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alanbuxton.bsky.social
Serial CTO etc in tech startups. Based in London. Also sometime classical guitar player. Working on an open(ish) data side project https://syracuse.1145.am
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More isn't always better, part 9 billion

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Cribbed from LinkedIn.

submitted 10 days ago • 19 comments

I wrote a long and slightly rambling post about the hot new way to code that all the cool kids are doing. 2point0.ai/posts/vibe-c... #ai #coding #vibe-coding

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Did my first successful headstand today. Still got some work to do before I can catch up with my 6 year old daughter. But we all need to start somewhere.

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

Fascinating Hacker News comment from Tom Gally, a professional translator (Japanese to English) who uses LLMs as part of his workflow, which he describes in detail: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4289... Wrote a bit more about this on my blog here: simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/2/w...

submitted 26 days ago • 8 comments

THE COMING AI CONTRADICTION In today's Odd Lots newsletter, I wrote about the gulf between how traders are thinking about AI vs. how Silicon Valley is. At some point, this is going to have to break

submitted 29 days ago • 33 comments

I build software products. I spend a lot of time in hotels. Here are some learnings about UX that I've taken from hotel elevators. They aren't about software UIs which makes them super helpful analogies when talking about general user experience.

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

That's one way to game your NPS

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote, a bit tongue-in-cheek (but not much) that the UK's tax regime is encouraging second-time tech entrepreneurs to move to Dubai. I picked Dubai more or less at random based on 2 people I'm aware of who moved there.

submitted 47 days ago • 1 comment

I fixed an "off by one" error in one of my codebases. It had been in there for best part of 3 years and been executed a few million times without it manifesting. Just shows how long some bugs can sit around below the surface.

submitted 49 days ago • 0 comments

Lesson in importance of testing your backups. I have two similar databases, both being backed up the same way. Or so I thought. I'd tested one a lot and it worked fine, so I assumed the other would work too. It didn't.

submitted 55 days ago • 1 comment

The trees behind me trying their best to protect the frost from the oncoming sun.

submitted 56 days ago • 0 comments

got into a huge fight with the wife but she apologized by buying me a cybertruck and a brand new life insurance policy

submitted 57 days ago • 111 comments

A year ago I blogged about the AI slop increase in bug and security reporting: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/ It has only gotten worse since then, but I wouldn't call it a serious problem just yet. The trajectory does not look good though.

submitted 57 days ago • 1 comment

My open-ish data project is mainly used by bots and scrapers. I want to keep things as open as poss so here are my latest commits to put pages behind a login but to make the login shared. github.com/alanbuxton/s... And then github.com/alanbuxton/s...

submitted 61 days ago • 1 comment

So... after clicking around I found my big refactor broke some pages. Those pages weren't being tested. Good opportunity to write some tests for them :) github.com/alanbuxton/s...

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

So today I committed a big refactoring in my side project. It highlighted 3 big things: 1. Something that seems like a relatively small refactoring can turn out enormous 2. Thank goodness for decent test coverage (see 1) 3. I've now got ChatGPT writing useful code. github.com/alanbuxton/s...

submitted 66 days ago • 0 comments

variable names *are* code comments

submitted 68 days ago • 147 comments

Definitely.

submitted 70 days ago • 122 comments

It's that time of year where I post this one

submitted 71 days ago • 170 comments

To everyone out there who needs help figuring out their 2025 objectives I give you a tried a tested process: Ancient Persian Decision-Making. According to Herodotus (writing around 425 BC):

submitted 71 days ago • 1 comment

I had my first success with ChatGPT writing a good piece of code for me. In the past I've given it tricky problems which it struggled with, or relatively simple things but in a language I'm not so up to date on (e.g. Bash scripts). But today it did a neat python function for me. Very impressed.

submitted 78 days ago • 1 comment

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy, in academia In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

submitted 79 days ago • 2 comments