Jon Atkinson

At the point in the week when I start closing more tabs than opening them.

I have a draft post I'm working on about the fun, creative, expressive craft we used to have and how it's changed. I think as an industry we are mourning.

I wrote a little today about how I'm using #Claude: www.jonatkinson.co.uk/blog/how-i-u...

I vibed out a Mastodon to Bluesky transfer tool this weekend. I decided I don't have the time to maintain my Mastodon instance, so here we are. I wrote about it here: www.jonatkinson.co.uk/blog/mastodo...

I don't think enough people know about Trafilatura (trafilatura.readthedocs.io). It's such good software. If you ever need to extract text, from almost any source, Trafilatura will do it. I use it all the time to prepare content for LLMs and RAG, or just make things readable. SUCH good software.

Amusing.

Claude Code getting a plan/implement mode is sure saving me a lot of typing. I've probably typed the phrase "show me your plan, don't implement any changes until I approve the plan" a thousand times in the last few months.

Using 20GB of GPU VRAM to OCR and extract your ridiculous PDF format API docs into some readable Markdown. 2025.

Claude Code wastes so many tokens on figuring out what folder it's currently in. This happens regularly when it's prefixing commands with `cd whatever &&`. Is anyone else experiencing this, or is there some local quirk with my project layout?

[2/2] ...They are such a long way apart. Both took a 'long' time (30 minutes), but Jules produced a PR, documentation updates, and actually ran the tests. Codex couldn't figure out `uv run pytest` and just YOLO'd the PR up without testing.

This is because I am trying to factory-reset a Thinkpad, using the Lenovo recovery tools. Despite my ~25-year career in technology this task has taken me almost a full day at this point.

When you stumble across a manufacturer support forum and there's some random person with 115,000 posts. What motivates those people?

SaaS products that lock SSO behind their highest pricing tiers (or worse, "Contact Sales" forms)... stop that, please.

There's something so nice about hearing the CPU cooler spin up when running a large test suite.

I wrote something earlier about the recent bubbles, and AI. https://www.jonatkinson.co.uk/blog/four-bubbles

[2/2] ...Sure, you might not like AI for philosophical reasons, but demonstrating a lack of understanding of their use isn't a compelling argument. It's complaining about a screwdriver because it can't hammer in a nail.

I'm selling a Thinkpad but to factory restore the Windows installation I need to run the Lenovo recovery tool which only runs on Windows so I am installing Windows in a VM and figuring out how to bypass the TPM requirements and I am glad this is how I am spending my time.

I wrote a quick thing last night, after spending the last couple of weeks away from work (but very much thinking about work): https://www.jonatkinson.co.uk/blog/the-future-of-agencies

The <meta generator> tag in the age of AI.

[2/2] ...An ecosystem full of people making software, and all with a shared understanding of both simplicity and complexity, and the principle of least-surprise. #Plasma is such an incredible achievement in it's current form. I'm in awe. And it's a joy to use.

[2/2] ...https://www.theverge.com/news/633166/discord-mobile-video-ads-quests-ipo

I'll say one thing for vibes-based coding; it's exposing me to a lot of new Python packages. Quite a few of my prompts end with "... you decide which Python package to use, just pick something mature". This is a weird way to discover software, but it's interesting!

I just upgraded my Mastodon instance for the first time since I set it up back in October. There is some very rusty old Rails knowledge in the back of my brain, and it really wasn't as difficult as I feared.

I have never understood newsletters.

Privacy and spam aside, are people really consuming blogs that way? How do you manage them? Do you setup rules and filters?

I don't understand the pattern at all.

[2/2] ...I realise I want that Smalltalk model of a single environment for my code, my work, and my libraries. I don't want to manage this stuff any more!

Overall, it's impressive, and responsive. I understand why they delivered the first version as a CLI tool, but IDE/editor integration is where a lot of others in the same space are focused, and there is a good reason for that.

[2/2] ...- It's much harder to keep track of the changes in a single 'conversation' UI. I found I had to keep another terminal split open with `nnn` running to inspect and navigate. Cline is better here.

[2/2] ...I wouldn't have even attempted to fix this bug without LLM assistance. I don't have anything succinct to say about that, or a lesson, but it's a contribution I wouldn't have made without AI tools. So there is something valuable there.

[2/2] ...I wish there was a standard way to move around email filter logic, but that is the only annoying manual process I had to deal with so far.

[2/2] ...I spend a lot of my time on video calls so I was most worried about my camera and mic and headset working well. The anxiety was completely unnecessary, everything works flawlessly.