Twin Cities IndieWeb - BlogFlock

It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes... - Barry Hess

2026-03-06T18:52:57.000Z

It’s snowing and I’m doing taxes.

I’ve mentioned the photographs of Ragnar Axelsson (Rax) a couple of times here in the past. I recently discovered the availability of the short BBC documentary featuring him: Last Days of the Arctic. Having studied hundreds of his pictures by this point, it was fascinating to see him and his subjects moving through the very environments where the photos were captured.

Please contribute to Number Research (via Shawn).

If you want a new song that feels thrown back to the 80’s, I recommend “be the girl!” by hemlocke springs.

Thank you, Mike O. Thank you.

I still have the old Apple TV with the crappy remote. We all hate it. I’ve been waiting at least two years to replace it with a new version. The new version of the Apple TV is always just around the corner, but at this point it seems like it will never come out.

Adam got me hooked on Turnstile and Lettini sharing this just upped my addiction:

Happy Friday!

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-03T23:14:58.000Z

I have @ottoai exercising the agent-first mb micro.blog client and have Claude Code working on the codebase. I’m in Telegram with Otto discussing features. Otto is my user giving me feedback, I’m the product manager, and Claude Code is building. 🤯

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-03T16:24:27.000Z

Our ride home parked at gate 83.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-03T16:12:35.000Z

I just learned that you can register a Shortcut in Unread to create your own actions for feed items. This is huge for my workflows! 🤯🥳

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-03T14:20:51.000Z

Offline 23 hours a day | Derek Sivers

Limiting online time helps me ignore the hype. Media still screams about what I urgently need to see now, but I don’t. A minute later, I’m offline. I text and call friends, then go home to work.

It’s Not Better Yet - Barry Hess

2026-03-03T03:59:38.000Z

We mourn our craft:

The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

This point stuck out to me. I’m going to take it completely out of context to make my own point. I haven’t yet found an LLM that is writing code better than I can. I guess it depends on how you define “better.” It’s better in many ways:

It can write code faster
It can write code more effectively than I can in languages with which I’m unfamiliar
At my descriptive prompting, it can quickly give me code design ideas that I hadn’t thought of yet
It can be used by novices and non-programmers to build software that solves at least some of the target problem space

Yet when it comes to implementing a non-trivial feature in Ruby on Rails, I’ve never seen a LLM put together something that I felt was better than what I would put together. I’ve not seen it in a “Yeah, that’s how I would have done it” way nor a “Woah, why didn’t I think of that?” way. This is, of course, a subjective statement, but it seems like a lot of people are lamenting the loss of that subjective view of beautiful code. I haven’t found that loss to have arrived yet.

It’ll probably happen at some point soon, though. Or maybe, like most things programming, 80% of the work will be in delivering the last 20% of the potential of LLMs. For me, I’m thankful that I happen to be one of those programmers who loves the higher-level building of creative solutions more than the act of typing lines of code. On most days I find the process of leading the LLM to the code I think is best to be a pretty satisfying experience.

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-02T21:43:48.000Z

Great time at the Nasdaq Marketsite today!

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-02T17:07:34.000Z

Aware Works by Jason Barnett – Enlightened Ceramics

My buddy Jason designs these gorgeous ceramic lamps. They really are illuminated sculpture. Since the start of the [general federal f*ckery] here, he’s added a couple to his offerings.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-02T16:38:33.000Z

I’m now need to look up the lyrics to figure out what these damn kids are singing about and still only understanding half of it years old.

Adventures in Vibe-Coding - Garrick van Buren

2026-03-02T16:21:28.000Z

Back in the 1900s when I was in 4th grade, the teacher gave us an exercise: Successfully get a robot to sharpen a pencil.

Now this was public school in rural Wisconsin, we didn’t have robots. What we did have was other 4th graders. So, once you hand wrote out your instructions and handed them to the teacher, a fellow student randomly selected a set of instructions and executed them.

Perfectly to the letter.

To inevitable failure and laughter from the entire class.

For even at 9 years old, we make assumptions about the important parts of a task, and we leave out substantial context; either because we don’t appreciate it or we take it for granted.

For the past 4 years, I’ve been managing DÉJÀ BRÜ via WordPress, WooCommerce, a Trello board, and a series of Google Sheets. It’s a small competition, so it works well enough. But this year, the fragmentation got to me, so two days after the competition was over I opened up Claude and started vibe-coding a homebrew competition management app.

Since Claude Code starts a $20/month, I just started with the chatbot, and had it generate a shell script to generate the app.

But let’s set the full context.

Between 2000-2010, I taught myself PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, and Javascript. I had a shelf of books covering all 5. If you dig back into this blog, you’ll find loads of posts from that era.

