New post: AI-Assisted Coding on a Budget

Not vibe coding. Reading every diff. Writing tests. Shipping faster anyway. Also: the economics of inference and who gets left out.

https://agingcoder.com/posts/ai-assisted-coding-on-a-budget/

#LLMs #SoftwareDevelopment #AIEngineering

AI coding agents are powerful, but they don’t magically remove the need for:
• code review
• tests
• discipline
• skepticism

My review of Vibe Coding reflects on where the book gets this right — and where it falls short, especially when moving beyond solo projects into production systems.

Read here: https://agingcoder.com/posts/book-review-vibe-coding/

#AICoding #SoftwareEngineering #VibeCoding #DevOps

New post: I revisited React Native in 2025 after 8 years.

I built an app with React Native and… it mostly just worked.

What’s improved, what still hurts, and when I’d now recommend RN for new apps:

https://agingcoder.com/posts/looking-at-react-native-in-2025/

#ReactNative #Expo #TypeScript #MobileDev

New blog post: RAG Time — Cooking Up Smart Recipe Suggestions with AI

Used a recipe database + embeddings + cosine similarity to build a FastAPI service that suggests recipes from your leftover ingredients.

A tasty intro to RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

Read here: https://agingcoder.com/posts/rag-time-cooking-up-smart-recipe-suggestions/

#AI #MachineLearning #RAG #LLM #Programming

Continuing my series on recipes + ML: last time was about clustering with unsupervised learning, this time it’s about serving those results in practice.

I show how to wrap embeddings + similarity search in a FastAPI endpoint, making recipe recommendations available as an API.

If you enjoyed the clustering post, this is the natural next step:
https://agingcoder.com/posts/2025-08-30-serving-the-cookbook-creating-an-endpoint-for-recipe-recommendations/

Continuing my machine-learning series—this time on unsupervised learning. The post walks through cleaning ingredients, building vectors, choosing K, clustering, and retrieving similar dishes.

https://agingcoder.com/posts/2025-08-25-clustering-the-cookbook-a-taste-of-unsupervised-learning/

#MachineLearning #UnsupervisedLearning #Python

Part 3 of my Supervised Learning series is LIVE!
How do you take a naive model and tune it into something nearly production-ready?
Find out in my latest deep dive with real scikit-learn code & tips:
🔗 https://agingcoder.com/posts/2025-06-23-experiments-in-supervised-learning-part-3/
#MachineLearning #scikitlearn #AI #Python

I've written a fairly technical blog (and have already published the first 2 of at least 4 parts) on Supervised Learning. You can read all about it, starting with https://agingcoder.com/posts/2025-06-13-experiments-in-supervised-learning/ and continuing in this article https://agingcoder.com/posts/2025-06-14-experiments-in-supervised-learning-part-2/

Blogged about my experience with various AI Coding Assistants (GitHub CoPilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Junie): https://agingcoder.com/posts/2025-05-28-llms-and-coding-6-months-later/

Punk is 50, but suddenly has a new best album. And it’s by a quartet of LA high school girls. This album is pure. From the first power chord—No Obligation by The Linda Lindas https://music.apple.com/us/album/no-obligation/1752949407

The notion that anyone would voluntarily read a Musk biography baffles me.

Friend: No this makes sense, it's a chain of dependencies. Every teams channel is a SharePoint folder

I think god is dead for sure

If you're still using Chrome for performance reasons:
- Firefox is now faster than Chrome out-of-the-box
- Firefox uses less memory than Chrome
- Contrary to Chrome, Firefox does not restrict Ad blockers, which will make your browsing experience much faster (and safer).

“We notice you are using an ad blocker…”

Yes, and I notice you are using a few dozen trackers. Turn off the trackers and I will look at your ads. Until then, we are at an impasse.

Man. What a loss. The ultimate Hacker. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/las-vegas-nv/kevin-mitnick-11371668

Journalistic organisations in Canada with official accounts on the #Fediverse :

* @winnipegfreepress
* @thetyee
* @Windspeaker
* @sprawlcalgary
* @livewirecalgary
* @pressprogress
* @thenarwhal
* TechNews @admin
* @HalifaxExaminer
* @thelocal
* @RueMorin
* @cabinradio
* @mtlgazette
* @NTVNewsNL
* @hakaimagazine
* @rewildingmag
* @NatObserver
* @TheBreach
* @theagendatvo
* @TVOntario
* @epicnews
* @chly1017fm
* @CKIAFM

I will update the list as I learn of other such accounts.

1/3

Apropos of nothing, I remember in the late 1990s every big tech co had is own proprietary email protocol. All were superior to SMTP. Point to point interoperability was fraught so everybody fell back to the poorly-featured standard for carriage among systems.

But customers valued being able to talk to everyone over any particular feature, and SMTP added some basic features.

And within five years all proprietary mail systems were dead. PROFS, HPMAIL, ALLIN1, CompuServe, MCI Mail. All dead.

Happy Enshittification Day! 💥

July 1, 2023: Reddit cuts off API access, Twitter requires login, Youtube may ban ad-blockers, Meta & Google block news in Canada...

A half-year since Cory Doctorow's seminal thesis on #enshittification, how corporate platforms die (https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys), and every corporate site seems hell bend on its own destruction.

Celebrate #EnshittificationDay by going to [instance address]/about, find the donations link, and make your contribution to open social media!

IT folks be like 👇😂

If you've never heard of Evi Nemeth, read up! Along with MANY amazing accomplishments, she was a founder of what we know as Unix system administration. It's a crime that her name isn't better known.

10 years ago, she and her fellow crewmates on a sail yacht disappeared in the Tasman Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_Nemeth