You might have ADD if

DuckDuckGo is from Mars. Google is from Venus. Use DuckDuckGo when you want to find something on the Internet. Use Google when you want to talk with the Internet about its feelings.

And I can tell you WHY you need a Chief Metaphor Officer. Sometimes we get comfortable and we sleepwalk through an environment where vigilance is essential. That's when you need me to tell you you're a floppy jockstrap in a staplegun factory.

I can't tell you what it's like, but I can tell you what being a Chief Metaphor Officer IS. When you need a visceral image that feels good because it feels awful, I'm a warm toilet seat in a gas station bathroom. Don't ask yourself how I got this way.

My official job title at Shiny is Chief Metaphor Officer. People ask me what it's like being the Chief Metaphor Officer. I tell them nope.

"Which project do I love best? They're like my children--I've already decided which ones I would sacrifice first."

"Most of HVAC is just fart dynamics with a better marketing department." #ShitClaudeSays

Monday is starting with a drink from the firehose, as usual. For some reason I'm in high spirits. As my wise mentor taught me: "I'm up to my ass in alligators, but that's great because I'm getting paid by the boot."

Me to a friend today: "I am not king of the idiots! ...I was elected unanimously in a free and fair election."

Built a lore file for my agent to understand which parts of our technical debt garbage have become repurposed into load-bearing garbage. It's called FUBARchitecture.md How's YOUR Monday going?

I said this about self-driving cars 5 years ago, and I'm calling it for vibecoding right now: "we can't trust an AI to do that" is soon going to flip to "good lord, can you believe grandpa tried to do that by hand?!?" We're already seeing it in crypto. Your prod env is next.

Programming holy wars aren't always about the grand crusades like emacs vs vim or tabs vs spaces. The mark of a true veteran is the long list of weird balkan skirmishes like HTMLParser vs HtmlParser.

So excited for a new day of AI project ideas breathlessly claiming to 100x all the things that literally say nothing more than do more of what works and less of what doesn't without demonstrating anything. Hmm. Is this a paying gig I could make an AI write these all day

My coworkers have to put up with this every day. I'm pretty sure they go home and pray to the gods of At Will Employment every night. (If you're not a developer, that file is encrypted and intentionally not human readable.) 🤣

Last week on the podcast I talked about how a past employer had a disaster recovery plan to stay up and running if our datacenter got hit by a meteor by having a redundant DC, and every six months we swapped primary DCs to practice failover. I got challenged with "come on, how often do meteors actually hit a datacenter". 8 days later Iran bombed the AWS datacenter in the UAE. That aged like milk still fresh from the carton.

27 years ago, The Pragmatic Programmer taught us, "it's all text, learn your tools, and learn a new programming language every year." It's 2026. It's all still true, but for a few details. It's all text. Learn your tools. And learn a new LLM every year. I don't mean toy with it or hop around. I mean learn it. Pick one and stick with it. Use Claude until you understand how it feels more creative and present to the human in the room. Use Grok until you can predict when dry wit and an allergy to bullshit will reign. Dive into Gemini until that deep research librarian mode feels natural. Copilot and Perplexity and DeepSeek have flavors, too. Pick one and learn it. ChatGPT, too, I guess. I don't talk about my exes.

Ohhhh, god. These ARE my monkeys. This IS my circus.

Me to a CW getting his ass kicked today: "This is the shit that builds character. The problem is that getting character built sucks ass."