The Wizard With the Very Defensible Pond
There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond.
Tech
Works on My Machine.
Scott Werner on software development and programming paradigms in a post-LLM world.
Recent essays
30 of 31Here Comes (Forward Deployed) Everybody
Note: I just enabled paid subscriptions for $8/month.
Artifacts Are Alive (And Photographs are Dead)
There is a photograph of a coral reef on the wall of my dentist’s office.
The Illusionist and the Conjurer
Penn & Teller have this philosophy about their craft.
The Collective Superstitions of People Who Talk to Machines
You had a technique.
The Ghost in the Funnel
Your Free Tier is Someone Else's Twenty-Minute Side Project
Open Source, SaaS, and the Silence After Unlimited Code Generation
The End of Feedback
From Nodes to Stories, Fiction as a Tool for Thinking
On Saturday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts.
The Great Zipper of Capitalism
On Pizzas, CSVs, and Building for Markets That Don't Exist Yet
As Complexity Grows, Architecture Dominates Material
There’s this talk from 1997 that I keep bringing up on here, but there’s a different part I want to call to your attention this time.
The Discovery Phase Is All There Is
Or: Documents Retrieved from the Department of Best Practices, Third Sub-Basement, The Building
The Different Shapes of "Think Before You Build" Prompting
Or: The Beaver Who Learned To Measure Twice
What If We Took Message-Passing Seriously?
There’s a mass of data that holds a shape you can’t quite name.
How I (Accidentally) Started a Newsletter
Looking Back on 2025
Solving Amazon's Infinite Shelf Space Problem
Michelangelo supposedly said the statue already existed in the marble, he simply removed everything that wasn't David.
Introducing touring_test: A Cucumber Extension For Agentic Usability Testing
It's like BDD, but the user is a hallucination
The Hackathon Where We Mostly Just Talked
Architectural Control at Agent Velocity
How Do You Speak Pidgin To A Probability Distribution?
Why We Still Need Frameworks When AI Can Build Everything
The Only Skill That Matters Now
There's this restaurant in Tokyo that doesn't have a kitchen.
The Tmux Menagerie
On Sessions, Dreams, and the Art of Parallel Agentic Programming
The Cause of, and the Solution to, All Your Team's Problems
So there's this developer.
Safe Is What We Call Things Later
Some Software Engineering Folklore
The System Inside the System
Announcing two new Ruby gems: vsm and airb
Entering Technical Debt's ZIRP Era
The manifesto for slop driven development
The Parallel Lives of an AI Engineer
or: The Octopus Developer's Guide to Parallel Existence
Refactoring in the Age of Unlimited Code Generation
Architectural Decisions at the Speed of Anxiety
Nobody Knows How To Build With AI Yet
The future of software development might just be jazz. Everyone improvising. Nobody following the sheet music.
The Great Flood of Adequate Software
Somewhere someone is still evaluating WinRAR
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Or: The Day My Toaster Started Taking Phone Calls
The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles
or how I learned to stop worrying and love fuzzy vegetables