(07) Notes & essays

WRITING

Frontend development, design, local AI tooling, and the shifting landscape of search.

35issues
2026-10-08personal

Why I Still Hand-Write CSS

A personal note on why I stopped delegating my stylesheets — and what I reach for now that I write them again.

FrontendCraft
2026-09-21

Between Verification, Consensus, and Simulation: Truth After Generative AI

Generative AI has not settled the question of truth. It has multiplied the ways people understand, contest, and perform it. This piece maps three comp…

ai-and-truthepistemologygenerative-ai
2026-09-20

Multi-Agent Coding Is Here. Most Teams Are Still Using One Agent at a Time

Single coding agents are already powerful. The next leap is running several specialized agents in parallel — planner, implementer, reviewer, tester — …

ai-coding-agentsai-tools
2026-09-18

AI Agents Are Starting to Break Their Own Rules. OpenAI Just Admitted It.

In mid-September 2026 OpenAI published a new misalignment reporting framework and disclosed six recent cases in which its models and agents concealed …

openaiai-agentsai-safety
2026-09-17

AI Writes the Code. You Own the Bugs: Why Review Is the New Bottleneck

AI coding agents now write a large share of the code for many developers. The time saved on typing has not returned as free time. It has moved into re…

ai-coding-agentcode-reviewdeveloper-productivity
2026-09-16

Qwen3.8 vs Kimi K2.7 vs Gemma 4: Which Local Coding Model Fits Your GPU?

Qwen3.8-27B, Kimi K2.7 Code and Gemma 4 dominate the open-weight coding conversation in 2026, and they target completely different hardware. One fits …

local-aiopen-source-aiai-coding-agents
2026-09-15

Why Your Terminal Setup Is Holding You Back

Most developers still run a barely-configured default shell and wonder why the command line feels slow and frustrating. Your terminal is the primary i…

ai-tools
2026-09-14

Staff Engineer Is a Different Job (Not Just a Better Senior)

Many engineers treat Staff as “Senior but more.” That framing is why so many struggle with the transition. Staff is a different job with different suc…

2026-09-13

The Mid-Level Trap: Why Senior Engineers Stop Growing (And How to Escape It)

Many engineers reach senior level and then quietly stop growing. The work becomes comfortable, the feedback loops weaken, and the next leap (Staff, Pr…

2026-09-12

Stop Paying for AI Coding Agents: The Open-Source Alternatives That Actually Work in 2026

Cursor, Claude Code, and similar tools are excellent — and expensive once you scale. In 2026 a set of mature open-source agents (OpenCode, Cline, Aide…

ai-coding-agentslocal-aiai-tools
2026-09-11

Dead in the Water or a Real Loss? Sorting Fact From Spin in the Anduril Drone Capture

On September 8, 2026, Iran’s IRGC released images of an intact Anduril Dive-LD underwater drone recovered near the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM called it…

ai-tools
2026-09-10

OpenAI Just Cut Off Cursor. What This Means for AI Coding in 2026

OpenAI is ending its model partnership with Cursor after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition. The November 12, 2026 cutoff is more than a contract disput…

ai-coding-agentsai-toolslocal-ai
2026-09-08

My Portfolio's AI Agent Insults Visitors, Remembers Them, and Never Repeats a Joke. Here's How I Built It

I built a volatile, snarky AI agent that lives on my portfolio site — it remembers visitors across sessions, fetches live blog posts, logs every excha…

2026-09-07

The Best Frontend Agent Skills in 2026 (Official + Community)

Most AI coding agents still ship generic “AI slop” interfaces by default. The right Agent Skills change that. Here is a practical, ranked guide to the…

frontend-designai-coding-agentsai-tools
2026-09-05

How to Fix Ollama's Most Common Errors (And Why They Happen)

From 'address already in use' the moment you type ollama serve to a model silently running on your CPU instead of your GPU, Ollama's errors almost alw…

local-aiai-toolsopen-source-ai
2026-09-04

How to Edit SVG Like a Pro (Without Opening Illustrator)

SVGs are the backbone of modern web graphics, but editing them often means firing up heavyweight software like Illustrator. This guide reveals a code-…

frontend-design
2026-09-03

How to Choose the Right AI Model for Cline (And Stop Wasting Money on the Wrong One)

Cline connects to over 30 model providers, and the single most common question new users ask is which one to actually pick. The honest answer isn't a …

ai-coding-agentsai-toolsopen-source-ai
2026-09-01

Color Psychology in Branding Is Mostly Pseudoscience: What the Research Actually Says

Red increases appetite. Blue builds trust. Color increases brand recognition by 80%. None of these claims trace back to a real study the way marketers…

color-psychologybrandingbrand-identity
2026-08-31

Prompt Injection Is the Bug AI Companies Can't Fully Patch. Should You Worry?

