Fan out prompts to multiple AI coding agents in parallel. counselors dispatches the same prompt to Claude, Codex, Gemini, Amp, or custom tools simultaneously, collects their responses, and writes everything to a structured output directory. No MCP servers, no direct API integrations, no complex configuration. It just calls your locally installed CLI tools.
Just heard about this on the latest episode of Mostly Technical podcast - a deceptively simple idea that could be insanely powerful.
]]><kelp-toc> at some point.
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But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
Could this be the beginning of the end for the CSS framework? Maybe it's time for Laravel Holdings Inc. to buy / bail them out?
UPDATE: Looks like Vercel and Google AI already swooped in to save the day, as it were. No word of the Tailwind employees that lost their jobs, though.
]]>...in the name of evolution, there seems to be mistaken thinking that the process of building a website needs to get more complex, using Javascript frameworks and modern backend systems; when at the end of the day, browsers still only need static HTML content to interpret.
There’s so much in this piece that echoes my current thinking about building for the web - things have gotten way more complex than they need to be.
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At work I will often need to decode a JSON or Base64-encoded string to more-easily examine the data. Using online tools like jsonformatter.org and base64decode.org are certainly convenient, but not exactly great for security.
Boop is a fantastic native desktop tool for doing all of that (and much more). I find myself launching it multiple times a day.
]]>It’s like a consortium of sketchy pawn shops complaining to the authorities after a popular retailer successfully cracked down on an organized shoplifting/pickpocketing ring, and the authorities then fining the retailer for the damage to the pawnbrokers’ business fencing stolen goods — and for exposing the police as ineffective.
This decision by French authorities melts my brain, and another reason for Apple (who are far from perfect in many respects) to ask “why do we even bother?”.
]]>Faced with the relentless, myopic, growth-at-all-costs optimism that seems to surround our tech overlords and their toys, all I can think is that I'd rather give up 99% of the consumer-tech "improvements" to go back to a world where things felt a little bit harder, and a lot more human.
This perfectly encapsulates a feeling of uneasiness that has been growing in the back of my head. I need more time to contemplate what this all means to me and how I intend to address it, but this from Scott Boms is a good start:
]]>I miss being excited by technology. I wish I could see a way out of the endless hype cycles that continue to elicit little more than cynicism from me. The version of technology that we’re mostly being sold today has almost nothing to do with improving lives, but instead stuffing the pockets of those who already need for nothing. It’s not making us smarter. It’s not helping heal a damaged planet. It’s not making us happier or more generous towards each other. And it’s entrenched in everything — meaning a momentous challenge to re-wire or meticulously disconnect. I’m slowly finding my own ways of breaking free to regain a sense of self and purpose.
In 2021 Netflix announced that it would start releasing a new original movie every week. A certain style soon began to take shape, a mind-numbing anticinema that anyone who has subscribed to Netflix in recent years knows by sight. I’ll call it the Typical Netflix Movie (TNM).
I’m not a huge Netflix viewer - I mainly use it to watch ‘mainstream’ movies that make it onto the platform, plus the occasional comedy special or documentary.
I was recently recommended Black Doves, the Keira Knightley thriller that is undoubtedly Netflix’s answer to the excellent Slow Horses on Apple TV+. Whilst it is a series as oppose to a movie, it still has all the hallmarks of the Typical Netflix Movie.
The characters’ dialogue is stilted, filled with overexplanation, clichés, and lingo no human would ever use, like two bots stuck in a loop.
Despite the implausible and unmemorable plot, the real deal-breaker for me was a particular piece of dialogue. At numerous points throughout the series, English characters wish each other “Happy Christmas”. Here’s the thing, no one from the UK wishes people “Happy Christmas” - it’s “Merry Christmas” (and a happy New Year) - and it’s jarring every time a character says it.
1-star - would not recommend.
]]>Meishi embodies Rams’s principle of “less but better” by enforcing limits. Each card represents a commitment to do fewer things, but do them well. Most satisfying of all is that by solving this particular problem, I’ve found that small solutions can lead to big impact.
