Patrick Smith

quick isolated portable wasm components:

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

I built my site from scratch in WebAssembly.

Using AI coding you can vibe wasm from fast C or Zig.

I generated a Markdown renderer in Zig from the CommonMark spec.

No Vite or React or frameworks, just me and my agent.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@theo Most of the work the coding agent does is already in the cloud.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@johnmaeda If the user has to work hard to get anything of value, then I’d say whether it clicks or not is irrelevant. Unless your point is to convince people to trust you even when you give them designs that don’t work.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@thdxr It’s not the same thing because being too early means you didn’t understand the market properly enough then to make a successful product, but perhaps it taught you something you can apply to today’s market.

Failure has different qualities.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@acdlite Reading and understanding the code might make you think how to change the prompt for the next time. It’s the code that ships to users, not the prompt.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@matthewcp But in this world of cheap refactors how many people are buying them? Are they holding off because they think next month’s refactor will be even cheaper? So the price of the refactor goes down but the amount of refactoring that will be needed goes up.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@garybernhardt I actually don’t think these sorts of tests are useless. They assert what the contract should be. If that contract changes then that’s a regression.

TypeScript has structural typing. This should allow more duplication of types rather than importing Root into a thousand files.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@rtfeldman What is the lesson of the first five seconds of the talk?

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@davidcrawshaw How big would the raw model be, before the post-training begins? Could someone sell one of those?

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@techgirl1908 January – May 2026
The Golden Age for Agentic Coding

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@rauchg You can do anything now, so the question is “what do we decide?”

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@thdxr AI for thee but not for me

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@steveruizok Websockets? Are you syncing a log or the object graph?

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

AI is the man who has tasted everything.

He knows every flavour, but when he cooks it’s a jumble of them all that clash in the mouth.

You must help him decide what to accentuate and what to leave out.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

https://t.co/hXE5lXLpFT

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

Like with cooking, taste is often about what to leave out as much what to put in.

The original iPhone was great because they added to the iPod but they removed from the Mac. And then they added the right mix of fresh ideas to make a new flavour.

AI coding today biases towards being additive and that’s why it’s so easy to create something that’s a jumble of flavours that clash.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@_chenglou It’s a denial-of-service attack on ourselves

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@charliermarsh Better, make it idempotent instead and drop the argument altogether

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@ThePrimeagen I thought coding was solved meant that we could mark all Jira tickets as done and play video games all day. Standups are renamed “recess” where we talk about the latest Nintendo game.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

One hard part is when you persist data. Then you have to consider how the data will evolve in the future. It’s fairly easy to paint yourself into a corner due to modelling the data in a restrictive way.

So the “programming” becomes about past you and future you and current you being aligned to solve a blurry range of continuously changing problems.

That’s way harder than banging in a prompt and producing something that works just for today’s problems.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@bcardarella I personally think sessions and cookies should be embraced more. It’s a mistake that mobile apps don’t.

[Patrick Smith @patrickgwsmith]

@bcardarella I think that might be because Websockets don’t support the Cookie header or any HTTP headers. So you can’t use a Http-Only cookie that would be ideal.