Weeknotes 225

The car seems to have developed “a noise” since going to garage. Good times. Never try.

My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Writing a terminal emulator from scratch has got to be up there in terms of both large and complex. Impressive.

Such is the progress of the LLM landscape, that as soon as I’d finished reading How I’m using coding agents in September, 2025 I moved straight onto Superpowers: How I’m using coding agents in October 2025 and it had progressed even more.

I find that AI models are especially prone to handing me walls of text when they think they’re “done”.

Me too. I really need to work on prompting Claude to behave as I want. I find the walls of text pretty overwhelming a lot of the time.

Some interesting tips in these two articles. I feel that I am at the “ask questions and hope” stage of using LLMs.

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP 😩

Some Christmas activity this week. Trips planned. Lists made.

I am part of the problem.

Here follows some old codger statements: 1) Blimey, Christmas stuff in the shops already, it should be banned! 2) Seems like we only just had Christmas, doesn’t it come around quickly?!

“Codger” – great word. Pleased with that.

Understanding why people underestimate software complexity – Some good examples of complexity in software.

Introducing ZFS AnyRaid – this sounds awesome if it comes to fruition. File system advancements don’t feel like the sort of thing you can rush, nor should you. The TLDR is that you will be able to mix and match different sized disks when this is implemented.

DSLRKIT DC 5V 2.4A Active PoE Splitter Power Over Ethernet 802.3af 5.5x2.1mm – I saw this mentioned on Reddit and I can see myself using one of these soon-ish. It allows you to make devices that require a 5V DC plug PoE-capable. The use-case for me being a Philips Hue Bridge.

In order to try and stay on the straight and narrow weight-wise, and to make dinner times easier during Winter, I made an unholy amount of Bolognaise on Saturday. So much Bolognaise in fact that we had issues fitting it in the freezer 🥶 – bye, bye, sausages from 2023 👋

This is me adding a little bit of cheese. Just a smidge.

CrankBoy

A full-speed Game Boy emulator for Playdate

What some people come up with. Superb.

An unusually full weekend, sometimes it goes like that. On Friday night we travelled over to Hull to see Nick Helm; always worth it. Then on Saturday, over to Sheffield to see a concert of the music of the Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones etc. We were sandwiched in between two groups of cretins in Sheffield, such is life.

Next week we are seeing The Divine Comedy, and then have friends visiting at the weekend. Busy!