iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 19/08/2026

TIL that TypeScript declaration emit can fail on types that type-check fine. Turns out the world is just one big mutable state and there's nothing we can do about it.

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 14/08/2026

LLMs are incidental complexity generators

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 11/08/2026

There are increasingly many cool ideas for things to do with AI but so far most of them seem to barely work. Turns out software engineering is just hard. kirahowe.com/2026/aug/8/i...

kirahowe.com

Is it all just vapourware? — Kira Howe

My personal space on the internet

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 11/08/2026

That’s so interesting. You must enjoy building editors!

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 09/08/2026

It is always, always a mistake to build a text editor. You will not “not need” the features you think will make it simple enough. Save yourself the time and tokens and skip to the part where you realize you do, in fact, need a real text editor and that you don’t actually want to build one of those.

Let's all do each other the professional courtesy of not lowering our standards and expectations so low that this level of shoddy, expensive slop looks impressive.

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The hype has gotten completely out of control. Yes AI is super cool and has its place, but come on! We should at the very least expect these flashy AI demos to work and deliver better value than what's already available.

That token usage probably used somewhere on the order of ~10MWh of electricity, roughly the average usage of a Canadian household for an entire year. Plus the $20k in cash; that could have been used to hire some recent grads who would have delivered a better result.

Everyone's talking about the $20k C compiler that doesn't work but the tone is excitement, not a huge collective eye roll -- what am I missing? This seems like a classic case of real harm and imaginary benefit. This is a well and truly solved problem if there ever was one.

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 01/11/2025

Writing "agents" is like writing a book on good software engineering practices.

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Reposted by Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

What if we did a single run and declared victory

Three panel thing. In the left panel we use error bars. In the second, we take statistical significance as the biggest number but still have error bars. In LLM science, we just have the biggest number

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 17/10/2025

This is one of my favourite conferences I’ve ever been to. Really high quality and genuinely interesting. Plus Berlin is one of the coolest cities in the world! Well worth checking it out if you can: bobkonf.de/2026/en/

bobkonf.de

BOB - BOB 2026

BOB Konferenz, Best of Breed Konferenz für Software-Entwickler und Entscheider in der Softwareentwicklung.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 09/10/2025

So since they removed launchpad from macOS and you can only launch things from spotlight now, does that mean you can't open an app until spotlight finishes indexing?

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 09/10/2025

The world is being cleaved into people who overuse AI and people who deal with the fallout of people overusing AI. Frustratingly, I don't really like being in either of these camps. Where do we go from here?

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 02/10/2025

I don't want non-deterministic, randomly wrong answers to my vaguely worded spoken-language requests. Do people really want this? I want tools that reliably do one thing well and consistently.

Bess Hamilton @besshamilton.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Reposted by Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦

My boss: Can't you get Copilot to validate the info in the spreadsheet? Me: Well, do we want it to be accurate or not? Because either I check it myself or I ask Copilot and then check its output *and* the spreadsheet, so... Boss: What's the point of Copilot then? Me: Exactly.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 03/09/2025

I wish people realized how unreliable these tools are -- they're great and useful, but can't be counted on. We shouldn't become dependent on them for important workflows because these kinds of performance fluctuations and pricing instability are completely predictable and expected.

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 02/09/2025

Just WHY Javascript You're killing me.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 28/08/2025

Working with AI assistants/LLM-driven development feels like coaching a really dumb, belligerent, and obsequious intern _all day_. It's exhausting and no fun. Super curious how other people are working with these tools for positive outcomes How do you use LLMs in your day to day, if at all?

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 08/08/2025

My trusty robot that will take my job any day now.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 06/08/2025

Lol that is hilarious. I need to find the setting to turn the drama down. They’re so pitiful sometimes 😆

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 05/08/2025

It just keeps getting better -- the more I tell it it's wrong and to keep trying, the more confident it gets with each subsequent (wrong) guess 😂 Delightful.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 05/08/2025

Narrator: The machine had not, in fact, found the source of the error.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 25/07/2025

It's just not feasible as an industry to continue wasting the vast majority of our efforts keeping up with trends -- most of these things are solved problems.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 25/07/2025

The frequency with which front-end developers are expected to _completely_ re-architect fundamental aspects of their apps, like state management or data fetching or caching is sheer madness.

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 21/07/2025

📢 Amazing job alert! 📢 Seeq is hiring for a few different engineering roles (some of which may have us working together 😄). I've had a really great experience working here the last few months and happy to chat anytime. If you're interested let me know! apply.workable.com/seeq/

apply.workable.com

Seeq

Seeq is a global leader in advanced analytics for process manufacturing industries. We’re transforming the way companies do business by harnessing the power of unused manufacturing data to generate fa...

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 15/07/2025

LLMs might just be the thing that convinces developers that good docs and well described APIs are worth writing.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 26/06/2025

Apple really shilling hard for pizza today 😂

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 17/06/2025

I mean.. that’s exactly what is happening. This is the gestapo, there’s no telling who those people are or who they’re accountable to. Americans are still severely under reacting to how completely fucked they are.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 17/06/2025

how did web apps work at all before Typescript

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 17/06/2025

How long do you spend upgrading JS libraries?

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 30/05/2025

Tim Pratley’s summary of the Scinoj Light conference is excellent, check it out for a great take on the main themes plus overviews of each talk. Thanks to everyone in the community who made this happen and who’s contributing summaries and responses like this clojurecivitas.github.io/conferences/...

clojurecivitas.github.io

The Hallway Track: SciNoj Light #1 Data Analysis Stories – Clojure Civitas

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 28/05/2025

Shared mutable state is a curse. Writing software doesn't have to be terrible. Do not use shared mutable state.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 27/05/2025

Fill out this survey voicing strong opposition: www.alberta.ca/school-libra... TIP: If you don't know what to write, explain your views/values to chatGPT and get it to write an answer for you.

alberta.ca

School library standards engagement

Albertans can share input on potential new standards for how Kindergarten to Grade 12 school library materials are selected and managed.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 27/05/2025

Everyone should fill out the survey.

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Reposted by Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦

Gander Social @gandersocial.ca · 22/04/2025

After a long bit of toiling, we're proud to announce the launch of Gander Social—a project to bring a new kind of social to Canadians. Canadian owned and hosted, a feed you control, privacy-first, consent-based, respectful by default. Join the Early Access program: gandersocial.ca

gandersocial.ca

Gander: The Social Media You Want, Built for Canada

Fun, private, and ethical. We're changing the way social media is done around here, all without your data taking an unexpected trip south.

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Thanks for having me! Always feel lucky to be part of such a wonderful community.

This is the best thing I’ve read in a while.

This is the best thing I’ve read in a while.

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Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 16/05/2025

Our very first ✨Scinoj Light✨ conference is wrapping up soon, it's been such an inspiring couple of days, so cool to see so many amazing ways people are using Clojure's data stack. Can't wait to go back and watch some of the talks I missed. scicloj.github.io/scinoj-light...

scicloj.github.io

SciNoj Light #1

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This is the best Sci-Fi I've ever read. Best part is there are so many more 😍

Kira Howe (McLean) 🇨🇦 @kirahowe.com · 16/05/2025

Commenting so I can follow this! Curious how it plays out.