iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick @nicklucas.dev · 15/03/2026

The alpha @trpc.io @trpc/openapi package is now on NPM!

Nick @nicklucas.dev · 08/03/2026

Coming today: major docs overhaul for 2026, proper App Router docs (well overdue), stripped out nextjs in general documentation, revamped onboarding Currently prototyping: game-changing openapi support

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 22/01/2026

Something something “the Haiku, the Sonnet, and the holy Opus”

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 01/11/2025

I’ve found that sub attracts a very wide range of devs who all think their technology is the best, and that drives a lot of hate for web technologies because a lot of mindsets are stuck in the 90s and 00s. It really is quite backwards around there

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 04/10/2025

Thing is I haven’t found much of an AI community to absorb myself in over here which is why I’ve been back there in recent months, but it feels like it’s impossible to get any reach for my own content there now

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 04/10/2025

I’m beginning to think that everyone who posted 🦋 on X/twitter and wasn’t a HUGE account got deranked the same way that @danabra.mov did (twice I think?) Even paying them money I’m lucky if my posts get 50 views even with promoting the post privately to friends for likes and stuff.

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 27/09/2025

I hear a lot of folk repeating this idea that LLMs don't know what they're going to say until they've said it, and knowing a little about their workings I wrote up a post about this misconception. LLMs do know what they're going to say! dev.to/nicklucas/ll...

dev.to

LLMs do know what they're going to say

The following is written to be as penetrable as possible for a semi-technical audience, and includes...

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 19/09/2025

The updated UI framework does feel like the biggest step taken in a few years. Liquid glass isn’t even the most interesting part of iOS 26

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 24/08/2025

What toppings are the best on pizza and why are they Ham and Pineapple?

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Reposted by Nick

Corbin Crutchley @crutchcorn.dev · 05/08/2025

back in my day vibe coding was just asking your smart friends what to do and acting dumb when they try to explain never seen someone take over my keyboard and type so fast

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 02/08/2025

Now we just need OSS review bots which remove clearly bot generated contributions to complete the cycle

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 13/07/2025

Depending on country there will likely be salary benefits to having a degree or masters. I went straight to masters as a self taught dev (with career experience and unrelated Bachelors) because the UK’s R&D tax rebate made me less valuable without it. Formal qualifications can break glass ceilings

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 12/07/2025

I honestly haven’t said WAT so much since Gary Bernhardt’s “WAT” www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

destroyallsoftware.com

Wat

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 23/06/2025

It’s okay I can spare 4.5 seconds 👹

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 22/06/2025

Similar applies to any ML, patterns will be detected during training and form a huge number of smaller highly abstract functions which combine to produce something more concrete

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 22/06/2025

One of the best intuitions you can look at is visualisations of how Convolutional Neural Nets build up their abstractions, there’s an image here: stackoverflow.com/questions/38... Combined with an understanding of the layering of maths it’s pretty powerful to see this IMO

stackoverflow.com

How to visualize filters after the 1st layer trained by CNNs?

The filters at the 1st stage of the CNN can be easily visualized since they are of depth 3 (RGB). How do I visualize the later ones ? Like in http://cs231n.stanford.edu/slides/winter1516_lecture7.p...

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 15/06/2025

It’s notable to me that cognition is talking about MAs which mutate a global system, while anthropic is talking about MAs which query a global system. The former is obviously harder because the outcome is more cross-dependent and so requires constant cross-talk to produce a consistent result

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 11/06/2025

And all of this leads to BSky feeling less sticky or worth opening. To compete with X they need to get really good with social algorithms and that hasn’t started to materialise yet It also hurts smaller accounts, a good post should be able to go viral but only big accounts can do that right now

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 10/06/2025

I really installed this with an open mind, but colour on buttons is important and there is no way glass controls should be inheriting the colour from behind. It’s a gorgeous control, but colour is not up for grabs for arbitrary use if you like UX

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 08/06/2025

Fair enough! I’m happy to leave a suggestion to that effect then ☺️

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 08/06/2025

Looks really good, I suppose since it's a new function the key can be required out the box and start to dissuade from footguns. Then TQ@6 could make that property required everywhere?

