MilkCrunch

Maybe AI Isn't the Next Big Thing, and That's Good News

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I sat through a vendor pitch. The product was a security tool I’d seen a version of three years ago. The rep opened the deck by telling the room the product was now AI-powered. Somebody asked what that meant. The rep said it uses AI to correlate alerts. Somebody asked how, specifically. The rep pulled up a slide labeled “AI-Powered Correlation Engine” with a picture of a brain. Somebody asked whether the underlying detection logic had changed. The rep said the engine now uses AI. This went on for ten minutes. Nobody bought anything.

SSH Is the Most Underrated Platform in Tech

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, I watched a contractor spend forty-five minutes trying to reach a Postgres instance on an internal network. He installed a VPN client, fought with split tunneling, restarted his DNS resolver twice, and opened a ticket with IT. I was sitting next to him. I typed ssh -L 5432:db-host:5432 bastion, pointed my client at localhost, and had a query running before he got his VPN connected.

He looked at me like I’d performed a magic trick. I’d typed one line.

Writing Code Was Never the Job

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The career panic is everywhere. AI writes code now, so what do developers do?

I keep having the same conversation. Someone with five or ten years of experience, mass-applying to jobs, wondering if they need to “pivot to AI.” Every time, I ask the same question. What did you actually do all day? If the honest answer is “I turned Jira tickets into React components,” then yes, you have a problem. But AI didn’t create that problem. It exposed it.

You've Got a Professional Kitchen and Unlimited Prep Cooks. Are You Going to Make Something?

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have more AI tools than I’ve ever had. Cursor, Claude, Copilot, a half-dozen CLI utilities I’ve wired into my workflow. I can scaffold a project in minutes, generate tests I’d never bother writing by hand, and spin up prototypes over lunch. I’ve never had this much capability sitting in my terminal.

I’m also not sure I’m shipping more than I was a year ago.

Not because the tools don’t work. They do. The code comes out fast. The boilerplate writes itself. The problem is that I’ve fallen into a trap I think a lot of developers are falling into right now: when you can build anything, you start building everything. And building everything is about as productive as building nothing.

The Best AI Integration Is a Folder

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have about 11,000 notes in Obsidian. Project outlines, article drafts, meeting notes, random ideas I captured at 2am. Claude Code can read all of them.

No plugin. No API key. No integration marketplace. Claude is a terminal tool that reads files. Obsidian is a UI for a folder of Markdown files. Point one at the other and everything just works.

I didn’t plan this. When I moved to Obsidian, I was solving a different problem: getting my notes out of Evernote before they became unreadable. The AI part was an accident. A good accident, but an accident.

FreeBSD Is What Unix Was Supposed to Be

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been running Linux for over thirty years. It’s fine. It’s more than fine. It runs most of the internet, most of the phones, most of the cloud. Linux won.

But lately I keep finding myself on FreeBSD machines, mostly for network appliances and jailed services, and thinking, “Right. This is how it was supposed to feel.”

A system, not a collection

I’ve written before about why the Unix philosophy keeps outlasting everything else. Small tools, text streams, composition. The ideas from 1970s Bell Labs that just keep working.

How I'm Going to Explain LLMs to My Parents

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wrote a 2,500-word breakdown of how large language models work. Tokenization, vectors, attention mechanisms, training phases. I was pretty happy with it.

Then I realized my Mom is going to ask me what ChatGPT actually does. And none of that is going to matter. My Dad, who ran mainframes from 1974 to 2007, is going to need a completely different explanation.

My parents are smart people. This isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about figuring out the right depth for the person in front of you. Meet them where they are.

What's Actually Happening When You Talk to ChatGPT

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every few days someone asks me how large language models work. The answers they’ve gotten usually fall into two camps: “it’s just autocomplete” (dismissive to the point of uselessness) or a wall of linear algebra that helps nobody outside a machine learning lab.

I’ve been trying to explain how AI and LLMs work to ordinary people, and I’m not great at it yet. So I figured I’d write out a plain-language reference for myself first. Did I succeed at making this accessible for the everyday person in 2,500 words? Maybe not. But it’s a start. Summarizing it for myself as a technologist might help me come up with a way to explain it to my Mom.

Coding on Credit

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs are shockingly bad at spatial reasoning, color theory, and working out problems in the physical world. They are, however, very good at writing code, as long as you keep in mind what’s actually happening: they’re making mathematical predictions based on a massive collection of publicly available code.

