Blog on Rachel Snijders

AI is actually good at writing code. I wish it wasn’t.

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am writing this at what I hope is the peak of AI assisted software engineering. Anthropic’s Fable 5 has just released, and somewhere deep down I am glad it’s ridiculously expensive.

On the one hand, it has never been easier to build that bespoke application you’ve always wanted, or to solve an esoteric bug in a huge codebase that’s actually costing your company real money every second that it persists. But on the other hand, it feels like the art of programming is slowly disappearing. Not because we don’t want to put in the effort — but more so because the architecture you would’ve jammed out in your editor during a 4-hour non-stop coding session, fuelled only by coffee and an insatiable desire to build something nice, can also be vibe-coded in fifteen minutes. With some extra prompting, exactly how you would’ve done it.

Why I wrote my blog in HUGO, and you should too

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I finally have a blog. It runs on Hugo. The build takes 18 milliseconds. The output is a folder of HTML files I could open in Lynx if I felt like punishing myself. There is no node_modules. There is no client-side router. There is no spinner.

You should do this too. Especially if your current blog is WordPress with 500 plugins.

The thing nobody wants to admit

The modern web is unbelievably bloated. Your “lightweight” personal blog probably ships 400 KB of JavaScript before it shows you a single sentence. It has a service worker. It has analytics for the analytics. The first paint waits on a hydration step that exists because someone, somewhere, decided that rendering HTML on a server was a problem that needed solving.

Some smartphone brands to look out for

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The mobile device market is a duopoly with a thin layer of decoration on top. Apple owns one half. Google owns the other half through Android, even when you’re using a phone with a Samsung sticker on it. Almost everything you can buy in a phone shop in 2026 ships with one of those two operating systems and pours your data back to one of those two companies, often both, by default.