Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Claude Code is good. Very good. Good enough that you need discipline to use it well. With a tuned CLAUDE.md, clear test-driven goals like WPT conformance, and some tooling to reduce noise and cost, it becomes a powerful accelerator. Without that discipline, it is easy to overuse it and slowly burn budget on things you already know how to do. I do not think this replaces engineering skill. If anything, it amplifies both good and bad habits. The trick is to make sure it is amplifying the right ones.

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

If the part of programming you enjoy most is the physical act of writing code, then agents will feel beside the point. You’re already where you want to be, even just with some Copilot or Cursor-style intelligent code auto completion, which makes you faster while still leaving you fully in the driver’s seat about the code that gets written. But if the part you care about is the decision-making around the code, agents feel like they clear space. They take care of the mechanical expression and leave you with judgment, tradeoffs, and intent. Because truly, for someone at my experience level, that is my core value offering anyway. When I spend time actually typing code these days with my own fingers, it feels like a waste of my time. If that time is being billed to my client at my expensive hourly rate, I feel even worse about it.

The bottom line for me: AI coding assistants are incredible force multipliers, but the human engineer remains the director of the show.

I became a software engineer because writing code is fun. Thinking through hard problems, designing elegant solutions, seeing the things you’ve built working for the first time… these moments are all deeply satisfying, so why in the world would I ever surrender them to AI?

TL;DR Umami analytics (built with Next.js) had an RCE vulnerability. Got exploited, installed cryptominers Mined Monero for 10 days at 1000%+ CPU Container isolation saved me because it ran as non-root with no mounts Fix: docker rm umami and enable firewall Lesson: Know what your dependencies are built with, and configure containers properly

By the end of this post you will... Understand, at a deeper level, how LLMs work Have built some new intuition for why LLMs work the way they do Understand the exact 1s and 0s that get cached, and how they reduce the cost of your LLM requests

We needed a way to send data to our server without an internet connection. A team member came up with this fantastic idea of using DTMF tones!

These are all of my posts made on various platforms, automatically accumulated here for posterity.

Diabaig is a traditional turn-based ASCII roguelike where you are never more than a few mistakes away from death. Choose a starting class, find powerful items, and learn new spells and techniques to face increasingly dangerous adversity. You will discover many floors with rooms filled with unique creatures, magic scrolls, unknown potions and mighty weapons. Use everything at your disposal to survive as long as possible and defeat the dragon, but remember to keep enough spare for the return journey.