Jim Nielsen's Blog
Jim Nielsen's Blog
Jim Nielsen
Opinions with a shelf life. Made by Jim Nielsen.
Latest Posts
Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”: the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it...
I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions. Now I’m gonna post another example. On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the...
I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach: I like it. I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the...
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a...
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a...
In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”. I was a teenager and...
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it. Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence). Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience: An opinion...
I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the...
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer. I'm...
Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30: Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you...
Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS. I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader. To clarify: Reeder is my dream RSS app and it already exists, so I guess you could say my...
Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the...
Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to ourselves and other people based on these stages): the design phase, the coding phase,...
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s...
I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too. What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably don’t care...