May 27 2026

Blogging Lives On 🤨❓

Is it weird to get the impulse to blog again in the days of AI slop everywhere? Or is it exactly like the impulse to get together that is becoming more and more common with the rise of disconnecting tech? Either way here I am, thirteen years after my last blog post, bringing it back.

With the total enshitification of LinkedIn basically complete, and my distrust of Google growing by the day I’ve migrated off of the blogger platform and copied my content from LinkedIn to this; a Hugo based static site in github hosted via Cloudflare pages.

The process actually kicked off a couple years ago and then I shelved it (like so many personal projects). Now though with AI tooling, this project and quite a few others are springing back to life as they get simpler and simpler to manage with the limited time I have. In this case it went something like:

• Me: Claude this repo is a few years old and incomplete, eval the tech, upgrade libraries that are out of date or propose new ones where better alternatives now exist
• Claude: … here’s a giant list of things you should clean up …
• Me: cool, go ahead

Claude then plowed through in about 10 minutes the kind of semi-enjoyable tinkering tedium that would have consumed a couple hours of my time. Previously, by the time I would have had everything setup the way I actually wanted it, I likely would have run out of either time or energy and wouldn’t have taken the next step of actually writing anything.

Amaze amaze amaze.

Of course, that didn’t prevent me from also jumping from task to task along the way… definitely shortened the diversions but not all of them!

1. a back and forth with Claude on what the point of {{< ... >}} syntax was for if I could just use inline html anyway (Markdown is a little lost) and ended up agreeing that the hugo figure shortcode was indeed worth using.
2. learning that the annoying spaces being added to my vim-surround output when building markdown links (<leader>gsae [) could be resolved by just using the closing bracket instead 🤦
3. then deciding to build new luavim script to make external link handling in markdown simpler so didn’t need the surround step anyway
   • interesting how it’s now easier/simpler/better to do this than to grab yet another plugin with AI around (some might have said it always was but I ❤️ my LazyVim)
4. wasting time trying to figure out exactly when my LinkedIn posts were ACTUALLY posted and eventually stumbling on this handy tool.
   • debugging said script for 5-10 minutes as Claude hadn’t quite nailed it on the first try
   • moving computers halfway the process and deciding to update my brew based init scripts to include the blogging tools (mostly just hugo tbh)
   • updating my dotfiles, and finding an Alfred setting that weirdly got out of sync so fixing that

So what are we doing here? What’s the goal?

I’ve always written a lot. At one point that was in the form of long form emails to my very favorite people. Those days and some of those people are gone now. More recently it’s been a daily note where I track todo’s, conversation notes and spew stream of consciousness as an effort to coral my thoughts and clarify my thinking on any given problem of the day. That often ends up being drivel without an audience though, and isn’t the same as honing a thought for public consumption. When I blogged in the past it was a form of memory and share-back exercise. These days AI feels like it’s made the need for that technical memory and stack-overflow style sharing obsolete. So what’s left?

One of the more important lessons I’ve learned in the last few years, both from co-workers and employers has been the value of “working out loud” (post to come). There are incredible, but nuanced, compounding benefits from just putting yourself and your work out there. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that the value of doing that extends beyond the walls of your workplace. With the AI psychosis rampant, and slop sloshing around everywhere what’s real becomes increasingly difficult to detect and increasingly important to have.

So I’m going to try to get back to working out loud, with my actual name (not somatose.com) and with the goal of building up my human reputation, better articulated thoughts, and a sovereign home for content I produce myself. I use AI extensively for coding, but no words on this blog will be written by anyone other than myself. (unless otherwise marked)