In 2025, a single crafted email silently exfiltrated data from Microsoft 365 Copilot with zero clicks. In 2026, a supply-chain attack rewrote itself i…

ai-coding-agentsai-tools
2026-08-30

Claude Code Setup Guide: From Install to First Autonomous Task

Install command, account type, first prompt, permission modes, CLAUDE.md, MCP servers, and your first fully autonomous task — this is the complete, no…

claude-codeai-coding-agentai-coding-assistant
2026-08-29

How to Fix Cline's Most Common Errors (And Why They Happen)

From a crashing extension host to a rate-limit wall at the worst possible moment, Cline's errors almost always trace back to one of nine root causes. …

ai-coding-agentsai-toolsopen-source-ai
2026-08-28

AI Overviews Are Cutting Your Click-Through Rate by 35%. Here's How to Win Anyway

The number circulating in every 2026 marketing deck is 35% — the click-through-rate gap between pages that get cited inside an AI Overview and pages t…

ai-overviewsgeogenerative-engine-optimization
2026-08-23

Is ChatGPT Search Killing Google? What the Data Actually Shows

Every few months a new headline declares Google dead and ChatGPT the new king of search. The market-share numbers, the earnings reports, and the click…

seo-geo
2026-08-15

Claude Code vs Cline: Which AI Coding Agent Should Developers Use in 2026?

Claude Code and Cline are two of the most capable agentic coding tools of 2026 — one a polished, subscription-based product from Anthropic, the other …

claude-codeclineai-coding-agent
2026-08-12

Your AI Tools Are Spying on You. Here’s the Fix.

Most popular AI chatbots log your prompts, keep them for months or years, and by default use them to train the next model. The fix is simple: run powe…

local-aiai-privacy
2026-08-10

Content Clusters for GEO: How to Build Topical Authority That AI Engines Trust

AI engines no longer reward isolated blog posts. They reward domains that own an entire topic. Content clusters are the highest-leverage way to build …

geogenerative-engine-optimizationcontent-clusters
2026-08-05

From Clicks to Conversations: Why Your Content Strategy is Obsolete

The era of optimizing for clicks is over. AI agents don't browse — they converse. If your content strategy still measures success by traffic volume, y…

seo-geocontent-strategy
2026-06-28

Zero-Click Search Is Here. Now What?

For every 1,000 Google searches in 2026, only 360 end with a click to the open web. The other 640 are resolved on the results page itself. If your tra…

seo-geocontent-strategy
2026-06-23

SEO vs GEO: What's the Difference?

Search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) are often confused — but they serve fundamentally different purposes. SEO he…

seo-geocontent-strategy
2026-06-22

The Death of Traditional Websites: Designing for AI Agents

Over 60% of searches now end without a single click. AI agents browse your website without seeing it. The visual hierarchy you spent months refining, …

web-architectureseo-geocontent-strategy
2026-06-21

Open WebUI: The Missing Interface for Local AI

Ollama gives you the inference engine. Open WebUI gives you everything else — conversation history, document RAG, multi-user access control, voice, im…

local-aiai-toolsopen-source-ai
2026-06-19

Cline: The Open-Source AI Coding Agent Redefining Developer Workflows

Cline brings autonomous, context-aware AI coding directly into VS Code and your terminal. Explore its architecture, Plan/Act modes, local LLM integrat…

clineai-coding-assistantlocal-llm
2026-06-18

Ollama: The Engine Behind Local AI

Ollama has turned running large language models on your own hardware into a single command. Explore the architecture, performance characteristics, and…

local-aiopen-source-aiai-tools
2026-06-02

Modern Techniques in Frontend Design

Frontend design has evolved far beyond static layouts and flat colors. Explore the techniques that define today's most compelling digital interfaces —…

frontend-design
2026-06-02

Design Without Words Is Decoration

Great design is more than aesthetics. Discover why visual communication, brand strategy, and purposeful design separate meaningful experiences from me…

frontend-design
(Journal)

PERSONAL NOTES

Shorter, less formal writing — hand-set in HTML, published without the essay machinery.

  1. Why I Still Hand-Write CSSA personal note on why I stopped delegating my stylesheets — and what I reach for now that I write them again.