12 posts tagged “les-orchard”
2026
Here's what I think is happening: AI-assisted coding is exposing a divide among developers that was always there but maybe less visible.
Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.
Now there's a fork in the road. You can let the machine write the code and focus on directing what gets built, or you can insist on hand-crafting it. And suddenly the reason you got into this in the first place becomes visible, because the two camps are making different choices at that fork.
— Les Orchard, Grief and the AI Split
2009
You guys are moving on this stuff too fast! Welcome to 2002, when lots of us had more spare time than employment and we deployed new crap like this on our blogs and sites daily.
I like rev=“canonical”. Les Orchard summarises the current debate over what colour to paint the rev=“canonical” bikeshed.
Tagging is like a salt water fish that lots of people thought was pretty and started trying to stick in fresh water tanks. I don’t think it thrives everywhere people have tried to stick it and not everyone who’s tried to clone tagging has gotten all the important parts right.
2008
Queue everything and delight everyone. Les Orchard explains why I’ve been getting interested in queues recently: “One of the problems it seems most modern web apps face is the tendency to want to do everything all at once, and all in the same code that responds directly to a user.”
2007
Les Orchard: “Web 3.0 will have Galactica-style angled corners.” (via) Here’s hoping.
2006
An S3 AJAX Wiki. Les continues to innovate against S3.
2005
Magic Microformat Forms Redux, Now with GreaseMonkey! Les Orchard gets in to Greasemonkey—with accompanying screencast.
2003
Blogging with AppleScript
Les Orchard describes an intriguing blogging tool built with AppleScript that posts links to a weblog when they are dragged on to a special folder on the OS X desktop.
2002
Personal web proxies
Les Orchard is considering building his own web proxy. I had never thought about the possibilities of these technologies beyond caching before, but Les’s post has really got me thinking. I often find myself searching around for a web page I visited a few months ago and can only vaguely remember—a proxy generated searchable history (I never got the hang of using my browser’s) would be a very useful tool. In addition, the ability to cache local copies of useful documents to preserve them should the original ever go offline would be very handy. How about a proxy with an accompanying small GUI desktop application which shows your recent browsing history (the last 15 pages or so) and allows you to mark documents for bookmarking / preserving? The application and proxy server could communicate via XML-RPC.