Kira Howe

August 202613 entries

2 posts/9 links/2 tools

August 4, 2026

Find accessible colours for the web (source)

Screenshot of selector for finding accessible colours

I finally got around to getting my website back up and running. Years ago now I started the process of re-building my website (yet again), this time as a link blog. I finally finished getting the machinery working and old content ported over, then of course had to bikeshed the UI for a few days. Anyway one thing I wanted was different colours for the different types of entries. But eyeballing them was leading to poor choices that were hard to read, so I built this tool to make it easier to find colours that still meet contrast requirements for readability on the web.

tool#accessibility#blogging#design#static-websites#ui#web-development

August 2, 2026

Have the models come full circle?

It feels like the big LLMs have come full circle. At first they were too naive to implement meaningful features autonomously and took so much handholding to get anything done it was quite a pain babysitting them. Then they got good enough to do meaningful software engineering work and there was (I now recognize in hindsight) a sweet spot at some point early this year where they got meaningfully better and good enough to take non-trivial work off my hands without causing dramatically more work. But now they're far too eager and require constant babysitting again. […2 min read]

post#agent-driven-development#ai-agents#ai-hype#ai-safety#coding-agents#developer-workflow#llms#software-engineering

August 1, 2026

Software Should Work Conference (via)

I’d never heard about this conference before, the talks look super interesting. I wish more people in the industry cared about working software. The bar seems to only be getting lower in this age of AI. I always love finding a batch of new people to follow and new conferences to daydream about attending.

link#conferences#quality#software-engineering