Aside from the fact that this requires the carrying of a pen / pencil, I do like the idea of this minimal (literally) productivity system. I’m considering a more analogue method of managing my to-do list, and the Ugmonk Analog system that inspired this is definitely up for consideration.
]]>Writing is the superpower of humankind. It is our truest form of magic.
Writing allows you to conjure up something of value where nothing previously existed. It costs little for you to write down the lessons of your life and yet those few minutes spent writing can be life-altering for the right reader. As I once saw it put: “there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”
Furthermore, writing is the foundation of nearly every technology and innovation because we have to record what we know before we can build upon it. And these innovations are passed down from generation to generation, allowing our children to inherit a richer intellectual fortune than what we were born into. The world is richer because we write and nobody is made poorer in the process.
This sums up perfectly why I am intent on building my writing habit 2025.
]]>Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons”. These seasons didn't use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena
As someone who has moved from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere and had their seasons shifted against the calendar year (and those seasons are so much more extreme and unrecognisable to what we experienced in the UK) I love the idea of taking a completely different view on the passage of time throughout the year.
]]>There are three main requirements which have to be kept in balance. These are urgency, importance and psychological readiness. Traditional time management systems have tended to concentrate on the first two of these. The neglect of psychological readiness is probably the reason that most people don’t find time management systems particularly effective or congenial.
The most distinctive feature of FV is the way that its algorithm is primarily based on psychological readiness — this then opens the way to keeping urgency and importance in the best achievable balance.
I love both the simplicity of this system and the fact it addresses procrastination head-on.
]]>One of the most enjoyable episodes of recent times, this was an enlightening listen that highlights aspects of search that I had never considered (but which support my general view). It takes some deep dives down some interesting technical rabbit holes. Prelovac is a very knowledgeable and humble guest, and embodies a company whose values I can get on board with.
A few random things I learned (spoiler alerts, maybe?):
It has given me tons of food for thought - exactly what I was hoping for before I listened to it.
]]>I don’t use ‘Read It Later’ apps as most of the content I consume comes from RSS feeds. However I’ve found ‘Read It Later’ behaviour to be the perfect use-case for Obsidian Web Clipper, a powerful first-party extension for Safari - more so than Safari’s own ‘Reading List’ functionality.
It enables you to save pages (or parts of pages) directly to Markdown-formatted notes in your Obsidian vault, alongside lots of useful metadata. Since it is just another note, it is synced across all my devices and available offline. It also saves a snapshot of the web page, so if it is updated I still have the original content. I’m excited to try this for the next couple of months to see how it improves my content consumption.
]]>A couple of weeks ago I came across Slash Pages by Robb Knight and I knew right away that it was the starting point I was looking for.
Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like
/now,/about, or/uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.
I already have a very brief /about page, and have a reasonably outdated /now, but now I ideas for what else to write about. I intend to treat this area of the site more like a digital garden that I can tend to and grow over time. I have added a /slashes index page to pull it all together and have grabbed some of my notes from Obsidian to set up a few new pages.
This process is entirely for me - the fact that this site is on the public web doesn’t automatically mean that anyone is going to read it. I don’t have analytics of any kind and I really don’t care if anyone reads this stuff, but I’m looking forward using this as an exercise to consider how I think about various things.
]]>When writing PHP I work in the Laravel framework almost exclusively. As a VS Code user (as opposed to PhpStorm) I don't have the luxury of being able to use the Laravel Idea plugin, which is pretty-much the gold-standard in creating a Laravel-specific development environment.
Instead I rely on a handful of extensions to make VS Code more PHP-aware, but it still leaves a lot of room for improvement.
The first-party Laravel extension is something that I have been eagerly awaiting, and even though it is still in beta I have already installed it on both my personal and work machines.
Check out the non-exhaustive list of features on the extensions marketplace page - Merry Christmas to me!
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