The cloud was a network-diagram icon for two decades before it was a product. Compaq coined cloud computing in 1996, AWS made it real in 2006, and the surrounding vocabulary — VPS, hyperscaler, colocation — each carries its own history.

The .yml extension is a 1990s DOS artifact. The 'YAML Ain't Markup Language' acronym is a 2002 self-correction. Both questions resolve cleanly once you know markup languages and data serialisation formats are different categories with different ancestors.

A short tour of database name origins. Children, code names, predecessors, acronyms, mythology, and at least one pet duck on a houseboat. Most of the history of the field is hidden inside the names themselves.

Two pronunciations of SQL have coexisted for nearly fifty years. Why the language was renamed in the first place, and what each pronunciation preserves, turns out to be more interesting than the debate that surrounds it.

A 2026 study found humans are quietly being gentler on AI-authored PRs than on human-authored ones. Single-reviewer review already broke at 400 lines per diff. The fix is two old ideas — distribute the review across the team, and pair every diff with a deterministic map of the code flow.

A small series of opinionated hot takes on AI engineering, drafted with LLM assistance and verified by hand. The index post.

Brooks said adding people to a late project makes it later. Adding LLMs follows a similar pattern, except the cost lands on a different axis — output rises while shared understanding of the system erodes, and the resulting cognitive debt eventually has to be paid.

Cursor, Kiro, Windsurf, Antigravity, Trae. All forks of VS Code, all wrapping one of three model APIs, all selling a long system prompt that does not move the model's ceiling. The vibe-coding tech-debt numbers were always pointing somewhere else.

Apple's "do not hallucinate" prompt is funny. The same logic is why AI-written + AI-reviewed pipelines silently approve bugs, why long contexts compound errors, and why the real guardrails are deterministic.