Rafe Colburn

I haven’t been a serious World of Warcraft player since Cataclysm but I’m giving it another shot when WoW Forever is released. Anyone else giving it another shot? I’m interested in how they’re applying what they’ve learned to the reboot, you don’t get to do this often in product development.

This is cool. simonwillison.net/2020/Jul/10/...

@circlejtp.me - Missing you this year at @monktoberfest.com

I've been using the Stelo continuous glucose monitor for the past few months and I created a little app to crunch the numbers that folks might find useful: rafeco.github.io/cgm/

Thanks to Claude Code, I don't have to worry about leaving GitHub repos with out of date README files in the case of my sudden death.

I had a fun chat about AI and Etsy on the Aboard podcast with @ftrain.bsky.social and Rich Ziade, it just dropped ... aboard.com/podcast/rafe...

This weekend I finished listening to the audiobook version of John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood." It's a great book about terrible people. The question I was left with was, which company is the Theranos of the AI boom? I imagine there's at least one.

This is 100% me, @simonwillison.net. simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/4/c...

I've been obsessed with improving my dotfiles repo since the holiday break started and last night I managed to get them working on Windows as well as MacOS/Linux. I know, weird flex but OK. github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

Built another new toy for myself this morning -- a Go Links app that runs on the Cloudflare free tier: github.com/rafeco/cf-goto

I revamped my dot files after a decade of neglect ... rafe.codes/posts/the-do...

Doing a little light tech blogging again … rafe.codes/posts/essent...

I'm celebrating Christmas by building an app to help me be better prepared for Christmas next year.

Just applied this approach to creating a tool to format feedback collected through Workday for easy consumption (with the help of Claude Code). Addressing a long-standing annoyance in just an hour of easy work was nice. simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/... cc: @simonwillison.net

I do love how Claude Code makes it easy to pick up tasks I'd normally never bother with, like updating my dot files and making sure they work on both my laptop and GitHub Codespaces: github.com/rafeco/dotfi... I am far too lazy to have ever done this without an assist.

I finally got around to migrating rc3.org from an outdated, no doubt insecure WordPress to a static site generator (Hugo) and Claude Code was amazingly useful. Here's a guest post Claude Code wrote explaining the migration: rc3.org/2025/11/23/m...

Someone let the domain name associated with their BlueSky account expire ...

Google's product management is really getting in the way of Gemini's success. This seems like the most obvious use case for Gemini in Google Docs and yet ...

Clear IC6 competencies on the Etsy career ladder of 12 years ago.

Back again for one of my favorite annual traditions. #monktoberfest

I like this take by @kentbeck.com on how AI-assisted programming changes the balance of which skills are most important From this interview with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-age...

Today I was trying to solve a problem with Cursor, and it misunderstood me, did something completely different than what I was asking for, and in the end helped me figure out the problem anyway. That felt like collaborating with a real human.

I wrote an entire blog post with this premise! rmondello.com/2025/01/02/m...

I'm generally into the migration from passwords to magic links, but if you're going to go that direction you should offer passkey access so that people can still enjoy the convenience of their password manager.

I'm finding it's really "No more Mr. Nice ChatBot" with Sonnet 4. When you ask Claude for feedback on a doc, it really gives it to you straight. FWIW, its critique was completely valid.

As AI summaries cannibalize the web, we should contemplate how web publishers paved the way by monetizing garbage.

This is really interesting. I asked it to write a guide to working with me based on its Assistant Response Preferences, and it’s quite accurate. simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...

One tiny thing most apps and sites could do to make life better and the web more secure is make sure their password quality algorithm accepts generated passwords from the common password management tools 100% of the time. They're all fine. Let's move on.

One morning you wake up and find yourself asking ChatGPT Deep Research to put together key tips for playing Civ7. I'm far too lazy to watch 1,000 hours of YouTube to figure out how to understand the insane number of systems in this game.

I know everybody is frustrated with how the old school media covers Trump but nobody who follows the old school media likes Trump anyway.

How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia? Before you open this thread, take a guess. Settle on a number and then compare it to what you'll learn in this thread. 🧵

The Web vs AI — good stuff aboard.com/the-spiders-...

That sad but also happy feeling when your dad's favorite women's college basketball player before he died a few years ago just won a national championship.

Hierarchy of content from best to worst: 1. Created by humans for humans 2. Created by AI for humans 3. Created by humans for search engines 4. Created by AI for search engines

I find I really dislike writing docs to fit a format (résumé, design doc, PR-FAQ, whatever) but I don't mind explaining what I'm trying to convey to an LLM and letting it shoehorn the content into the format. The constraints of a format dull my thinking in a way that chatting does not.

Here's something that happened today: finance.yahoo.com/news/etsy-ap...

Absolutely fascinating.

We view the Bluesky app as a lobby to the open social web, and we don't demote or throttle links. We believe it should be easy for you to connect your social following here with your web presence elsewhere.

One of the most surprising (to me) developments to emerge from the pandemic is people joining in-person meetings from their desk in the office.

Millions of websites rely on PHP. That's a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of a few core developers. Enter @thephpf.bsky.social to combat the "bus factor" and ensure that the language keeps moving forward. @gregkumparak.bsky.social spoke to @pronskiy.bsky.social to get the backstory...

Some trends are unstoppable... and so companies will adapt to assume they are always present AI easy to use for cheating on any kind of virtual interview --> in-person interviews returning This is not about this one dev building this one tool. Hundreds more tools will follow:

Since writing this article, I have received messages from federal civil servants who tell me it is accurate, and that they are frightened. Please share this with anyone who doesn't understand the scale of the transformation. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...