We mourn our craft
A software engineer's lament on AI's impact on programming, mourning the loss of hands-on coding as a craft.
Nolan Lawson is a software engineer based in Seattle, known for his work on web performance, accessibility, and offline-first applications. He is the creator of pinafore.social and a longtime open-source contributor with deep frontend expertise.
10 articles from this blog
A software engineer's lament on AI's impact on programming, mourning the loss of hands-on coding as a craft.
A developer reflects on 15 years of blogging, covering his career's technical evolution from machine learning to web development, and the challenges of writing online.
An experiment using AI to build a working IndexedDB browser API implementation from scratch, aiming to pass Web Platform Tests.
A software engineer's personal journey from skepticism to embracing AI coding assistants, examining the tribalistic debates surrounding LLMs in development.
A developer builds a travel itinerary web app for his wife using AI coding assistants like Claude, exploring the 'vibe coding' approach and its pros/cons.
A software engineer shares practical strategies for effectively using AI coding agents like Claude Code, emphasizing setup and feedback loops.
The HTML <time> element is widely used but lacks practical browser or assistive tech support, making it a semantic but underutilized feature.
A developer reflects on the impact of AI-generated code on small, educational open-source libraries like his popular blob-util npm package.
Explains why browsers throttle JavaScript timers like setTimeout to 4ms, and explores modern alternatives like scheduler.postTask for better performance.
A web developer argues for building accessible UIs by highlighting the practical, selfish benefits for developers, such as easier debugging and better code.