Jim Nielsen

  1. Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions

    I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach: I like it. I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the same, which I would describe as: Avoid in-page interactions that…

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  2. Collective Speed Is Not the Summation of Individual Speed

    I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a fast company My mind immediately went to the 4✕100 relay at the…

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  3. Hook It Up to the Machine

    In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”. I was a teenager and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the details of what was happening around…

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  4. Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom

    Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it. Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence). Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience: An opinion dismantled by reality. An artifact torn apart by the real world. An idea…

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  5. That’s a Skill Issue

    I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people who made this" This is top of mind because I’ve been working…

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  6. Fewer Computers, Fewer Problems: Going Local With Builds & Deployments

    Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer. I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because builds work on my machine…

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  7. Prototyping with LLMs

    Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30: Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who…

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  8. I Tried Vibing an RSS Reader and My Dreams Did Not Come True

    Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS. I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader. To clarify: Reeder is my dream RSS app and it already exists, so I guess you could say my dreams have already come true? But I’ve kind of always wanted to…

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  9. The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

    Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/​Register Later/​Register…

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  10. Continuous, Continuous, Continuous

    Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to ourselves and other people based on these stages): the design phase, the coding phase, the testing phase, the integration phase, the release phase, and…

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