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Danny Brown
← Writing

feat: Initial Blog Post

July 31, 2026 · 3 min read

Blogs are pretty 2010s, I question whether it’s worth even having a blog section on this site. In the age of LLMs, will you even trust that I, a human developer, wrote this? Regardless of what you do or don’t believe, I pledge here and now that posts in this section of the site will be written by me: Danny Brown, a human.

LLMs are good for a lot of things, many of which I highlight on this very website, but I’m not personally interested in reading posts by LLMs, so I shan’t be inflicting that on you – assuming there is indeed a “you” reading this post.

You may seem that en dash in that last sentence and think “an LLM definitely wrote this,” but you’d be wrong! I’ve been using em- and en-dashes long before AI made them suspect. I made that en dash with the alt+0150 keyboard code that is deep in my muscle memory, and these em-dashes—these very ones—were made with gall darn alt+0151. LLMs have made me avoid them more often, but if this blog is to be a legitimate outlet for prose, I have to write my way, and that means with ample punctuation, emphasis, and bombastity.

I’ve always been a generally fast coder. When LLMs were just chat bots, they just sped me up even more, and I still felt like I was learning a ton, since they were helping me solve atomic pieces of code that I was able to grok and add to my toolkit. As we’ve moved more toward agentic LLMs, I know I’m not alone among devs that are worried my skills will atrophy as LLMs do more of the boilerplate (and increasingly well beyond just boilerplate).

But at the same time, if this is the future of software development, there’s definitely a FOMO element of not being on the cutting edge of these tools. In an effort to bridge this divide, I do a lot of “run a couple agents, work on another thing by hand” in an attempt to keep both skillsets current.

As LLMs get better and better, being a fast coder feels like it means less and less. If I know what I want and the LLM can produce it in 1% of the time, and I read and test the code to verify it’s what I would have written—but after hours or days of effort—being a fast coder feels way less relevant than it did five years ago.

What feels relevant to me these days (in no particular order):

  1. Solving real-world problems.

  2. Shipping faster with fewer bugs.

  3. Broadening my stack: I’m no longer a specialist, I’m now Product, DevOps, Full-Stack Engineering, QA, and Project Manager – and constantly considering what other areas I can gain experience in as well (iOS, IoT, better home automation? The world is my oyster).

  4. Making LLM tooling more reliable and consistent: adding determinism to non-deterministic tools.

  5. Developing impeccable taste in code style and architecture, and not just accepting what the LLM tells me.

  6. Extreme ergonomics in the tools I’m building, so that even if I’m being outpaced in writing speed, I can keep up at actually doing things.

Song On Right Now: “The Fox in Motion” by Hop Along