroad/p...
"Culture fit" in tech hiring often means "doesn't make us uncomfortable by questioning how we do things."
But what if the person who doesn't quite fit is exactly what your team needs?
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
There's something bothering me about engineering promotions. We assume good coders automatically make good leaders. Spoiler: it doesn't work that way.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
Searched for banana bread recipes lately?
You'll find "The Ultimate Guide to Perfect Banana Bread: 15 Amazing Variations" written by a system that can't actually taste, touch, or try anything.
This is AI slop. And it's breaking how we learn from each other.
medium.com/@gemma.croad...
