Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

I’ve talked about imagemaps before, but the essence of them is that you define areas of an image that, when clicked, hyperlink to different places. The most-common way of doing these was always client-side imagemaps, where the HTML code itself contained all of the coordinates and, crucially, the resulting destinations. But that’s not what kind of imagemap this is.

But last weekend, while I was running my monthly ‘Storm King’s Thunder’ D&D campaign, I asked one of the group to help me get the dryer down from the shelf. Immediately the group set to work removing the back panel and trying to figure out what was wrong with it, while still playing D&D.

With respect to memory, while I can’t remember everything I used to be able to, I can understand things again very quickly with appropriate, er, prompting. AI is very good at helping me with this, and it lets me switch between open source projects and work projects much more efficiently than if I didn’t have it. With respect to the long hours, AI is able to grind in a way that, even as a young developer, I would have had a difficult time keeping up with. This means, for example, I can have a much more extensive test suite for my projects than I would have otherwise. Looking at the tests that Claude generated in this case, they are more extensive than what I probably could have mustered the energy to do myself. So AI has addressed two fundamental (relative) weaknesses I have developed as an older developer.

AI is the continuation of the computer revolution. I love computers so much.

The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not just tenants. To plant things in soil we control, and to tend them. Because if we don’t, the only record that we were here will be someone else’s ad inventory, and when the ads move on, we’ll move with them—into the quiet, unmarked graveyard of the deleted.

"...mind you, no one's ever paid me for my manners either."

The surest way to ruin an engineering team is to believe it will survive whatever you do to it.

There is a never-before-seen glut of experienced, highly senior talent just lying around right now, like cuts of meat someone threw out of the fridge to rot on the floor of the restaurant. Game dev teams don't get birthed as fully-formed agglomerations of talent... it takes years for them to come together as effective creative communities and start making material they can be proud of. So we're looking at an industry that's not only hemorrhaging talent, but also hemorrhaging the interpersonal trust and momentum you need to make good games.

Every year I dread coming back from vacation not because of the work, but because I have no idea where I left off. A failing test, a well-written TODO, and a slow first day back are all you need to ease back in.

Man, Valve really does win by doing absolutely nothing while the rest of the industry shoots itself in the head. I fear for what happens when Gabe Newell retires and the MBA cancer fully infects Valve.