Speaker
Scott Tolinski
Appearances over time
2 episodes
Episodes
2
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Scott Tolinski noted that AI tends to add code rather than remove it, even when prompted to, making bloat and technical debt increasingly difficult to manage.
Jujutsu (JJ) version control can use Git as its backend, allowing different team members to use Git and JJ on the same project simultaneously without conflicts.
Jujutsu maintains an operation log of all revision history — commits, merges, snapshots — allowing users to simply run an undo command at any point.
Freelancers and contractors should price work based on value delivered to the client, not time or effort spent — a principle that holds true regardless of AI acceleration.
Scott Tolinski's Hugging Face Reachy Mini robot required about 2 hours to assemble from scratch using a 50-step instruction booklet, and includes cameras, microphones, motors, and PCBs.
Scott burned through all his Fable 5 credits before the July 7 cutoff, calling it the best model he'd used for complex repo-wide tasks while acknowledging its heavy compute usage.
Junior from Sentry Labs integrates with 10+ developer services and lets teams trigger actions like PR creation, build debugging, and scheduled reminders directly from Slack channels.
Git was designed for humans making deliberate commits. AI agents commit every thought. The next version control system needs to capture every operation, every keystroke, and every agent conversation — and whoever builds that wins the next era of development tooling.
Local AI is not a monolith. Thousands of small, purpose-built models on Hugging Face run excellently in the browser for specific tasks — speech detection, categorization, vectorization. But running a frontier-quality general model locally is a compute nightmare most people are not prepared for.
AI-generated backend code is often passable, but UI code is where things fall apart. Drill into smaller changes and use tab completion for UI — that's why so many AI-built apps feel terrible to use.
One team is merging 60 PRs per developer per week, spanning thousands of lines of AI-generated code with almost no meaningful human review. The result: technical debt, recurring bugs, fragile architecture, and a codebase becoming impossible to maintain.
Every software engineering problem being blamed on AI — duplication, inconsistency, fragile code — has existed for decades. AI didn't create bad practices. It just compresses 6 years of codebase decay into a few months.
Most people think 'local AI' means the software is on their machine. It doesn't. Tools like OpenCode with DeepSeek still make API calls — to servers in China. True local means the model weights run on your hardware.
Jujutsu (JJ) is Git-compatible, offers a universal undo command via its operation log, and removes the concept of branches in favor of bookmarks. But every time someone explains why they switched, Wes hears someone who was just misusing Git — not someone with a genuinely unsolvable problem.
AI reduces time spent, but that was never the right basis for pricing anyway. Charge based on value delivered to the client. Your army of agents, your tooling, your expertise — that's what you're billing for, not the hours on the clock.
webkit-box-reflect creates glossy floor reflections and has been in Safari for decades. It was never standardized because it was trendy, never proposed through the proper process, and is now obsolete — future solutions like HTML canvas will handle reflections more flexibly.
React developers pull in a library for everything. Angular developers trust the framework and resist external dependencies. In the AI era, the Angular approach looks increasingly correct — AI writes custom utils better than ever, and libraries like Hammer.js show the long-term maintenance cost of dependency sprawl.
The Bose QC35 is still the best noise-canceling headphone Wes has owned. New ear cup pads and a plug-and-play USB-C charging board from the QC45 model transform a decade-old pair without any soldering — just a little wallowing out the connector hole.
The Hugging Face and Pollen Reachy Mini is a 50-step, 2-hour build featuring cameras, microphones, motors, PCBs, and a fully open app ecosystem. Connect it to any AI provider and you have a programmable, expressive robot — Scott is already building a spelling tutor and a Warhammer 40K battlefield advisor.
Auto-accept on, brain off? The answer depends on what you're building. For production code, skipping code review means losing the mental model of your codebase entirely — and that erodes the core value of having an engineer in the loop.
GET can't officially have a body. POST feels wrong for read-only queries. HTTP QUERY (RFC 10008) is the first new HTTP method in roughly 16 years, and it's already implemented in Node.js — filling the gap GraphQL has been hacking around forever.
GitHub announced you can get your public repo on a CD-ROM, and the internet declared it an infrastructure scandal. Scott's take: the marketing team of 3 people cannot redirect engineering budget. The outrage was completely unhinged.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Technology 83%
- Business 17%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
