Oscar, an open-source contributor agent architecture - Oscar is a project from the Go community that aims to develop AI agents that assist open source maintainers. I think this is a great idea. Open source is a load-bearing pillar in our modern digital infrastructure and maintainers need help. If AI agents were able to reduce the maintenance burden, it could reduce burnout, improve project longevity, and encourage new development. Excited to see where this goes. Move on to ESM-only - A proper update on JavaScript’s move-to-ESM fiasco. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that tools like Vite are helping push the community migration forward. One clear takeaway is that new packages should publish in ESM-only (no dual-publishing of ESM + CommonJS). Last week, I ended up republishing Checkboxland as ESM-only, in large part due to the influence of this post. My keyboard ergonomics journey as an engineer - A nice write-up on keyboard ergonomics from my former co-worker Grant. This post inspired me to experiment with keyboards, and I’ve been using a split keyboard for the past two months now. Thanks Grant! You Must Read at Least One Book To Ride - The basic message here is that there’s an astounding amount of mediocrity in our industry (all industries, really), and all it takes is reading one book in a relevant topic for your work to make you stand out. Compelling, if true! Radiant - A technical deep dive into a startup that is working to replace diesel generators with portable nuclear reactors the size of a shipping container. As I read, I found myself carried away by the narrative and detailed explanations of the problem space and potential solutions. The article comes from tech investor Packy McCormick’s Substack blog, which explains the techno-optimism. Honestly, I’m here for it. He’s writing about people pushing the frontiers in fields that actually matter like energy, transportation, and biomedicine. These are things that will help people live healthier lives with fewer costs and more personal freedoms. Good reading, if you need that shot of optimism from time to time. Nobody Cares - A proper rant/observation about how so many things in the world could be better if people cared more. It got me thinking about the times when I did my best work and the other times when I didn’t. My working theory is that it’s not that people don’t care… it’s more that they don’t care about the same things. The streetlight installer in his post cares more about driver experience than pedestrian experience. The bureaucrat cares more about getting home by 5 to make dinner for their sick spouse, than working late to push for alternative bike ramp designs. What makes Japan “nice” isn’t that they care more… it’s that they care about the same things more. Seems plausible, right? Precocious Young People Should Do Deep Technical Training - “Science and technology drive the modern world. If you understand how they work, you can become a much more active participant in the world, instead of being at the mercy of what is effectively magic.” Of all the things I learned in the years I spent studying mechanical engineering, the most important was that I can understand anything… it’s just a matter of desire and time. I don’t know if that realization ever comes unless you’ve battled your way to an understanding of at least a couple highly technical subjects. The Colors Of Her Coat - This post left me awestruck. Through a series of stories, Scott Alexander makes a case that the long march of human advancement is methodically removing our opportunities to experience wonder. Modern humans no longer feel ecstasy when they drink a spiced beverage, hear an opera singer, or see an AI-generated portrait, because these wonders are no longer scarce and scarcity is what gives things value. So what happens when we finally arrive at our post-scarcity utopia (whether that be via earthly technology or spiritual afterlife)? Are we in heaven or hell? It’s a fascinating discussion, full of examples, poetry, and religious symbolism. LightNote - Interactive music theory lessons in the browser. Try the free sample… it’s pretty fun. I’m kinda jealous that I didn’t build this.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead Effective technology takes our most time-consuming tasks and moves them into the background so we can focus on other important things. We can see this happening on the civilization level with the infrastructure we’ve built to get inexpensive food, water, energy, and transportation. But it also works on the personal level. Whether it’s a high-quality dishwasher or well-designed personal-finance software, technology is our primary tool for saving time and redirecting our attention. But not all technology is successful at this. The power of technology is abstraction and a poor abstraction is worse than having no technology at all. Case in point: a smart light-bulb that never saves you enough time to recover the time you spent setting it up. Simon Sarris has a great post describing some of these issues: “Many modern devices (and apps) really excel at squishing tradeoffs into weird shapes. They are better thought of as little imps that sneak into homes and ask for more and more of your attention. They want to gently claw at your eyes and ears. They want to put notifications on your phone and remind you that you need to interact with them, or buy more of them, so that they might become even more convenient.” Simon Sarris, Careful Technology Much of our technology has small hidden costs. A new app on your phone, an audible hum in the background, a recommended cleaning every six months, recurring manual software updates, monthly emails in your inbox, increased risk of a breaker trip, reduced counter-top space, parts that need replaced, a small monthly fee, a new username and password, batteries to recharge, parts to recycle, etc, etc. Each cost seems small but with enough bad technology you face death by a thousand cuts. You lose time, peace, and other more difficult-to-quantify things, like “the cozier feeling of home.” We have to be discerning about the technologies we let into our lives. I’m tired of technology that trades one set of problems for another. I want that technology you don’t have to think about.

A few weeks ago, I was building a server-side API client. I had written the code and tested it in isolation. Everything looked good. Unfortunately, when I included it in the main service, I started seeing errors. I decided to try asking an AI tool for suggestions. I gave it the error message and a bunch of context. It gave me a solution with a detailed explanation. The errors went away. But the solution didn’t sit right with me. It was a bit complex, introducing more layers of code and various protections. The errors were gone, but I couldn’t clearly explain why it worked, and that was bothering me. While the code was being reviewed, I decided to take another look. I brought back the error and spent some time digging into the stack trace. That’s when I made the discovery: it was an environment issue. All I needed to do was set an environment variable and the issue would be fixed. The AI-provided code had been masking the real issue, quietly suppressing the error, and hiding the truth in its complexity. Now this is the part of the post where I’m supposed to criticize AI programming tools. I won’t be doing that. This isn’t an AI problem. I remember the first time I tried to fix a memory leak. Certain iPhone users would load the webpage, interact for a while, and then randomly the webpage would crash. We struggled to diagnose the issue (Safari’s devtools weren’t great at the time). We thought we fixed it several times but the issue kept coming back. Why? Because we didn’t understand the problem. We kept digging and eventually we found it: one of our dependencies was storing massive amounts of data on the window object and it wasn’t getting cleaned up. We added a cleanup step and the problem was gone for good. Since then, I’ve adopted a mantra: you can’t fix a problem you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter if the “fix” comes from AI, Stack Overflow, or trial-and-error. If I don’t understand the problem, I feel unsettled until I do.

Here are some things I made in 2024: Music Box Fun: Advanced Editing (a new major feature): Adds multiple-note selection for bulk operations on notes (like deletion, copy/paste, nudging and dragging) Also includes a “space editor” for arbitrarily adding/removing space anywhere in the song Includes other niceties like note highligting during playback and pitch highlight on hover Music Box Fun songs I made: Elliott’s Theme (Stardew Valley) in 15-note and 30-note versions Bluey Theme Song Jupiter Theme (The Planets) 11 new projects added to Let’s Get Creative, now available at a new domain name: https://letsgetcreative.today The Firefly Building in Minecraft (if you know, you know) 13 blog posts on bryanbraun.com, including a companion repo to my post on unusual Git IDs. I’m happy with this list. It was a year of many challenges. In February we got hit by a flooded basement and an emergency hospitalization which left my wife with limited mobility for a month. It was a difficult time and I’ll be forever grateful for the family and friends who helped us get through it. It was also a year of growth for my kids in particular, bringing many new parenting challenges. At the same time, I have so much to be grateful for. My wife and I hit our fifteenth anniversary and our relationship has grown stronger despite (or perhaps because of) the storms we’ve weathered. Every year brings new opportunities and challenges and it’s a privilege to have a committed partner that I can face them with. 🚵🏻‍♀️🚵🏻‍♂️ I wish you all the very best in 2025.