Brett Codes

The case for coding by hand, even if it is slower: www.youtube.com/watch?v=t95-... There are more metrics and aspects to care about when writing code than speed alone. Plus coding by hand is fun! I ramble on a bit about why and cases where it's really important to do so

i recorded an over-the-shoulder video of me coding a zero-dependency static website and podcast feed generator in Ruby from scratch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy4... ruby is a great fit for these types of projects since it has robust templating, file utils, and YAML parsing built into the stdlib

the resulting project is a podcast feed for my rambling monologues, which i've titled The Brett Codes Show if anyone prefers listening via an independent source rather than YouTube: show.brettcodes.com

I wrote about why the Deno runtime was left to die, what led to those circumstances, and why Cloudflare and Ryan Dahl can and should do more to support the project in the long-term: brettcodes.com/the-disappoi... But my biggest takeaway: I'm done with VC-backed open source.

an unpublished blog post from august 2026 looks like my worries were well-founded given cloudflare acqui-hired the Deno company team and their work on the Deno runtime done except for 1 year of maintenance i feel like a sucker for having gone all in on VC-funded open source

i was until yesterday using the Deno Deploy host (but actually moved off it to save money); most of my personal scripts are written with TS + Deno; i like using Deno a lot and this news is a bummer. maybe some group of people and organizations will decide to maintain it moving forward...

rambling about The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, talking about the Humancrafted forum, and what else I'm reading www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Bf...

the first week of the humancrafted forum has been really awesome and positive, lots of thoughtful discussion. you can join it here! humancrafted.dev/forum

I wrote about my plan for the next 3 months, sharing some numbers about going indie and YouTube earnings, as well as what I'm going to focus on brettcodes.com/my-plan-for-...

i reflected on my failings as an engineering leader integrating AI into my team (before i quit it entirely); the result is beware: chronicling over 30 real risks from first-hand experience of using LLMs on a software team brettcodes.com/beware/

Beware the erosion of team culture and morale.

i reflected on my failings as an engineering leader integrating AI into my team (before i quit it entirely); the result is beware: chronicling over 30 real risks from first-hand experience of using LLMs on a software team brettcodes.com/beware/

Beware junior engineers being isolated by replacing collaborative human conversations with the chatbot. Onboarding and mentorship are as important as ever. Chatbots aren’t suitable substitutes.

i reflected on my failings as an engineering leader integrating AI into my team (before i quit it entirely); the result is beware: chronicling over 30 real risks from first-hand experience of using LLMs on a software team brettcodes.com/beware/

Beware LLM-generated writing that's used in human communication. It's always excessively verbose and typically useless. Nothing good comes from AI-generated internal communications.

i reflected on my failings as an engineering leader integrating AI into my team (before i quit it entirely); the result is beware: chronicling over 30 real risks from first-hand experience of using LLMs on a software team brettcodes.com/beware/

proud to announce i am officially a loser i suspected it was true but it has now been confirmed

at the end of the Rails World keynote speech yesterday, the creator of the Ruby on Rails web framework, DHH, said anyone who rejects AI is a loser lol - which is just a bizarre & cruel note to end a keynote on

one of my favorite things about coding is being able to make simple, bespoke software for my needs. most recently i made a little podcast episode downloading web app! podbud is simplistic and makes it easy for me to download podcast episodes with organized filenames that i can put on my mp3 player