I read Simon Willison’s blog religeously , and occasionally he references a post he wrote way back in the dark ages of 2005. Every time he does I think what a shame it is that I lost a lot of the content I’ve posted over the years by intermittently switching the platform and domain I publish on. I’ve various published on:

• http://danny.is (since about 2013)
• http://dasmith.co.uk
• http://blog.dasmith.co.uk
• http://notes.dasmith.co.uk
• http://thescri.be

In July I stumbled on a GitHub repo which had some of my old posts from dasmith.co.uk, and ported them over to this site.

Today I spent a little bit of time looking on the Wayback Machine to see if I could find and move over some of my much older writing - particularly the stuff I published on my first blog (thescri.be) circa 2005-07. I asked Claude Code to:

Okay, so I Just remembered that many years ago I used to have a blog on http://thescri.be And some of those posts are archived on the Wayback Machine. The latest snapshot I can find is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080521124353/http://thescri.be/

I would like you to go through the posts on there and download their content into a series of markdown files. I think that eventually I will want to make all of these Notes in this site, But for now I just want to get down the content, ensure that the links are correct. Ensure that the dates and titles and everything are correct. And also wherever possible get any images which have been backed up. Um before actually trying to get all of these, you should come up with a plan for how you're going to get them. Ultrathink And do a little bit of exploring and research to work out the best way of doing this.

It came up with a plan which involced using the chrome-devtools MCP to spin up a browser and navigate the internet archive to find as many posts as it could from various snapshots. It did a really good job of finding posts which only appeared in one snapshot, which it turned out was quite a lot of them (all in different snapshots). It then extracted their contents and downloaded any archived images and created some markdown files with YAML frontmatter for them. I then asked it to:

Okay, now what I'd like you to do is go through these posts and do the following:

1. Turn them into MDX files which import <Callout> from '@components/mdx'
2. Update the frontmatter so that it matches the correct format for my notes content collection. Turn the categories into tags and discard the originalURL.
3. Fix up any markdown formatting issues.
4. Add a <Callout> at the top of each saying "This was originally posted on [thescri.be](originalURL) on <date in human readable format> and was imported here from the [Internet Archive](archiveUrl) on 18 December 2025"
5. Move the files into `src/notes`
6. Move any images to `src/assets/notes` and rename in the form "xxxx-xx-xx-current-file-name.ext" where xxx-xx-xx is the date the post was made. Update the image links in the posts.
7. Ensure internal links use the correct Astro URLs (eg: [link](/notes/<slug>)). If the internal links point at posts which we haven't been able to retrieve, leave the original thescri.be URLs.

So in two prompts (three if you include yes do it after it did the planning) I ended up with a load of my super old writing as notes in this site! I’ll do something similar for the other old domains I have soon!

Tauri Template is a batteries-included template for building production-ready desktop applications with Tauri, React and TypeScript. It’s designed with opinionated patterns that help both humans and AI coding agents build well-architected apps. The first version of it was extracted from Astro Editor in the summer, and yesterday I shipped some fairly major updates to it…

• Added cross-platform support including path normalisation, OS-detection utilities, sensible title bars and updated GitHub actions for building releases for all platforms.
• Added tauri-specta for typesafe Tauri commands.
• Switched to React Compiler.
• Added static analysis tools: knip , jspcd and ast-grep .
• Added a quick entry pane which is a floating window that can appear anywhere. This is triggered by a global shortcut which can be changed in the preferences. On macOS it’s converted to an NSPane so it works over fullscreen apps, and there is an event bridge pattern which allows for this kind of pane to send data to the main window. The idea here is to provide a working example of how global spotlight-esque things should work.
• Added a bunch of other common Tauri plugins which are likely to be needed in most apps.
• Added internationalisation, including support for RTL languages.
• Tweaked the shadcn theme and cleaned up the Tailwind and CSS a bit.
• Refactored the monolithic lib.rs into multiple files.
• Refactored the React components slightly.
• Fixed a whole slew of bugs, potential edge cases and performance issues and generally made the code more defensive.
• Completely overhauled the developer documentation.
• Simplified the Claude Code Commands and Agents and updated the AI Agent files.
• Plus a load of other little things which I can’t remember.

If you’re looking to start a new Tauri project, it’s a good place to start. Give it a try .

This is an interesting read.

27% of Claude-assisted work consists of tasks that wouldn’t have been done otherwise

This is one of the huge advantages of LLMs for me.

Most employees use Claude frequently while reporting they can “fully delegate” 0-20% of their work to it. Claude is a constant collaborator but using it generally involves active supervision and validation, especially in high-stakes work—versus handing off tasks requiring no verification at all.

This is also good to see in a report from an AI company like Anthropic. Far too many folks are hailing Agentic AI as a death knell for engineers. But this chimes with my experience, and if Anthropic themselves are still working like this I think we can safely say “nope” to that one.

The full article is worth a read.

A lot in this article chimes true to me. The Enshitification is everywhere. (Discovered via Jim’s notes)

But this is by far the scariest thing…

Here’s the most devastating long-term consequence: we’re eliminating the junior developer pipeline.

Companies are replacing junior positions with AI tools, but senior developers don’t emerge from thin air. They grow from juniors who:

Debug production crashes at 2 AM

Learn why that “clever” optimization breaks everything

Understand system architecture by building it wrong first

Develop intuition through thousands of small failures

Without juniors gaining real experience, where will the next generation of senior engineers come from? AI can’t learn from its mistakes—it doesn’t understand why something failed. It just pattern-matches from training data.

We’re creating a lost generation of developers who can prompt but can’t debug, who can generate but can’t architect, who can ship but can’t maintain.

The math is simple: No juniors today = No seniors tomorrow = No one to fix what AI breaks.

Thoughtful guidance on using LLMs at work. Feel like I’m gonna borrow heavily from this next time I have to write a policy on this.