Monday, 23rd March 2026
Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.
On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.
Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:
I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.
I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later.
None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certianly don't know why a decision is right or wrong.
And the most importantly, they don't choose. That part is still yours. The real work of software development, the part that makes someone valuable, is knowing what should exist in the first place, and why.
— David Abram, The machine didn't take your craft. You gave it up.
The most interesting alpha of datasette-files yet, a new plugin which adds the ability to upload files directly into a Datasette instance. Here are the release notes in full:
- Columns are now configured using the new column_types system from Datasette 1.0a26. #8
- New
file_actionsplugin hook, plus ability to import an uploaded CSV/TSV file to a table. #10- UI for uploading multiple files at once via the new documented JSON upload API. #11
- Thumbnails are now generated for image files and stored in an internal
datasette_files_thumbnailstable. #13
slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time
— Neurotica, @schwarzgerat.bsky.social