iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Very true. We've always built PoCs, drafts, etc. I guess it is much easier to polish a PoC into something that looks "stable". Then those are what we're seeing It does mean trust has changed. I'm hesitant to use something like that in case it ends up unmaintained or full of bugs

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not aimed at anyone in particular. just a trend we see these days because AI has made it easy. leaving a trail behind you of good but effectively abandoned projects because you had another idea today.

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at least its good fun watching the AI heavy repos increase in size every release, gives good graphs! 😂

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The Zena Programming Language @zena-lang.dev · 29/09/2026

one great project is better than many half-baked ones you're going to lose interest in tomorrow

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James @43081j.com · 9h

tinyrainbow 3.2.0 🌈 - hex colour support (`colors.hex('#303')`) - rgb colour support (`colors.rgb(51, 0, 51)`) - perf improvements (fastest in many cases now!) ❕ If you support a new enough Node, remember you can use `styleText` (built-in!) instead

npmjs.com

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Reposted by James

New blog post on zena-lang.dev: Designing a Programming Language for the AI Era zena-lang.dev/blog/2026/09... Includes why I think a language good for humans and WebAssembly is good for AI, and why Zena is a project that's optimistic that humans have a place in software development.

zena-lang.dev

Designing a Programming Language for the AI Era

What makes a programming language effective when AI agents write, test, and review code, and why being optimized for WebAssembly is being optimized for AI.

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James @43081j.com · 28/09/2026

the best kind of PR 😀

a screenshot of a GitHub PR showing dependency changes: 729KB of dependencies removed.

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Reposted by James

Jens Rømer @jensroemer.com · 25/09/2026

I've been helping out @43081j.com on github.com/43081j/tangl..., and wanted a way to prioritize what to work on. I had an assumption that repos on Tangled, who have GH workflows but not yet Tangled workflows would be great candidates. So I did a quick script that goes through repos on Tangled...

github.com

GitHub - 43081j/tangleflow: Convert GitHub actions workflows to tangled pipelines and vice versa.

Convert GitHub actions workflows to tangled pipelines and vice versa. - 43081j/tangleflow

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James @43081j.com · 24/09/2026

Me and @paulvall.dev have more 😅 have just been distracted!

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James @43081j.com · 24/09/2026

Very good point! We will add one 🙏

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James @43081j.com · 24/09/2026

Today we're launching ai-policy.dev! A collaboration of me, @danielroe.dev and @matteogabriele.npmx.social - this provides a few human curated AI contribution policies you can choose from. Our hope is that this will help you better define your stance and what kind of contributions you accept 🙏

ai-policy.dev

AI Contribution Policies

Ready-to-use AI contribution policies for open source projects.

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James @43081j.com · 23/09/2026

today we released a new library as part of tinylibs: tinyps ⚙️ this exposes a few utilities for dealing with system processes. you can use it to list, kill and find processes amongst other things. check it out and let us know if anything needs improving! 🙏

github.com

GitHub - tinylibs/tinyps: A tiny library for dealing with spawned processes

A tiny library for dealing with spawned processes. Contribute to tinylibs/tinyps development by creating an account on GitHub.

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James @43081j.com · 23/09/2026

it manages which version of Python is installed (installs it for you like mise, etc) and manages your Python dependencies (e.g. from pyproject.toml)

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James @43081j.com · 23/09/2026

was curious what the various increments were, so here's the pnpm size bumps labelled!

A poorly annotated chart of the size of pnpm to install. At 12.0.0 it was rewritten in Rust (+27MB). At 12.1.0 it introduced more complex task orchestration (+1MB). At 12.4.0 it introduced support for Python and Rust packages (+2MB). At 12.5.0 it introduced support for Python env/runtimes (+3.5MB)

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James @43081j.com · 22/09/2026

check it out! some pngwn goodness ✨

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James @43081j.com · 22/09/2026

was bugging me that update-notifier is 1MB+ so i made an alternative if anyone wants to use it! nano-notifier is ~275KB much of that is from clack, which itself is used by many of the consumers of update-notifier already, so will be de-duped.

github.com

GitHub - 43081j/nano-notifier: A somewhat small tool for notifying when your package has updates available.

