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Laurie Voss
I'm Laurie Voss. I've been a web developer since 1996, with occasional breaks to found companies like awe.sm (2010) and npm (2014). I like making websites, and I like making the web bigger and better. I think one of the best ways to do that is to encourage more people to do web development, by teaching them existing techniques and by building tools and services that make web development easier, so they don't have to learn so much.
July 2026
September 2026
All posts (10)
Just yesterday I published a very long post about the economics of open source. As part of that argument, I mentioned that the cost of writing software has collapsed, and that meant the variables in the equation had changed for the first time in thirty years. That led me off on a tangent that grew into this equally...
The first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with basically "nothing fucking works". And...
On July 16, Hugging Face reported they were being hacked - seriously enough that they reported it to law enforcement. Five days later, OpenAI disclosed that the hacking was being done by their own agent. What I want to know is: what happened to the law enforcement? OpenAI unleashed an agent that committed what would...
In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different. In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight. This post is the next check-in, and I have good news and...
I've been interviewing a lot of DevRels recently (I'm still hiring!) and part of the interview process is, naturally, telling them what the job actually entails. In DevRel that's a bit more important than other positions, because DevRel is such a flexible and multi-faceted role that it means very different things...
About a year ago I made some predictions about the effect of AI on programming jobs. Block laid off 40% of its staff claiming AI made them more efficient. Is that really true or did they just over-hire? Let's look at some data and see what's really happening. In February 2026, global venture capital hit a...
I've been writing quite a bit about AI the last few years. First, I talked about what LLMs are in the first place: really big Markov chains that have hit a threshold where they appear to be reasoning, to a level of fidelity that it makes no sense to argue about whether they are really "thinking" or not. Computers...
There's been a whole lot of discussion recently about the impact of AI on the market for web developers, for programmers in general, and even more generally the entire labor market. I find myself making the same points over and over, and whenever I do that it's time to write a blog post about it, so this is that....
I started writing a post called "how to write AI apps" but it was over-reach so I scaled it back to this. Who am I to tell you how to write anything? But here's what I'll be applying to my own writing of AI-powered apps, specifically LLM applications. A battle I've already lost is that we shouldn't call LLMs "AI" at...
I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can point people to when they ask "but what...
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