Fri 28 August 2026 | -- (permalink)

First update in over 10 years.

I wanted to revive this because I have some projects that I'm going to share and I wanted to put them up here.

I also wanted to start putting out some thoughts about software engineering.

I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of the hype around LLM-based improvements. Most of my thoughts around that wil be pretty negative. I think that the investments in the big AI companies (OpenAI and Anthropic) are completely unsustainable, that a lot of the productivity claims are overstated, and that there are real harms in pushing this particular tool as a solution for a lot of problems that it doesn't solve very well.

But ...

Before I do that I'll post a few positive thoughts. The first is that I don't think I would have revived this blog without Copilot. During a computer migration I lost the folder I used to build this site, both the raw .md content and my checkout of the static site generator.

And the prospect of rebuilding everything when I couldn't even remember what tool I was using (turns out it was Pelican) kept me from tackling the project for years.

So yesterday I downloaded the generated files from S3, asked Copilot if it could figure out what software I was using, and had it recreate the content .md files from the generated versions.

I was back up and running in just a few hours. Now, this is all pretty basic (everything here is default Pelican, with a simple theme). But I would guess it would have taken 5x as long to get everything back, if I needed to do everything without a tool like copilot. So that's a real advantage, and I'm genuinely glad this tool exists for this kind of work.