Tom MacWright

2025@macwright.com

Changing my mind

I've changed my mind about a lot of stuff recently:

  • I have been using Claude Code a bunch. I feel deeply conflicted about it: it isn't satisfying to use, it has all these ethical problems, but it works really well. Only the highest-level models work well for writing code: opencode is much nicer and less glitchy than Claude Code, but it uses Grok by default which is a lot worse. I'm only using it on work stuff. Partly the watershed moment was the Claude Code form factor: in-editor AI suggestions are annoying and disruptive, whereas the CLI editor-lite direction is a lot better. Note: please don't recommend another coding CLI to me, I've seen them all and despite using them, I am existentially tired by the LLM discourse.
  • I switched from Alfred to Raycast. The biggest reason was that I want to run less software, and Raycast replaces Session and Rectangle for me. I've also been impressed with 'Raycast-the-platform' - its Strava integration shows the last 4 weeks' mileage in my menu bar. Not tied directly to Raycast as a quick switcher, but nifty.
  • I've been adopting Effect at work, after swearing it off for a year. I think my qualms with it are still pretty true (the team does not care enough about documentation and it can be difficult to use) but there are also a lot of benefits - a big ecosystem that's pretty mature, and the opportunity to remove other NPM modules because Effect includes nice implementations of things like DateTime, Duration, and Cron types.
  • I switched this blog to use 11ty after being a holdout using Jekyll for roughly 14 years. Jekyll kept encountering problems building the site. 11ty is fine and the migration was mostly smooth. I still have some incremental work to do with it. The site builds slightly faster but that wasn't a real motivation for the switch, it was more about switching to a static site builder that is actively maintained. Plus I had a bunch of post-optimization involved with the site that was already written in JavaScript, and using 11ty let me integrate that with the site build process.