Weeknotes 265

I’m sorry, not sorry, about the rising amount of AI/LLM related posts. You’ll just have to skip them like you do when you see Neovim mentioned 😁

THIRD MAN PRESSING IS NOW OPEN (via Studio Notes #94)

Jack White built a vinyl pressing plant in his home town. He also seems to have continued the colour scheme he first used for his upholstery business.

I think the days of not adding extra tests to my test suite due to the maintenance burden they would create might be over. I noticed that LLMs are very keen to add additional tests for every little thing, which at first alarmed me, but then I thought “Why not?”.

The Tower Keeps Rising

Why You Need a Local LLM Gateway - and How to Set One Up with Bifrost

If you’re calling LLM APIs directly from your apps, you’re flying blind. A local LLM gateway gives you logs, fallbacks, cost tracking, and a single configuration point for every provider. This post covers why that matters and how to deploy Bifrost in Docker in under five minutes.

Like Aperture I was talking about last week, this post talks about putting LLM gateway/proxy in front your AI harnesses, but this one runs locally and doesn’t require Tailscale to work.

Davit

A fully native macOS app for Apple’s container platform. Run Linux containers on Apple silicon; no Docker Desktop required.

Docker Desktop is not a pleasant experience. This might be an alternative.

A FAREWELL TO CODE REVIEWS

Code review is many things. It is a form of asynchronous communication. An avenue for knowledge sharing. A learning opportunity. A safety net. It is also a battleground.

I was tweaking Tailscale config this week and started to worry I was losing track of what was being changed. (This brought back painful memories of checking boxes in IIS and not knowing what, if anything, had changed, and being grateful I eventually got to leave IIS behind for Apache which had file-based, diffable, configuration files).

Given recent experiments, I thought I’d put it under the supervision of Terraform. Instead, I took the suggestion from my LLM that I might want to try using Tailscale GitOps instead, and I’m glad I did. Built-in, and keeps everything as a JSON file in a git repo. Now I can change config in a PR and merging it to main updates Tailscale.

TIL about HuJSON - “Human JSON”

The JWCC format permits two things over standard JSON: C-style line comments and block comments intermixed with whitespace, allows trailing commas after the last member/element in an object/array.

I am a fool for upgrading to the iOS 27 Public Beta. I shouldn’t listen to advice from podcasts. Now the app I used to order coffee doesn’t work and I have to go to the counter to order 🙀

My Notes on Three Years of Coding with AI

As 2026 arrived, it became clear to me that I needed more hands-on time with these tools, whether I liked the vibe of them or not. It was a fairly plain bit of self-reflection: if I want to keep working as a software engineer, I can’t really picture a version of the next few years where I opt out of AI entirely and still find steady client work.

I wonder whether there is a term for that person who is the biggest know-it-all in the Slack community but without whom the Slack community wouldn’t exist at all because no one else talks?