Reading through the article I wasn't sold on the argument until I came to third example:

Many traditional productivity tools require you to manually construct task lists, drag items across Kanban boards, and assign micro-deadlines. Goblin.tools is a free, single-page suite of single-task AI tools designed specifically for neurodivergent users or anyone feeling overwhelmed, requiring zero sign-ups or configuration.

Many interfaces can be too overwhelming, particularly for neurodivergent folk, so it's important to consider different paradigms for interaction.

I remember the days of HTML 3.2 but I do not miss them. These days I am more impressed with all the things that can be achieved with just HTML and CSS.

This could be done on the device, for example the Android app ObscuraCam has automatic face detection.

This is true not just for AI, but also adding more engineers to a project that isn't going well. No matter how many resources you throw at it, it will continue to be slowed down by the underlying problems with the team or company culture.

Based on my tests, it works with Safari though not in Firefox.

You can't style the sources differently, but you can with img tags.

Could you achieve the same thing with media queries?

Also the picture element is less than ten years old.

According to caniuse, since March 2016 it works across the latest devices and major browser versions. So it depends if you have users with very old browsers or devices.

Good question, though wouldn't that be a feature of the browser? It wouldn't be a good user experience asking people to manually enter coordinates.

Today I stumbled upon Don't paste the AI:

When someone asks you something, they want your answer. Not a wall of ChatGPT text. A short answer from a human will always be worth more than one from a robot, even if the robot is right.

Exactly this! If I am talking to someone who has expertise in an area, I want to know what they think, not what an LLM outputted.

This sums up my current bugbear with people using Claude, as its output is too verbose. I don't mind the use of agentic tools, though I want a concise explanation written by a human.

But where it starts to get dicey is when you have both jargon and long text explanations being generated by machines, for people at different levels of understanding. “Bumped dependencies” is good. Everyone knows we are updating packages. “Performed a scheduled dependency refresh as part of ongoing maintenance practices. Minor and patch-level version bumps were applied across the dependency graph, including transitive dependencies where applicable” is bad.

My takeaway from the article was, in the author's own words, "start with debt in code you’re about to change anyway". That's not to say you shouldn't tackle technical debt in code that isn't changing, rather it's lower priority.

The cost of a piece of debt is its messiness multiplied by how often you go near it. A horrible module that hasn’t changed since 2023 costs almost nothing today. You’re not reading it or extending it. Refactoring it is paying down a loan that isn’t accruing interest. Meanwhile the mediocre little helper that 40 features lean on, the one edited every other week, is quietly the most expensive code you own. It’s usually not on anyone’s list because it doesn’t look scary.

I had not thought about tech debt in this way before. It makes perfect sense to focus on paying off the tech debt where you spend the majority of your time working, and hence accruing interest on.