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When Things Go Wrong With AI-Generated Code
My first bad experience: the code generated by Claude Code made my dashboard unresponsive in my browser. Eventually, the data stopped updating. After a ten-minute debugging session, I asked Claude Code to revert the change, and it did so promptly. But then I started getting execution failure notices on Discord. A lot of notifications. Then I started investigating…
It appears the browser was making frequent refresh requests to one of my workflows, which depleted my Claude pay-per-use credits. Bummber. Looking at my n8n dashboard, I saw that one of my workflows was failing because of that. Logs were confirming the problem with the interaction with Claude AI. As shown on the graphs below, my instance CPU usage went through the roof. Ouch. Now I know what happened, and the problem was fixed. Now, I should find a way to rate-limit this type of behaviour. That’s for tomorrow, I guess. 😅
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My Defaults as of 2026-01-10
Changes from the last edition are in bold. ✉️ Mail Client: Fastmail 📨 Mail Server: Fastmail 📝 Notes: Craft + Apple Notes ✅ To-Do: Things 3 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app 📚 Photo Management: Photos.app + Photomator 🗓️ Calendar: Calendar.app 🗄️ Cloud file storage: iCloud 📰 RSS: Reeder connected to Inoreader 📇 Contacts: Contacts 🕸️ Browser: Mobile Safari + ARC Browser on Mac + ChatGPT Atlas 🧠 AI: ChatGPT + Claude AI 🔎 Search: Kagi Search 💬 Chat: iMessage (WhatsApp when abroad) 🔖 Bookmarks: AnyBox 👓 Read It Later: Inoreader 📜 Word Processing: Ulysses, Craft 📊 Spreadsheets: Numbers 🛝 Presentations: Keynote 🛒 Shopping Lists: Reminders 🧑🍳 Meal Planning: None 💰 Budgeting & Personal Finance: Numbers 🗞️ News: La Presse (Apple News for English news) 🎶 Music: Apple Music 🎧 Podcasts: Apple Podcasts 🔐 Password Management: iCloud Keychain & Apple Passwords 👨🏻💻 Blog hosting: Ghost, Micro.blog, Scribbles.page 🌐 Web Services: Cloudflare, Chillidog Hosting, DigitalOcean
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On Tahoe Icons
Just finished reading “It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons”, which many UI design pundits and non-UI experts, as well as simple, passionate Mac users, have been referring to a lot recently. I appreciate the documentation effort. It’s really well done. Very convincing. But…
Designers age and are gradually replaced by a younger generation. Whether you like it or not, they bring new beliefs (justified or not), design principles (better or not), and values (questionable or not). Recently, there’s a trend where software appears much less crafted than it once was. Everything seems thrown together, flat. And still…
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An Important Lesson
When I started my studies in computer science over 40 years ago, we learned to read functional specifications and then translate them into machine instructions (COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, etc.). It was the training of a programmer. I knew that one day I could become the person who writes functional specifications. I didn’t become a programmer, nor did I work in the development world.
Due to my recent experience with Claude AI, Claude Code, and Vercel to create custom applications, I realize that I have become the one who writes functional specifications, but for processing by artificial intelligence. What does this tell me about the profession of a software developer? The need to write specifications remains essential, if not more so, even with powerful tools like AI. I think it’s a valuable lesson.
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On OpenRouter.ai
I just finished reading about the service openrouter.ai. I was curious to understand the purpose of this service as well as its business model. I saw several instances of this service being used in n8n workflows. The problem I see with this service is that it makes the consistency of the quality of responses from the requested LLMs even more unpredictable. Each request could be handled by LLMs with different characteristics and performance from one time to another. I’ll pass on this, but I still learned something tonight.
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Launching Numeric Citizen Blog Digests
Today, I’m excited to share my latest idea and creation: a website collecting my Micro.blog posts, monthly digests. What, another website? Yup.
In case you didn’t know, Micro.blog has a newsletter capability. My blog offers readers the opportunity to subscribe to a monthly blog post digest delivered to their inboxes. Plus, each digest is also available as a webpage (here’s the index page if you are curious). It’s a great way to get a quick overview of everything I published for a specific month. Of course, the whole thing is searchable.
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And the next n8n project is?
My next project with n8n automation is to build a replacement for Mailbrew. 🫣 I’m facing many architectural decisions:
- How do I fetch content (web or RSS feeds)?
- How do I extract articles for more efficient summarization?
- How do I combine the results?
- How do I control the size of the summary?
- Do I need some form of temporary data persistence within the workflow?
- How do I minimize LLM credits usage?
- Should I use an n8n data table for storing data sources and loop through them one by one?
- Where do I send the summary and how (Telegram, Discord, Email)?
…and probably a few more decisions to ponder!
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MacUpdate Is Dead?
From MacUpdate website:
Unfortunately MacUpdater 3’s promised lifetime of “until 2026-01-01” is now over. There will be no MacUpdater 4 or any continuation of the MacUpdater product from us. Our daily maintenance has been stopped and we don’t verify updates anymore. MacUpdater 3.5 is now unsupported but free-to-use including all previous “Pro” features.
WTF?? 😩
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Let's Start 2026!
This is my first post of the year on Micro.blog. Despite the overall global, political, and economic challenges that don’t seem very promising, I am personally looking forward to 2026.
Travel-wise, I have four planned: Egypt, Mexico, France & Thailand. This could also be a productive year for photography. I’m looking forward to those trips as we celebrate our 20-year relationship, my wife and I. 😊
Tech-wise, it’s the year of the iPhone upgrade. After skipping the iPhone 16 and iPhone 17, it’s time to upgrade my capable but aging iPhone 15 Pro Max. I expect to stay on the Max. It could also be the year when I replace my M2 MacBook Air with the M5 version. It will depend on the available money and other factors. Lastly, if Apple finally release a HomePod with a screen, I might get one, too. 💻
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In 2026, I’ll Keep an Eye On…
I’m already turning my attention to 2026, in no particular order:
- Ghost.org next moves, now that are a better Fediverse citizen.
- Plausible Analytics, which seems to be overkill for my needs but I might find a use for their service exposure via their APIs.
- Craft because they finished the year with a bang and I’m super anxious to learn what’s next.
- Apple because of Apple Intelligence and Siri promised updates. Will they deliver? They are the underdog right now but it could serve them well in the end. Remember the Mp3 players market before the iPod? I do. I don’t want another features rush but a bug-fix bonanza. Will they deliver? I have my doubts. What’s next for Photomator and Pixelmator?
- Micro.blog might also surprise me with features like RSS reader integration. Who knows.
- Anthropic and OpenAI offerings… will they keep the pace? Will they slow down? Will they surprise us? Will they crash? Is enshittification on our way?
- Inoreader is also evolving at a steady pace and I wonder if it will continue in 2026.
- Things to-do manager: will it turn to version 4?
So much fun is awaiting, I’m sure.
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Craft & Inoreader in 2025
In 2025, two notable apps or services received numerous and meaningful updates: Craft and Inoreader.
Craft received long-awaited tag support, with APIs and MCP support added. The latter two are quite transformative, and I expect 2026 to bring many new users to the app. Personally, I’m barely scratching the surface of Craft APIs. Craft is at the center of everything that I create, and I couldn’t think of a better app to support my creative journey.
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And Now Microblog Poster Web App is Live!
It’s a web app (on Vercel) just for me to use so that I can write blog posts on the go with a clean UI. It’s my second web app on Vercel built entirely with Claude AI.
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Who's Right?
Apparently, web analytics is not an exact science. Here are three web analytics versions of the same period: from November 23rd to December 23rd (Top: Ghost Analytics, Middle: Plausible Analytics, and Bottom: Tinylytics). Plausible feels conservative, with about half as many unique visitors as Ghost, while Tinylytics seems to overestimate. The patterns are barely the same, too. Who’s right?
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Consuming AI Can Be Expensive
While experimenting with n8n and LLM services, I realize that using artificial intelligence can become a very costly hobby. The fact that the consumption of these services relies on two separate offerings — the subscription to the interactive service and on-demand billing for APIs — requires careful management and wise choices of providers.
Currently, I use ChatGPT and Claude AI in interactive mode, but I also need a provider to access AI via APIs. This latter mode of consumption is particularly expensive if you’re not careful.
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My Learning Approach
Still exploring n8n, slowly but systematically. Because I’ll be using all sorts of external services like Craft, Micro.blog, Ghost, Inoreader, my strategy is to do individual integration tests instead of trying to build a biggy workflow and find all sorts of errors. Each of these micro experiments is forming the building blocks of something bigger. This approach is not different from the one I used for building iPhone apps and learning Objective-C and Interface Builder back in the day. I guess I’m a bottom-up kind of guy when it comes to understanding this kind of stuff.
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Goodbye, IFTTT
It was a memorable, long journey. I officially shut down my IFTTT account tonight after over five years of use. It wasn’t costly, but I have the feeling that IFTTT started to trail behind competitive offerings like Zapier, Make and now n8n. It wasn’t the most user-friendly for debugging issues. Now, I’m turning my focus towards n8n. In the coming days and weeks, it will be my next digital playground for experimentation.
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Learning in the Age of AI
From solitary trial-and-error development to confident AI-assisted learning. Continue reading →
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Saved 50 Minutes
Realmac Software shared their latest dev talk video. The video title mentions conversations about future plans for Elements. I was curious because I want to know where they are going with the CMS and RSS. I headed to YouTube and asked AI the following question: did they mention CMS? In a few seconds, I got my answer: yes, and they also talked about better support for RSS, which is something I’ve been waiting for. I didn’t watch the video; I already had the information I wanted. I saved 50 minutes of my time.
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On Tony Fadell For Apple's New CEO
Tony Fadell may seem like a nostalgic choice to replace Tim Cook at Apple, but the company’s current state suggests a focus on design, like during Steve Jobs’ era, could be more beneficial. Continue reading →
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Think Different
I understand the enthusiasm for AI among certain groups of workers, especially in the field of information technology and more specifically software development. However, I believe that caution is necessary for most other categories of employment. Enthusiasm cannot simply be transferred systematically and literally to every domain, whether technological or not. Contexts differ greatly, professions are highly diverse, and even small variations in requirements can reduce the applicability of AI to nearly zero. We should remain critical of this overflow of passion and the promised revolution; by doing so, we might help avoid the potential bubble that increasingly seems to be forming right under our noses.
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