30 Days 1: Slopacolypse

Inspired by my friend Jordan’s weeknotes blog, I’m trying something new: a monthly collection of thoughts, links, and reflections. Weekly would never last, and honestly I have my doubts about monthly too, but it’s a new year so let’s give it a go.

😱 It’s almost the end of January

• I always get a little positivity boost every new year. There’s something cleansing about getting back into a routine after a week of Christmas, turning a new page, and starting new projects.
• But, January has a habit of kicking any positivity in the balls. It’s cold, wet, dark and miserable. Sometimes there are days when the only outside I see is a 15 minute dog walk that even the dog is unhappy about.
• And oh my god, don’t get me started on the news. Seriously considering a news/social media detox for my sanity.

✨ Shiny new websites

• This website you’re looking at now is a new one. I wrote about it here.
• My consultancy website, Push Code, also got a fresh lick of paint this month. The plan is to keep the business site ultra minimal, more like a business card site, and share more about the work I do over on this site.

💦 Slopacolypse

• Definitely my favourite word of the year so far. Karpathy really does have a knack for capturing the zeitgeist of this era of computing.
• I’m noticing more and more people, who previously I would have described as AI cautious (if not outright sceptical), suddenly espousing AI coding and telling the world about it.
• Definitely feels like we’ve hit some kind of inflection point. Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Codex have made the benefits so compelling that the slop is a price worth paying.
• Talking of slop, someone sent me a pull request for one of the OSS packages I maintain that was very clearly vibe coded and essentially rewrote every single line of code. Please don’t do that.

🤩 Hype-bot

• It was impossible last weekend to use X without being bombarded by a wall of posts proclaiming, “OMG this is INSANE”, or “How I automated my entire life with this one free tool”… they were of course talking about Clawdbot, erm, Moltbot.
• Being as susceptible to clear and obvious overhype as the next man, I immediately downloaded and installed it. Within 30 minutes I had a personal bot I named Claudette, up and running on a free Oracle Cloud VPS. Definitely didn’t see a need to buy a Mac Mini for it. Genuinely, I loved it and had a fun few days playing around.
• For now I would strictly recommend setting this up on a machine you don’t mind fucking up. It’s YOLO mode cranked to 11. I tried to link my Mac via the companion app so Claudette could access my Things via the things-cli. Turned out she didn’t have /opt/homebrew/bin in her $PATH and I caught her messing around with LaunchAgent .plist files to update the $PATH environment variable. I find that both impressive and terrifying in equal measure.
• Over a few days of light experimental use, Claudette was burning about $10 of tokens every single day 😬.
• Clawdbot was a daft name in an obvious brand-infringing kind of way.

🔥 Tailwind drama

• Big web-dev drama of the month was Tailwind letting 75% of it’s dev team go, due to - according to its creator - “the brutal impact AI has had on our business”.
• I love Tailwind and use it in almost every project I start. This is a real shame and I hope they can find a way forward.
• Intuitively, I’ve never felt open source is a particularly solid foundation for a standalone business. I guess by now Tailwind has established itself as too important to not exist. Both Vercel and Google have stepped in to sponsor and if I was a betting man I’d put money on one of them acquiring Tailwind in the coming weeks.

⚔️ Are you yanking my pizzle?

• No more Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for me - I finally got to the end of the medieval Bohemia-themed RPG last week. Honestly, I think my family are pleased about this.
• I’ve been in love with this game. Despite having its fair share of murder and pillaging, it’s a pretty wholesome and charming game, with a good sense of humour. I found myself fully invested in Henry’s character, and the dynamic between Henry and the other main characters - especially Hans - is superbly written.
• When my other half asked me where I’d like to go on holiday this year, the only place I could think of was, “erm, Bohemia”. And so it is, that’s where we’re going. Jesus Christ be Praised!