Nate Meyvis

On cognitive debt On cognitive debt People are talking about cognitive debt, the idea that AI-generated codebases are at risk of falling into a state where nobody knows how...

I'm not sure that AI is making "cognitive debt" worse, and I'm optimistic that AI can in fact help us mitigate it.

www.natemeyvis.com/on-cognitive...

On watching code fly by These days I'm watching a lot of code fly by. This can take the form of scrolling through diffs of pull request or seeing code flash by in Claude Code. When ...

Don't underrate the value of reading code that's "flying by."

www.natemeyvis.com/on-watching-...

What might an AI-first recipe site look like? The near future will have AI-native versions of just about everything. I want to know more about what that will look like, and I want a clean modern recipe s...

What might an AI-first recipe site look like?

Blog post: www.natemeyvis.com/what-might-a...

Site: recipes.natemeyvis.com

New technology in programming and poker Work feels different now. Steve Yegge captured something important in an interview with Gergely Orosz: There’s a vampiric effect with AI, where it gets you ...

12-tabling online poker as an analogy for The New Programming:

www.natemeyvis.com/new-technolo...

New technology in programming and poker Work feels different now. Steve Yegge captured something important in an interview with Gergely Orosz: There’s a vampiric effect with AI, where it gets you ...

Programming with AI reminds me a bit of 12-tabling online poker in the early days.

www.natemeyvis.com/new-technolo...

Thinking about context The context window is one of the new fundamental ideas in programming. Here is a nice Claude-centric overview of it. Programming now requires a strong w...

Some notes about context windows:

www.natemeyvis.com/thinking-abo...

On making one's own environment First, an update on my vibecoding agentic engineering journey: I'm making approximately one new webapp per day, slightly more over the last week.[^1] Not a...

Some first thoughts on living in a digital world more of my own making:

www.natemeyvis.com/on-making-on...

Coverage tooling for AI Some, but not all, traditional software engineering tools will have new, AI-optimized analogues. Consider coverage tooling: not test coverage, where you meas...

Some notes on "coverage tooling" for AI:

www.natemeyvis.com/coverage-too...

Humane, adaptive AI bootstrapping In the AI near-future, we'll be able to make solid tools of modest scope quickly. The promise and potential of AI has many other aspects, but "please make an...

Humane, adaptive AI bootstrapping:

www.natemeyvis.com/humane-adapt...

For me: easier to set up; friendly context menus; easier to maintain.

Helix, two months later I in October. It's worked out well, I'm still using it, and it's likely to be my default text editor indefinitely. I hadn't noticed that - / -like functi...

Notes on the Helix text editor after using it for two months:

www.natemeyvis.com/helix-two-mo...

On having a data object Here's a common pattern: People this pattern. Everyone likes the (apparent) simplicity of , and many engineers also think that those objects bring abs...

In some circles this is one of my most contrarian views: www.natemeyvis.com/on-having-a-...

LearnedLeague Web page, showing FrielP as the opponent for match day 1.

Jumping straight into the deep end on a chilly morning for #LearnedLeague 106.

Have you written publicly about your work and AI? (I don't expect you to or anything, but if you have, I very much want to read it.)

Some thoughts about spaced repetition and scheduling. (Draft: all comments welcome.)

www.natemeyvis.com/notes-on-spa...

If anyone out there is knowledgeable about spaced repetition algorithms and willing to read a draft of a blog post, please let me know! I'd be grateful. Solid knowledge of FSRS and its various constants is particularly useful, but not necessary. (DMs are open, etc.)

Watching some poker on stream for the first time in probably 6 years. (Just what's available free on YouTube.)

I don't ever play poker these days, but that didn't keep me from having a bunch of opinions about the very first hand I saw. (J9 / 22 / K8) @thinkingpoker.bsky.social

Well, bright side, I get to play a significant match on MD25, and if I'm going to be playing to avoid relegation, this is about as safe as it comes (I'm safe with a win or tie, or LegnerB loss or tie, or OvallesJ loss, or HaanD loss [or maybe tie]). #LearnedLeague

Nothing to be sorry about, of course. I just thought it was funny that 1899, of all years, is not part of any unit's date range.

The list of units of AP United States History, with "1898" (the end of Unit 6) and "1900" (the start of unit 7) highlighted.

@cdbarker.bsky.social I'm sure this is a very old observation in APUSH circles, but what are you supposed to do about the start of the Philippine-American War, the Newsboys strike, and so on?

Nope! I have not played a hand of poker for money in over 5 years. (For a long time I would have been very confident I'd never write that sentence!)

...so this whole game is just going to take place inside the Alabama 30?

Extremely interesting. And people can *out*flop you. (Cards can't, and people can't "out-turn" or "out-river" you.)

A good edge case to be in the habit of considering is "what if the back end did nothing but dump all the relevant data to the front end, and the front end did everything else?" Taken literally, it's usually not the best idea, but it's well worth thinking through.

If your New Year's resolutions will involve learning something, I might be able to help (I've built a spaced repetition system that is ready for alpha users):

www.natemeyvis.com/zippyflash-i...

(Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT is a lot better as a math tutor than a Greek or philosophy tutor.)

Christmas break, day 4: got a little spare time and, in half an hour using ChatGPT as a tutor, made more progress in Galois theory than I previously have in tens of hours of study.

I had overlooked the obvious: this might just be Cursor itself.

New post: how to ramp up (as a software engineer on a new team).

www.natemeyvis.com/how-to-ramp-up