David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #33 (November 2025)

Posted 2025-11-05 under #dispatch

I fear the days of Big Baby Nico are coming to a close. My man’s walking, talking, making his desires known. It was a good run, 17 months almost. It felt like Nev sort of skipped this phase, so this was a novel experience, and Tiny Toddler Nico is awesome. The best is when we’re putting on a fresh diaper and he looks down, waves, and says, “bye bye my penis.”

Microcosm

Claire got me my first effects pedal, a Hologram Electronics Microcosm. This thing is righteous. A normal pedal affects the sound in predictable ways (reverb, distortion, etc.). This one takes the sound in and starts chopping, repitching, looping, generally generating pleasant randomness. Here’s a short track I made with it:

I’m running my electric piano through it (as well as my Prophet synth for the outro). I think effect is really nice – gives my grid-based music a less rigid, more organic feel.

Marky

I was putting together a team presentation about ChatGPT Codex and decided to see if I could build a simple web bookmarking API in under an hour. With that done, I asked it to take a stab at a web UI, and was frankly blown away by the result. I continued iterating on it for about a week, and I’ve now deployed it to the same server running this site and have been using it as my bookmark manager for the better part of a month. You can view my public links here. Here’s what it looks like when you’re logged in:

It’s not perfect – it trips on websites with really restrictive anti-crawler measures, and some of Vue.js-based dynamic behavior is a little janky. I also can’t really comment on the code quality as I’ve barely looked at it. That said, it is exactly what I want in a bookmark manager, with features like plaintext archiving, full-text search, and referrer tracking. It’s exciting to imagine a future where, if you have the right skills, the bar for creating software is much lower and all kinds of new stuff comes to life.

It’s long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions.

– Justin Searls

If you’re interested, you can look at the source code and run Marky yourself, but I’d instead encourage you to install Codex and make that thing you always wanted.

I took my e-bike to our local shop for a tune-up and some upgrades: a rack, kickstand, and this nifty frame lock. These were big in Copenhagen; you don’t really see them here in the states but the guys at the shop were able to run one down. It won’t stop someone from picking the bike up and walking away with it, but at least someone can’t hop on, turn the throttle, and go. I’d been eyeing other bikes but, with these upgrades in place, I’m feeling content with the one I have.

I ran the Bull City Race Fest half-marathon for the fourth year in a row. I didn’t do great, coming in something like eight minutes slower than last year (result, certificate), but 9:22/mile feels about right given my level of preparation. And now I feel GREAT, routinely going on easy runs without the stress of training.

We did a weekend at Fairy Stone State Park with a bunch of Durham friends. Great times, wholesome family fun.

I went to Nashville for a team offsite last week. Highlights included Third Man Records, Jack White’s record shop/recording studio (I picked up a live recording from one of my favorite bands) and this ridiculously good cover band.

This Month

• Adventure: NYC, then upstate NY for Thanksgiving; Troy Turkey Trot
• Project: keep jamming with my Microcosm, produce another track
• Skill: live playing (guitar or keys)

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Gate of the Feral Gods, Matt Dinniman – this series rips so hard
• Non-fiction: The Notebook, Roland Allen
• Music: Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio

Links

• Why engineers can’t be rational about programming languages | spf13 (via)

  Every time an engineer evaluates a language that isn’t “theirs,” their brain is literally working against them. They’re not just analyzing technical trade offs, they’re contemplating a version of themselves that doesn’t exist yet, that feels threatening to the version that does. The Python developer reads case studies about Go’s performance and their amygdala quietly marks each one as a threat to be neutralized. The Rust advocate looks at identical problems and their Default Mode Network constructs narratives about why “only” Rust can solve them.

• Scripts I wrote that I use all the time (via)

  In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites.

• What if people don’t want to create things - macwright.com

  When I look back on TileMill in 2010, Mapbox Studio, Observable, the whole arc: I can’t help but worry about the supply of creativity in society. In particular: If we give everyone the tools to build their dreams, very few people will use them.

• Just Talk To It - the no-bs Way of Agentic Engineering | Peter Steinberger (via)

  The benchmarks only tell half the story. IMO agentic engineering moved from “this is crap” to “this is good” around May with the release of Sonnet 4.0, and we hit an even bigger leap from good to “this is amazing” with gpt-5-codex.

• Vibe engineering

  I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce?