Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. [2] This kind of project falls into the second bucket. Using AI coding assist to reify those projects is sort of a form of wish fulfillment. I never would have gotten to it, but now I can have the project. One less metaphorical book sitting unread on bookshelf.

he Gecko engine compiled to WebAssembly. The real Firefox interface, rendering entirely inside this browser tab.

🦊 Firefox in WebAssembly

This piece walks through that setup end to end. By the end you will know where your time is going, have a workflow that gives useful feedback on every PR, and know the point at which sharding actually becomes worth it.

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."