I got properly nerd sniped by @elonmusk a couple of days ago. I’d been mulling over where the AI code writing trend might be heading and procrastinating on a half-finished essay draft for a couple of weeks. Then Elon summarised it in a single sentence and I kicked myself. “Code itself will go away in favor of just making the binary directly.” Cue hoots of derision and wonder in equal measure. ...

The following piece was submitted to The Spectator, January 2026 The feeling of renewal that comes with New Year often dissipates as the return to work hoves into view. January blues set in. This time around, though, I’ve been unable to shake an ennui not brought on by middle age, my daughter heading back to university, or even signing into Teams. No, this malaise was brought on by using a specialist tool for programming provided by Anthropic (they of the ‘Claude’ series of large language models and an OpenAI competitor). Their ‘Claude Code’ software is like having an expert sat at your desk, hands on your keyboard. It can see your files, read your error messages, make changes, run them, see what breaks, fix it, and iterate - all without you playing messenger. It’s a key tool in what’s been dubbed ‘vibe coding’. You describe in English what you want to happen; it does it, in your actual environment, handling the how and showing you the result. Run several at once and you have a team of ‘agents’ - the term of art - each tackling a different problem. ...

I saw quite a lot of comment on this job advertisement on LinkedIn by Galen Hunt, who is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. 1 million lines? Surely not everyone said There was widespread derision on Twitter/X in response to this which I think is a bit unfair. Quite a lot of it seemed to be about the use of Rust (which seems to relate to some cultural issues I don’t care about in this context). Yet more of it was about the wisdom of replacing ‘battle hardened’ code with ‘AI generated slop’ which I thought was a bit of a basic take. Yes, we all know that history is full of disasters when it comes to upgrades, replacements and rewrites. Yes, we all know that it’s possible to generate bad code using these tools. This might well end up being scrapped for all kinds of reasons, but that’s Microsoft’s issue. ...

It used to be a given that every programmer would eventually end up writing their own compiler and language. I’m not quite there - yet - but I am at the point where I want to build my own peripherals - starting with a trackball. I’ve always liked them as an element of an interface. I think it harks back to those early 80s halcyon arcade days and playing Missile Command, Crystal Castles and Marble Madness. I liked the pinpoint accuracy you could get - or as pinpoint as a bit of hardware that was battered daily by hordes of kids could get. This was years before I ever even saw a mouse, let alone used one. ...

I’ve always had a problem of wanting to do to many things and having too many interests. Of course the advice and sensible thing to do is to realise what you can and can’t achieve and concentrate on one thing or a small number at most. Ideally you find your passion and go all in for a while. I’ve never been very good at doing that, to my detriment. I would overthink things, get put off by the steep initial investment doing something in say, a new language needs. Buy a book, decide which framework is the best etc. I’d end up bogged down and something new would come along. But that idea would remain, annoying me like grit in an oyster that was destined never to have its shot at becoming a pearl. ...