Blog
Welcome to the Blog.
Prompting Is Not Conversation
2026-04-13
The phrase “just talk to the model” is one of the most successful half-truths in the current AI boom. It is good onboarding and bad description: useful for getting people in the door, and deeply misleading the moment anything expensive, fragile, or embarassingly public depends on the answer.
Prompting is conversational only at the surface. Under real workloads it behaves much more like specification-writing for a probabilistic component inside a larger system, except the specification keeps pretending to be a chat. ... continue
Freedom Creates Protocol
2026-04-06
Natural-language AI was supposed to free us from syntax, ceremony, and the old priesthood of formal languages. Instead, the moment it became useful, we did what humans nearly always do: we rebuilt hierarchy, templates, rules, little rituals of correctness, and a fresh layer of people telling other people what the proper way is.
Natural language did not abolish formalism in computing. It merely shoved it upstairs, from syntax into protocol: prompt templates, role definitions, tool contracts, context layouts, reusable skills, and the usual folklore that grows around every medium once people start depending on it. ... continue
TP Toolchain 7: TPW -> Delphi
2026-03-13
The transition from Turbo Pascal for Windows (TPW) and Borland Pascal 7 to Delphi was not merely a product upgrade. It was a mindset shift: from procedural resource wrangling and manual message dispatch to a visual, component-based, and event-driven workflow. Developers who had mastered TPW’s message loops and resource scripts found themselves in a different world—one where the form designer and object inspector replaced the resource editor, and where component ownership and event handlers replaced explicit handle management.
This article traces that transition from the perspective of a practitioner who lived it. It covers workflow changes, delivery model shifts, debugging adaptations, and team process evolution. The goal is not nostalgia but practical guidance: what to watch for when migrating, what patterns hold, and what pitfalls to avoid. The TPW-to-Delphi path was well-traveled in the mid-to-late 1990s; the lessons learned then remain applicable to any transition from low-level, imperative UI development to a higher-level, component-based framework. This article assumes familiarity with TPW or BP7; readers new to that era may find Part 5 and Part 6 of this series useful for context. ... continue
TP Toolchain 6: Windows Transition
2026-03-13
Parts 1–5 mapped the DOS-era toolchain: workflow, artifacts, overlays, BGI, and the compiler/linker boundary from TP6 to TP7. This part crosses the platform divide. Object Pascal extensions, Turbo Pascal for Windows (TPW), and the move to message-driven GUIs forced a different kind of toolchain thinking. Same language family, new mental model.
This article traces that transition from a practitioner’s perspective: what stayed familiar, what broke, and what had to be relearned. We cover the historical milestones (TP 5.5 OOP, TPW 1.0, TPW 1.5, BP7), the technical culprits that bit migrating teams, debugging and build/deploy workflow differences, and the mental shift from sequential to event-driven execution. ... continue
VFAT Shortname Rules
2026-03-10
The second story begins with a floppy label that looked harmless:
RELEASE_NOTES_FINAL_REALLY_FINAL.TXT ... continue