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brent bailey's personal weblog

@bront.rodeo0readers194posts2mo ago

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When Craft Matters

Late last year I experienced a period of existential terror about the rise of AI in programming. I did not want to be left behind, unprepared for a world where all code is written by LLMs and the role of a programmer shifts to something more like overseeing an assembly line. So I bit the bullet, plunked down $20 for a Claude Code subscription, and got to work vibecoding away at a few different projects. My initial work with Claude was pretty mindblowing. I was able to crank out in a day project

March Update/Links/Screenshots

I got diagnosed with ADHD this month. This will likely come as no surprise to anyone who knows me even a little bit - I've already been getting treated for it on and off for the last few years, and given my entire deal it's not a terribly shocking development. They had me fill out a survey about how often I forget things and how much my struggles with executive function cause me difficulty in my personal life ("Highly Agree" in both cases) and then do the Conners Continuous Performance Test, whe

Live Forever As A Time Worm

Or how I learned to stop worrying and hate Interstellar Originally given as a talk at MindSwap #4, 2/7/2026. Ever since I was young I have been obsessed with time's arrow. This is in large part because as soon as I became aware of the possibility of eternal death - around age 8, if I remember correctly - I have been consumed by both terror and the desire to outwit it. The strategies most commonly recommended to me are to "make peace with it" or "find god", but neither has proved particularly

January Update/Links/Screenshots

After averaging 9 posts a month last year, I have gotten off to a slow start this year. Mostly this is because, at least for right now, I have no daily project to write about. One of my takeaways from writing at such a frenetic pace last year was that it would be nice to actually take my time drafting and editing things. I have been doing this, but it's a bit of a monkey's paw: when I don't just immediately hit "publish" after writing something I often end up either deciding it was a bad idea or

personalscreenshot-dump

I have made several stabs at writing this post this week, none of which really felt like they stuck the landing. It is very hard to cleanly capture a year that contained both my marriage and my mom's death. Some days I have felt better than I have in years, some days like I will never see sunlight again. Focusing on one or the other side of it feels like an incomplete picture, but writing an essay about how sad I am that's also about how happy I am doesn't really mesh tonally. So: it's been a he

Lotus Farming In Another World

Like many people who live in cities and spend most of their time on the computer, I fantasize a lot about leaving it all behind and touching grass forever. I try my best to be cognizant of just how much of a fantasy this is: I find it easy to get bored in the biggest city in America, so I'd probably go insane within days of moving out to a farm somewhere. Boredom aside, there is a reason manual labor is something people often try to escape, and that the ability to do it in a leisurely fashion is

30 days of atproto: hope for an open future

It's a beautiful day here in New York. Zohran Mamdani was elected on a message of hope and change (and significantly more concrete change than the last time something similar happened). This is also the final day of my 30 days of atproto project, which works out thematically quite well. I have a lot of hope for atproto, and while there's a lot of work in front of us (just as there is for the mayor-elect), I am thrilled at the prospect of building something that felt impossible a few years ago, a

The (Absolute) State of the ATmosphere: 3. Stuff I'm Not Sure About

A shorter post today - it's election day in New York, so I've got other stuff on my mind. This is the stuff in the ATmosphere I'm either mixed on or haven't dived deep enough into to have a strong opinion about. Feeds One big selling point of Bluesky is being able to "choose your own algorithm". This is pretty well-trod ground for others, and apps like graze.social purport to make it easier. Clearly people are using this feature and finding workflows that work for them. But my own dive into it

The (Absolute) State of The ATmosphere: 2. The Bad

Though I'm overall optimistic about the direction of atproto, it's a young ecosystem and there are still jagged edges. As I mentioned yesterday, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about some of the stuff here, and am generally optimistic that it's being addressed, but I think these are worth noting as the big sticking points I ran into during my explorations. DIDs I was really excited to try hosting a did:web. Self-signing my own identity from a domain I control felt like the final s

The (Absolute) State of The ATmosphere: 1. The Good

I finally wrote up what I did over the last few weeks, so I figured I'd zoom out a bit and try and cover what I learned in the process and the ups and downs of working with atproto at the tail end of the year of our lord 2025. Where possible, I'll do my best to link to all the bookmarks I've made of tools or explainers by smarter people than me. I'm going to make this a three-parter focusing on what's good, what's bad, and what needs work. The importance of giving a compliment sandwich during f

~3 Weeks Of The ATmosphere

It's been a while! I went to the Brooklyn atproto meetup on Wednesday and met a lot of cool and interesting folks doing cool and interesting work - shoutout to the leaflet team, who inspired me to start crossposting my atproto work over there. This also reminded me that I should probably do a writeup of what I"ve been up to. After initially blogging every day's worth of work on my 30 days of protocol (which really has just turned out to be 30 days of atproto) I realized that the rules I set ou

Cat Lexicon Server Prototype

I'm short on time again - had a wedding ceremony to attend last night and a reception to attend today - so today's another 5-minute throwaway. I set up a quick server prototype that I can run some basic curl commands to and from and that validates my lexicon schema. This is all local for now and not attached to a PDS, so URIs are fake. lexicons.js: import express from 'express' import { TID } from '@atproto/common-web' import { lex } from './lexicons.js' const app = express() const PORT = 300