It’s a bit like coding on credit. Because so many developers have published their code on GitHub and similar platforms, LLMs have an enormous pool of examples to draw from. They’re not solving new problems; they’re regurgitating solutions that have already been worked out in computer science.

Text Files Are Still the Answer

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used Evernote for more than ten years. It was my external brain. Meeting notes, project ideas, recipes, travel plans, random thoughts I wanted to capture—all of it went into Evernote.

And for a while, it was great. Fast capture, decent sync, available everywhere. The promise was simple: put your stuff here, we’ll keep it safe, you’ll have it forever.

Forever turned out to be about a decade.

The slow realization

It wasn’t one thing. No dramatic failure, no lost notes, no sudden shutdown. Just a gradual accumulation of friction.

The Cloud Repatriation Trend

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The cloud was supposed to be cheaper. For a while, it was. Then the bill came.

Over the past couple of years, something interesting has been happening. Companies that went all-in on cloud are quietly bringing workloads back on-prem. Not all of them. Not for everything. But enough that it’s worth paying attention to.

This isn’t an anti-cloud screed. The cloud is great for lots of things. But “just use AWS” has become the default answer to infrastructure questions, and defaults deserve scrutiny.

Open Source in 2025: The Year the Forks Worked

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

2025 was supposed to be the year open source fractured. License changes, consolidation, maintainer burnout—the doom narrative wrote itself.

Instead, something interesting happened. The forks worked. The community adapted. And open source ended the year stronger than it started.

Let’s talk about what actually happened, and what’s coming in 2026.

The forks worked

Remember when HashiCorp switched Terraform to the Business Source License? The open source community responded with OpenTofu, and a lot of people wondered if it would fizzle out.

Advent of Code Prep: Advanced Techniques

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This is part 3 of a three-part series on preparing for Advent of Code. See the main overview for the complete roadmap, Part 1: Foundation for parsing and data structures, or Part 2: Core Skills for grids and basic traversal.

You’ve got the foundation. You can navigate grids and traverse graphs with BFS and DFS. Now for the techniques that unlock the harder puzzles—the ones where brute force fails and you need a smarter approach.

Advent of Code Prep: Core Skills

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

This is part 2 of a three-part series on preparing for Advent of Code. See the main overview for the complete roadmap, Part 1: Foundation for the basics, or Part 3: Advanced Techniques for harder algorithms.

With the foundation skills from Part 1, you can parse any input and manipulate basic data structures. Now it’s time for the techniques that solve the actual puzzles. These three skills—grid navigation, graph traversal, and recursion—appear in probably 70% of AoC problems.

Advent of Code Prep: Foundation Skills

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

This is part 1 of a three-part series on preparing for Advent of Code. See the main overview for the complete roadmap, or jump to Part 2: Core Skills or Part 3: Advanced Techniques.

Before you learn fancy algorithms, you need to be fluent in the basics. I’ve watched people struggle with AoC puzzles not because the algorithm was hard, but because they spent twenty minutes fighting with string parsing or couldn’t remember how to use a dictionary properly.

Preparing for Advent of Code: A Python Techniques Roadmap

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Advent of Code just wrapped up, and I’ve been taking notes. This year marked a change: after ten years of 25-day marathons, Eric Wastl trimmed it to 12 days. Looks like this is the format going forward—more sustainable for everyone involved.

But I’m not here to talk about the puzzles themselves. I’ve been tracking the techniques that kept coming up. The patterns that separate “I solved it” from “I solved it in under a second.”

Just Use Postgres

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few years back I inherited a system that had Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ. Five different data stores. For what was, at its core, a CRUD app with some search and background jobs.

Each one was added to solve a specific problem. Each one made sense at the time. And each one was another thing that could break at 3am, another thing to monitor, another thing nobody fully understood anymore.

Legacy Is a Sales Word

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve sat through a lot of enterprise sales pitches over the years. You can always tell when the salesperson doesn’t actually understand what they’re selling—they get this glazed look when you ask a technical question, then pivot back to the script. “But have you considered the total cost of ownership?”

There’s one word that always makes my ears perk up: “legacy.”

“You’re still running a mainframe? That’s legacy technology. You need to modernize.”

The Unix Philosophy Still Wins

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every few years, someone announces the next big thing that’s going to change how we build software. Visual programming. Low-code platforms. AI-assisted everything.

And yet here we are in 2025, and the tools that actually get work done look remarkably similar to what Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were building at Bell Labs in the 1970s. Small programs. Text streams. Pipes. Composition.

I find that kind of hilarious.

Three sentences, fifty years

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes, put it simply: