Jim, per usual, resonating on a good frequency.

thx for tuning in Dave!

📝 Story about a family vacation when I was a teen and our car kept overheating and nobody could fix it without hooking it up to a computer.

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/hook-it...

Just talking to myself here. Nothing to see. Move along.

Not how one becomes an influencer tho lol

This is how we leave our mark that we are human — imperfections

Don’t mind that giant knife stab wound in the middle where I was checking doneness. I didn’t have a toothpick

First time trying to make peanut butter brownies from scratch #mundanepost

vibrant orange sand dunes and layered sandstone rock formations in the desert, with a white truck dwarfed by the landscape in the middle distance and flat-topped mesas stretching across the horizon under a blue sky

lone figure stands atop an orange sand dune, framed by a narrow gap between two weathered red sandstone rock formations, with blue sky above

More time with sand, but not the silica kind.

I’ve witnessed more outages in the last 6 months than in my entire career before that combined. I wonder what changed 🫠

...on the other side

Safari browser icon followed by the heading "Implementing in Safari". Below are 3 content warning ratings listed with colored indicators: a red bar for "Profanity: Severe", a yellow bar for "Frightening & Intense Scenes: Moderate", and a green bar for "Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking: Mild"

Parental Guide

lol the best surgeons are the ones who makes lots of incisions — not one, tidy, small incision

Reverend Dave is preaching and I am here for it!

I 👏 want 👏 your 👏 thoughts 👏 not 👏 Claude's

I don’t want a screenshot of your Claude conversation The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.

📝 The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life...

daverupert.com/2026/04/clau...

📝 We're all moving so fast, we're outrunning wisdom.

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/speed-n...

yeah agree, watching/talking to actual users describe their problems and then devising a solution for them is a totally different kind of working than having chunks of work handed down which you debate internally apart from any users

swing the hammer, don't look at where it lands

just stand in awe that the hammer swings itself

> Jim’s problem is that he’s reviewing the output. Bro, you’re not supposed to look!

lol I'm not gonna lie, that's been in the back of my head too. "You're paying too much attention to the details, bro. Just blur your eyes and it all becomes clear"

Sticking ads in your tool’s CLI is a terrible idea. No exceptions. You can't convince me otherwise.

[bundler]
✔ Compiled 47 modules in 2.1s
✔ Tree-shaking complete — saved 34kb
✔ Done in 2.4s

Tip: Ship faster with Bundler Pro — parallel builds, edge caching, and instant rollbacks. example.com/bpro

> LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage.

A good one for ur next job interview:

“What’s your best attribute?”

“I’m lazy”

📝 I had more to say and it spilled over into a blog post.

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/skill-i...

Photograph of a bowl with frog eye salad in it

Sunday afternoon treat. We call it acini de pepe (“a-cheen-ay day pee-pee” our pronunciation) but it’s probably better known as frog eye salad. #mundanepost

Next time I’m at the quarter arcade with my kids and nobody can win a plush teddy bear from the claw machine, I’m just gonna proclaim “skill issue”

lol skill issue on a non-deterministic system is a good point

It's interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects.

Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on _us_, the people who made this"

📝 I fixed a problem of my own making.

I went to local builds/deploys for my notes site. So far I'm digging it. Might do it with more of my sites.

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/fewer-c...

Can't be slow and janky if you're nothing!

honestly, I don't know. I think the first thing I need to figure out is what I actually want to do ha

I know I don't need to, but I want to quote/reference that post now anytime I mundanepost

just as a cop out, like "nate said I could. take it up with him if you don't like it."