Donnie Adams

I constantly struggle with using the tools I want to use (open source mostly, e.g. Thunderbird) and the tools that work best (Apple Mail). This extends to my developer tools, but most of them are now open source (Fresh, Zed, Ghostty, Zellij).

I have completed my migration to terminal-first development. I use a terminal (Ghostty) with a multiplexer (Zellij) and all of my development activities, including reviewing PRs (thanks to tuicr), happens there. The GUI apps I use: Slack, Discord, Zoom, Firefox.

Today, for the first time in my professional development career, I did not open a GUI IDE.

If you use GPT 5.6 Sol Ultra for a task, you must ensure it has a well-defined stopping criteria. Learned the hard way that it will just keep iterating if it doesn’t.

I’m a professional software engineer and I use Apple’s Terminal.app as my daily-driver terminal emulator. I can’t be the only one (outside of Apple engineers).

I was informed that my open-source maintainer free access to GitHub Copilot was revoked. I’ve never been more excited to lose free access to something. It caused so many issues with my employer’s GitHub organization.

I miss the days of bug reports that are, “I do this and that happens, but I expect this other thing to happen. Here are the steps I follow to reproduce.” Now everything is fed to AI and you get a root cause analysis that may or may not be a wild goose chase.

I recently discovered a new use for LLMs. It helped me create a personal color scheme based on my preferences and generate theme configurations for all the tools I use. A clean, pleasing, and consistent experience for my whole computer experience.

Zed is dope. It’s been my daily-driver for over a year. I’m happy to be recognized as a Community Champion. zed.dev/blog/communi...

Every morning around 3:30AM, my son starts making noise. I take him downstairs, he sleeps on my chest, and I watch Netflix or read or work. It’s amazing how the time doesn’t matter.

I learned a valuable lesson today: when *it* hits the fan, clean the baby and then the fan.

I joined a co-ed softball league. Haven’t played baseball/softball in about 18 years. My shoulder and back are already sore after our first 1 hour practice.

I’m doing a much better job keeping up with my podcasts since my son was born.

Excited to be in New York City for the first time! And excited to present at the MCP Dev Summit.

First day back to work after 4 weeks of parental leave. Of course, last night was the worst night of sleep since we got home from the hospital.

I’ve gotten a lot more use out of AI chat bots since I became a parent.

New post on setting up a Codex environment for Gleam. It was a little more complicated than I expected. thedadams.com/blog/2026/03...

As a new parent, I run into cloud environment timeouts way more often, and I very much appreciate those that make such things configurable.

The more I use @gleam.run the more I like it. I know it's not pure, but the functional paradigm makes me think in different ways. Looking forward to building some great projects with it.

As an open-source maintainer, I don't understand the "Can you make this new thing more like this old thing?" mindset. If you like then old thing, why not use that?

I have recently rediscovered peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They will be my go-to snack for a while.

My favorite line from a Zed blog post I read recently: “Even long edit histories barely compare to the memory savings Zed obtains from not being built with Electron.”

I like GitHub a lot, but it blurs the lines with git so much that people never really learn how to use git. I see a number of commits with no body, and the PR description is full. If you fill out the commit body, then I don't have to go search for the PR to find a description of what you were doing

Yesterday I decided to give up on vim keybindings in all the places. I'm still getting a bunch of j's and k's in my code, but hopefully that goes away soon.