Nolan Lawson

  1. You had a story

    You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life. You’d share the story with others. Maybe you’d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you’d say, “I’m a programmer.” And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of […]

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  2. Days of miracle and wonder

    Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common, which is that our favorite album is Paul Simon’s Graceland. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening track, “The Boy in the Bubble”. The song can be read a few different ways, but I read it as an aging man amazed by modernity but also […]

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  3. We mourn our craft

    I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it. I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that […]

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  4. 15 years of blogging

    My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.) This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first …

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  5. Building a browser API in one shot

    TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of tests. When I learned that two simple browser engines had been vibe-coded, I was not particularly surprised…

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  6. AI tribalism

    “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” – ClickHole “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes, paraphrased 2025 was a weird year for me. If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were […]

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  7. 2025 book review

    My reading appetite has been weak again this year, which I blame on two things: 1) Slay the Spire being way too good of a video game, and 2) starting a new job, and thus having more of my mental energy focused on that. But I did manage to read some stuff! So without further […]

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  8. An experiment in vibe coding

    For the holidays, I gave myself a little experiment: build a small web app for my wife to manage her travel itineraries. I challenged myself to avoid editing the code myself and just do it “vibe” style, to see how far I could get. In the end, the app was built with a $20 Claude […]

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  9. How I use AI agents to write code

    Yes, this is the umpteenth article about AI and coding that you’ve seen this year. Welcome to 2025. Some people really find LLMs distasteful, and if that’s you, then I would recommend that you skip this post. I’ve heard all the arguments, and I’m not convinced anymore. I used to be a fairly hard-line…

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  10. The element should actually do something

    A common UI pattern is something like this: People do lots of stuff with that “4 hours ago.” They might make it a permalink: Or they might give it a tooltip to show the exact datetime upon hover/focus: Note: I’m assuming some Tooltip component written in your favorite framework, e.g. React, Svelte, Vue…

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