About
A Smattering of Stories by Chris GathercoleChris Gathercole has spent 25+ years in tech, spanning product management, engineering leadership, and strategy. Oh, and AI. These articles are informed by that experience.
Find him on LinkedIn.
Colophon
In publishing, a colophon is a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book — Wikipedia
These sections are extracted from the full colophon.
The Pretensions
The ‘professional’, work-related posts are very much a collaboration between myself and a couple of different AI systems. I’m making no claim of “100% human!” in this tranche of content.
I’m trying to achieve the best understanding I can of a topic, present it in a comprehensible way, with no egregious gaps or assorted misses or misunderstandings, in my own voice. Something that I can be proud of. Definitely not something I lazily offload in its entirety to ChatWhatever and unthinkingly click SEND.
The wording is (almost) all mine. The tone definitely is. I favour the spittle-inflected rant, the borderline rude, angry old man shouts at clouds, approaches. I still enjoy the writing part.
I have found a great delight in achieving a “greater than the sum of the parts” feeling from my AI-enhanced discussions, particularly with Claude Code. Once you coerce Claude (Opus) into not immediately trying to build things, and settle into discussion mode, bouncing ideas off Claude, spin off research, summarising, fan out, fan in, etc, all being captured in a discussion doc… well, the resulting discussions leave me feeling better informed and thinking more clearly about whatever the topic was (or turned out to be).
There are numerous little rituals we have collaborated towards which leave me feeling confident(ish) that I’m not being led astray. This is vibe-discussing (as no-one is calling it) and I am very happy with it. Would recommend.
These Pretensions posts are by the best me I can achieve with the current tech. I stand by them. Mistakes are mine to own. The arguments and points within are what I find personally relevant, interesting, and provocative. I would love to discuss any of these face-to-face with anyone who cares.
There will be a post about this.
The Site
Initially, and many years ago, this was a personal exploration of the possibilities of static site generators. GitHub Pages, and Jekyll, were chosen largely because the “free website” aspect, and that it was based on Ruby, my then favourite language.
Years passed, my home pcs changed, and it became more and more awkward and time-consuming to keep a local build of the site running, which remains a weakness of Ruby, sadly. Until I couldn’t (be bothered), and we had reached full stagnation.
Personal preferences had changed, and I was no longer interested in the minutiae. I just wanted it, or something to work. Some desultory investigations into upgrading, or switching to a new SSG, ensued, but nah. Too much of a faff. Stagnation continued.
And then vibe-coding became a thing. And Claude Code, in particular. One evening, in about 30mins, we had the local site build running, and then an hour later (ish) we had upgraded (as far as the seemingly not-for-much-longer Jekyll approach would allow), tweaked, and deployed to live. Fan-bloody-tastic.
Full of enthusiasm, mainly because I no longer have to care about the details, we have extended and restructured the content architecture to import my LinkedIn articles.
And here we are.
Copyright
All content on this site is by Chris Gathercole and licensed under a Creative Commons, ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
You are free to copy, adapt, and share this work as long as you attribute stories.upthebuzzard.com, don’t use it commercially, and share any derivatives under the same terms.
P.S., many thanks to Cory Doctorow for responding to an email out of the blue from a complete stranger who had some questions about his Creative Commons philosophy, and pointing out some useful articles to said stranger.