2026 : ezyang's blog

Hugo Migration January 4, 2026

This blog has lived on WordPress since it was initially created during a social challenge at MIT to write a blog post a week or pay up with beer. I remember a very important piece of advice I had been given at that time: don’t fuck around with your blog authoring software, just do the minimum viable thing (use WordPress) and focus on writing posts.

It’s 2026 now, the world is different, and in particular the existence of coding agents means that this particular advice falls flat now: it has never been easier to vibe code your own blog software and be done in an afternoon of token generation. Similarly, over the years, I had been increasingly unhappy about my WordPress setup (too hard to add images, ancient version of WordPress, Markdown has taken over the world why am I still writing in ReST, I love scripts.mit.edu but I definitely don’t want to use it to host serious things). So I typed this into ChatGPT and Claude and asked it what I should migrate too.

The gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer January 4, 2026

Let’s suppose you asked an AI coding agent to “implement a CLI calculator”. Imagine if, instead of only writing short Python script, it also started building an automated test suite, a crash reporting mechanism and a telemetry subsystem. You’d be like, “What the fuck is this?”

But now let’s say that you were planning to release this project to users. It would be clearly negligent to not have an automated test suite. A crash reporting mechanism might be overkill for a simple calculator, but for more complicated CLIs interacting with the real world, it may not always be feasible to have reproducer, in which case crash logs are essential. Similarly, a telemetry subsystem would be wildly inappropriate for an open source local-only calculator, but it could make sense for a networked application or a corporate tool of all consenting users. One of the important functions of a senior engineer is to be able to evaluate the context a software project lives in and figure out if we need to do something, even if it isn’t explicitly asked for. This is contrast to a helpful assistant, who is first and foremost obligated to follow the user’s instructions. This leads to a gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer.