I have been see­ing an in­creas­ingly preva­lent trend of peo­ple show­ing up in on­line spaces flaunt­ing that they are writ­ing with the as­sis­tance of AI. They seem to be proud of this. They should­n’t be.

It’s not easy, but I think it’s one of the best habits I’ve ever built.

Back in my day, we used math for au­to­com­plete.

While read­ing an old — un­pub­lished, for now — es­say of mine, I was re­minded of the won­der­ful book by Robert Persig ti­tled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book serves to help any­one in any pro­fes­sion, but I think it speaks par­tic­u­larly well to the lives of open source main­tain­ers.

I like HackerNews, but I don’t love that so much of it has turned into dis­cus­sion of a sin­gle topic: AI. This is a ver­sion of HackerNews, fil­tered to re­move any ar­ti­cle fo­cus­ing on AI. Refreshes about every ten min­utes.

Harper Desktop is fi­nally avail­able for in­stall.

This week of Radical Speed Month has been ded­i­cated to putting the dis­parate com­po­nents of the Harper Desktop App to­gether.

We’re ded­i­cat­ing the next month to just one thing: get­ting a Harper desk­top app shipped.

We’re fi­nally re­leas­ing Harper 2.0.

There are times where it is pru­dent to use an AI agent (like Codex) ag­gres­sively. There are other times where they should be avoided like the plague. The ques­tion of into which bucket a par­tic­u­lar en­deavor falls is dif­fi­cult to an­swer.

It was not un­til rel­a­tively late in my aca­d­e­mic ca­reer when I re­al­ized my thirst for the writ­ten word had given me a su­per­power.

There are a gazil­lion guides out there about the var­i­ous tech­niques you can use to im­prove the qual­ity of AI gen­er­ated code. Instead, I want to talk about some more gen­er­ally ap­plic­a­ble ideas that I’ve found es­pe­cially use­ful in the age of AI.

Why does so much of the soft­ware we use feel harm­ful?

People are us­ing Harper for writ­ing prose in Visual Studio Code.

Linkarzu’s re­cent video about Harper is a great primer on what it can do.

I’ve come to the re­al­iza­tion that there is a high de­gree of spe­cial­iza­tion among aca­d­e­mic fields. If we em­brace this spe­cial­iza­tion through cus­tomiza­tion, we could gain an ad­van­tage over other gram­mar check­ers. That’s all to say: We want to en­able au­thors and aca­d­e­mics to cus­tomize Harper to their spe­cial­ized lan­guage.

I just found out that some new pro­jects are us­ing Harper. Could yours be next?

In case you did­n’t know: Harper can con­vert text to ti­tle case! This has been around for a long time, but we haven’t re­ally talked about it pub­licly.

My re­cent work to im­prove Harper’s vi­sual de­sign.

If you main­tain or work on a pro­ject in any com­piled lan­guage, par­tic­u­larly a lan­guage that is known for hav­ing a slow com­piler, I be­lieve it is crit­i­cal to reg­u­larly sched­ule time to do an analy­sis of your build process and make ad­just­ments if nec­es­sary.

For as long as I can re­mem­ber, I’ve told peo­ple that the real chal­lenge of soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing is­n’t writ­ing code. It is­n’t doc­u­men­ta­tion or CI pipelines ei­ther. No, the biggest chal­lenge in soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing is man­ag­ing com­plex­ity.

Writing is one of life’s greater joys. It’s a men­tal work­out that of­ten brings me a level of clar­ity that is hard to find else­where.

The most com­mon com­plaint I’ve been hear­ing as of late re­lates to Harper’s per­for­mance. I’ve been told that Harper has got­ten slow. As it turns out, the prob­lem was­n’t the ac­tual gram­mar check­ing, it was ren­der­ing the high­lights on the page.

I’ve been told New York is an ac­quired taste. I can see why they might say that.

It was my first WordCamp and first con­fer­ence talk, so I was nat­u­rally ner­vous.

I want you to read that ti­tle as lit­er­ally as pos­si­ble. Harper is now ca­pa­ble of evo­lu­tion.

I’ve got some ex­cit­ing new work I’m prepar­ing to dis­cuss later this week (hopefully). In the mean­time, I’ve col­lected some re­cent sight­ings of Harper in the wild.

I was re­cently en­cour­aged to sub­mit a talk pro­posal to the AI track at WordCamp US. I was more than happy to oblige, and to my sur­prise, I got in.

Expression rules were de­signed for a cer­tain kind of er­ror. But there are many gram­mat­i­cal or lay­out rules which hard dif­fi­cult or down­right im­pos­si­ble to de­fine with an ex­pres­sion.

In an age where large lan­guage mod­els have ex­cep­tional con­text win­dows, it’s easy to fall into the trap of be­liev­ing a sys­tem is sim­pler than it is.

This post ex­plains how to add sim­ple phrase cor­rec­tions to the gram­mar checker Harper—a be­gin­ner-friendly way to ad­dress com­mon, con­text-in­de­pen­dent er­rors and con­tribute to its gram­mar check­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

A guide for adding a new pro­gram­ming lan­guage to the Harper lan­guage server.

Failing to ac­count for this re­al­ity can slow down de­vel­op­ment and dis­suade con­trib­u­tors from stick­ing around.

There’s a great deal of over­lap be­tween those who use Harper and those who use Firefox.

The most com­mon type of ma­chine learn­ing out there takes the form of some kind of neural net­work. Inspired by how our own brains work, these sys­tems act as func­tion ap­prox­i­ma­tions. They are great, but they come with a few key pit­falls.

SpellBolt is a Firefox ex­ten­sion that de­liv­ers Harper’s fan­tas­tic gram­mar check­ing straight into your Firefox browser.

There are a great va­ri­ety text ed­i­tors on the web, each used in a dif­fer­ent con­text. That’s a beau­ti­ful thing, but un­for­tu­nately our users ex­pect Harper to work in all of these places seam­lessly.

When our users in­stall Harper, they should ex­pect it to work any­where they do.

Advice you can give your mom (or other non­tech­ni­cal per­son) for how to use ChatGPT wisely and ef­fec­tively.

Reflecting on the clar­ity pho­tog­ra­phy brings.

I was hon­ored to be a guest on Linkarzu’s YouTube se­ries.

Two months does not mean twice as many.

Don’t be­lieve the click­bait.

A boon if you com­ment your code.

Of course it’s that easy.

Spoiler: there aren’t many.

Wisdom from my grand­mother.

You might not ac­tu­ally need it.

Chronically un­der­rated, chron­i­cally over-pre­scribed

How I pre­view my Markdown quickly and re­li­ably.

How I in­tend to live bet­ter.

How I built a soft­ware ren­der en­gine from scratch, and you can too.

It saved me enough time, I had some to share about it.

An ex­per­i­ment on how to live in a seem­ingly hope­less world.

Or: why do­ing things at the last minute ac­tu­ally saves time. I talk about the im­por­tance of shock­ingly fast it­er­a­tion cy­cles and lean man­u­fac­tur­ing.

We look at sev­eral in­ter­est­ing ways com­put­ers gen­er­ate ran­dom num­bers. It may fas­ci­nate you to know that some meth­ods are not truly ran­dom, but only an ap­prox­i­mate.

A key part of Rust is far bet­ter than what JavaScript has to of­fer.