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 07/06/2025

Yep, I _think_ it would work well. Should be a pretty easy union type to test out anyway

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 07/06/2025

So long as the type adapts to whether a mutationKey was set I don’t see a need for enforcing it when it used to be optional. Libraries like tRPC can ensure one is always set and user-land code gets mutationKey:undefined until it’s set so are protected from misuse

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 06/06/2025

useEffect is the root of all evil and should be avoided react or dev tools should provide a mode to log all the effects which fire named by component/hook, it would massively shorten debugging journeys

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 01/06/2025

I think that’s just the typical lifecycle of a Haskell system in a business, I’ve heard it more than once * one developer in a team gets really FP-pilled * rest of team spends future years scared of system * system is rewritten

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 31/05/2025

Love the idea of just having a JSON framework around this concept, but it also really changed the way I think about RSCs in about 2 minutes Great post!

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 29/05/2025

Homebrew is the worst package manager out there. The way they handle the universe is very poor for both performance and compatibility. Was trying to avoid upgrading our MacOS and Xcode to latest for a few weeks some years back, and homebrew pushed a bunch of changes that broke Xcode… why

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 23/05/2025

Midnight Generation’s album is stunning, here’s the single that caught my ear: youtu.be/2dMRxv3lbXg?...

youtu.be

Midnight Generation - Don't Wait Up (Official Music Video)

YouTube video by Midnight Generation

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 10/05/2025

Honestly no idea, but I like that you can take a github url and replace the domain on it, and you can run the code - any future replacement worth its salt would just be a different domain to replace so you don’t lose any projects if they’re in github

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 10/05/2025

We’ve had a good experience with stackblitz in tRPC, have had problems even getting some projects to run on codesandbox by comparison

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 02/05/2025

Agents are too powerful for coding. They’re not great at everything, but for very specific or repetitive tasks they’re king. I just added a WAF to cloudfront in minutes to restrict IP ranges, that sort of terraforming task used to be a full afternoon of research and fiddling

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 01/05/2025

Unless you’re on AWS Lambda, in which case they have a blog post announcing the experimental flag being available for node 22 but then when the flag was removed apparently made their own build without the feature enabled. Maybe when they add node 24 we’ll get it back

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 26/04/2025

Added regex. Now has two problems. It checks out honestly! Hope it’s not too painful to get sorted 🙏

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 24/04/2025

I was pleasantly surprised to see the prompt pop up at work the other day, and it worked great when doing some playing with copilot agent mode!

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 15/04/2025

*me I was too befuddled when I wrote this

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 14/04/2025

My as an experienced dev trying vibe coding with copilot’s agent mode for the first time and seeing an actually very reasonable sourdough recipe generator and feature requests actually working

media.tenor.com

a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a cnn background

ALT: a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a cnn background

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 05/04/2025

You should get 30p to the government for every £1 you spend in store, that will show them

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 27/03/2025

This investigation is the most exciting thing happening in JavaScript right now. Fingers crossed it can be fixed as it will completely change tRPC performance characteristics at scale

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 21/03/2025

For those finishing up Severence tonight: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s85E... Please try to enjoy each chord equally.

youtube.com

The Severance Theme sounds SICK on Classical Guitar ...

YouTube video by Sam Griffin Guitar

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 21/03/2025

It's been a while coming but this is a huge release. My personal favourite addition is out the box support for FormData and File/Blob/Uint8Array in procedure inputs

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 20/03/2025

Your outie wouldn’t spoil the finale on Bluesky for those who are a few episodes behind

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 17/03/2025

It can translate the types as a whole just fine, it just makes stupid mistakes even once you give it 10 files of context on correct types

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 17/03/2025

@elsakaan.dev before you say it, this IS Claude’s model doing this!

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 17/03/2025

I really don’t think copilot is coming for our jobs any time soon. It can’t even translate min(0) correctly from Zod to ArkType

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 15/03/2025

It was largely a tooling problem for me, the deployment tools were so bad that putting in dynamic changelogs was hard, so: “we’ve been fixing bugs and adding features!”

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Nick @nicklucas.dev · 11/03/2025

I choose to comment to prove I’m the one in control

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