However in the intervening years, I’ve done little programming either for myself or others. Turns out, even maintaining a development environment takes deliberate effort. Node was that interesting to me. I grew weary of managing server up-time and fixing bugs. So I stopped.

Then, in fall of 2021, I got an idea for an app to help me organize my genealogy research, so I dusted off my Rails skills and started building. When I completed the research project, I turned the app off and haven’t visited it since.

So, it’s been 5 years since I’ve used any software I’ve written and at least a decade since anyone else has.

Seems like it might be time.

As of this writing, I’ve spent $20 and Claude Code has helped me with 3 apps.

A homebrew competition management app (~12hrs, from scratch, currently deployed on a test server)
A homebrew recipe management app (~6hrs; from scratch, currently migrating my recipes into it, still local)
The aforementioned genealogy research app (~3hrs; updating to Rails 8, and adding mapping, still local)

And that’s just been in the last week.

I’m absolutely left with the sense that vibe-coding is a misnomer, it’s more like technical writing, more like clearly articulating how to sharpen a pencil to a 4th grader.

Here’s my initial prompt for the competition management app:

create a ruby on rails app for beer judging.
2-3 judges per flight of 5-6 entries. homebrew competition, bjcp-sanctioned, but arbitrary styles could be select, from full BJCP to just a single historic style not recognized by the BJCP. actors: judges, entrants, stewards, organizer roles; cellar, judge coordinator, event coordinator, admin. entrants submit their own entries, some competitions may be paid, others may be free entrants get downloadable scoresheet PDF, publicly available leaderboard. devise for auth, unless Google OAuth would be easier. payment via Paypal. full rails with views. probably Heroku for deployment. the minimum I'd like; entrants enter beers, judges can register, organizer and assign beers to categories, organizer + judge coordinator can assign judges to flights while avoiding any potential entry conflicts, judges can evaluate a beer, entrants can see evaluation within their account.

Now, there have been a few pleasant surprises at what Claude implements outside of my request (feature or bug?), and those suggestions usually force me to really consider what I want and how I want it to work. I find Claude’s code is readable and I’m comfortable making edits to it.

I tried Cursor for one of these vibe-coding sessions and found that while the code was somewhat higher quality (more readable, more concise), Cursor was a far worse business analyst, asking fewer clarifying questions, stubbing out worse features unprompted.

By the time Weekend Update started on Saturday night, I had deployed the homebrew competition management app to a test server and shared a link with my co-organizers. However, that in itself took 3 hrs – which is well within my past estimates of deployment taking 50% of the development time to date.

In the end, the primary reasons I hadn’t committed to building any of this software before: opportunity cost.

Why build custom software if Google Sheets works?

Why build custom software if stable, maintained, equivalents exist for $30/year.

I’m not sure that having an expert Rails developer at my fingertips for $20/mn substantially changes that. If anything, all this highlights is that writing the software was never the hard part – having an incentive to maintain it is.

And none of these 3 apps yet have that.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-02T14:22:43.000Z

Delicious coffee this morning at Blue Bottle Bryant Park. Not going to score top presentation points, but the taste is as good as always.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-02T04:54:45.000Z

I can certainly do a lot with OpenClaw, but when you turn around and realize you used $30 of LLM tokens in a single day it gives you pause. 😬💸

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-02T02:32:22.000Z

Dramatic Erosion Transforms Iceland’s Black Beach | Weather.com

Hard to believe it is just… Gone.

Here’s a shot I took of Beatrix playing with the waves there in 2018.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-02T02:19:09.000Z

Once you understand that Donny Dictator is a lifelong adherent of Norman Vincent Peale you understand that his aggrandizement is more than just a bulling tactic but, in fact, his religion. His self-belief is the very foundation of his faith. He is his God, as he was raised to believe.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-02T01:06:13.000Z

Times Square!

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-03-02T00:54:12.000Z

We’ve instituted Small Project Sundays once again at our house. My wife writes about today’s here (a cleanup of the front hallway closet.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-02T00:45:01.000Z

Just told Claude:

Okay. I’m going to go on a walk for about an hour. This whole project is still pretty new. Can you exercise it extensively using the test blog permissions you have now and give it a thorough work through various features. Fix anything that comes up and we’ll check in when I’m back.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-01T23:29:39.000Z

My last two flights I’ve spent the entire time working with coding agents on projects. The time just flies by! Don’t even need headphones.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-01T23:22:30.000Z

POAP 7570327 at I passed through LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in 2026.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-03-01T22:10:00.000Z

If your reading my blog you should really consider reading my daughter’s blog too. @mthingelstad has gotten the blogger vibes and is sharing amazing stories on her semester abroad. I think you’ll like reading her posts even though you aren’t her dad! 🤩