Nolan Lawson

  1. On not becoming a cyborg

    I was a voracious reader as a kid, and I noticed a funny phenomenon: whatever writer I had most recently read, my next paper for English class would sound like them. If I read a bunch of Stephen King, I’d sound like Stephen King. If I read the Narnia series, I’d sound like C.S. Lewis […]

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  2. The asteroid currently hitting frontend web development

    A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh W. Comeau, to name a few. Other well-known luminaries like Kent C. Dodds, Addy Osmani, Rachel Nabors, and Lydia Hallie have pivoted from talking…

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  3. You can just choose how many bugs you want now

    There’s a bizarre aspect of AI coding that I’ve been trying to put my finger on, and I think it’s this: you can basically just decide how many bugs you want your software to have now. We discovered this first with security, because of course security bugs are the most non-negotiable ones. But I think…

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  4. Using AI to write better code more slowly

    A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it! But the thing is, LLMs are very flexible. And you can use them just as effectively to write high-quality code…

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  5. The diminished art of coding

    Programming is an art. It’s less like fine art or music and closer to architecture or carpentry – combining form and function – but it is an art. If you don’t believe me, consider code reviews. I’ve definitely done code reviews where I admired the mastery on display, where the elegance of the solution…

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  6. You had a story

    You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life. You’d share the story with others. Maybe you’d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you’d say, “I’m a programmer.” And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of […]

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  7. Days of miracle and wonder

    Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common, which is that our favorite album is Paul Simon’s Graceland. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening track, “The Boy in the Bubble”. The song can be read a few different ways, but I read it as an aging man amazed by modernity but also […]

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  8. We mourn our craft

    I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it. I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that […]

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  9. 15 years of blogging

    My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.) This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first …

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  10. Building a browser API in one shot

    TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of tests. When I learned that two simple browser engines had been vibe-coded, I was not particularly surprised…

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