A somewhat small tool for notifying when your package has updates available. - 43081j/nano-notifier

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Reposted by James

~paul @paulvall.dev · 21/09/2026

understanding is the one part of software that still runs at human speed. that's not a bottleneck. that's where we're still needed. i wrote about why open source gets to choose its own pace.

paulvall.dev

we need time to assimilate

the reason behind one sort function got lost in a rewrite, and a tarball came out nine times bigger. on comprehension debt, peter naur, and why open source should slow down.

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James @43081j.com · 22/09/2026

Lots of relatable things here. Let's all slow down a little 😄

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James @43081j.com · 21/09/2026

giving old domains some use, we've published a basic site on ESM and how to migrate to it at esmodule.com if anyone wants to contrib a guide or improve one, please do! thanks to @iamstan.dev for putting the domain to good use 🙏

esmodule.com

ES Modules - The JavaScript module system

A guide to ES modules, the module system of JavaScript.

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James @43081j.com · 20/09/2026

i also have this but just can't remember what i called it 😂 all good, i made it again now!

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James @43081j.com · 20/09/2026

started a project somewhere on one of my laptops. can't remember which laptop and which directory. seems to have vanished 😂 time to do it again!

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James @43081j.com · 18/09/2026

Good times 😀 Babel getting a bunch smaller! Tarball size also dropped from 192KB to 40KB

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James @43081j.com · 18/09/2026

If you can make an issue to explain a bit more, I'd be happy to look into that

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James @43081j.com · 18/09/2026

did you know: `cross-spawn` is no longer needed if you use tinyexec (or just use tinyexec anyway as it is smaller!) if you're using `_parse`, tinyexec also exports `normalizeSpawnCommand` which does the same job

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Reposted by James

Evil Martians @evilmartians.com · 17/09/2026

Not all heroes wear capes... at least the @e18e.dev team doesn't. They’re on a mission to make the JS ecosystem lighter and faster. So we’re donating to them as part of our OSS donation program. They've already reduced node_modules size and made Node.js tooling much faster, and we appreciate it!

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James @43081j.com · 17/09/2026

Solid doing good stuff as always 😀

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James @43081j.com · 17/09/2026

Super nice work by the team here 🙏

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James @43081j.com · 16/09/2026

TIL this is valid > import from from 'mod'; makes sense but assumed it'd be reserved 😅

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James @43081j.com · 16/09/2026

Yup exactly this! And often the answer is no, unfortunately. Same benefit of writing things down on paper, it forces you to understand it better

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James @43081j.com · 15/09/2026

i often just skip reading the description now and go straight to the code. it does a better job of explaining 😅

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James @43081j.com · 15/09/2026

i don't mind people using agents to create PRs, but please at least write the description and replies yourself 🙏

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James @43081j.com · 14/09/2026

xcancel is gone again 😔 > Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can't share more details.

xcancel.com

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James @43081j.com · 14/09/2026

i noticed Claude was unnecessarily reinstalling itself every 30 mins or so. wasting bandwidth, CPU time, etc. it turns out if you have an older version still running, it keeps trying to install the already-installed new one every 30 min. because it compares `latest` with the _running process_

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It's the best! Very chill 😄

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good question! 😅 given it is trying to manage more and more things (github actions, node versions, etc.) - maybe nub/vite+/bun-like? but those each do a bit of their own thing too

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GitHub having some trouble this morning it seems 👀

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Good to be back home today. Lots of GitHub to catch up on 😄 And a few new ideas 👀

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You too! See you next time 🙌

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Was great to see you again! 🙏

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Flying back to the UK! My seat was changed and now I'm in a _premium_ seat (further forward 😂)

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it does seem like pnpm is trying to keep up with the competition, but the competition only exists because it is no longer just a package manager. at this point i'm not sure what the competition is, though

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