Rian van der Merwe's bloghttps://elezea.com/https://elezea.com/2026/04/two-small-new-things-on-the-blog/https://elezea.com/2026/04/two-small-new-things-on-the-blog/Two small improvements the WordPress migration unlocked: auto-posted side-project releases and per-content-type RSS feeds.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:29:02 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/discogs-mcp-v3-2-0/https://elezea.com/2026/04/discogs-mcp-v3-2-0/Adds `search_discogs` for catalog-wide queries beyond your own collection, plus two real-world accuracy fixes: owned-marker correctness across pressings, and…Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:58:22 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/tldl-v2-2-0/https://elezea.com/2026/04/tldl-v2-2-0/Two meaningful changes since v2.1.0. tldl now detects new podcast episodes directly from RSS feeds with conditional GETs instead of relying on Podcast Index…Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:59:50 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/what-actually-changed-about-being-a-pm/https://elezea.com/2026/04/what-actually-changed-about-being-a-pm/Fear-Driven Development, evals as the new PRD, and what actually shifts in the PM job when AI becomes part of the stack.Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:54:37 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/stand-out-of-our-light/https://elezea.com/2026/04/stand-out-of-our-light/Freedom depends on our ability to reclaim control over our attention from forces designed to exploit it.Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:07:15 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/is-hip-hop-in-decline-a-statistical-analysis/https://elezea.com/2026/04/is-hip-hop-in-decline-a-statistical-analysis/Streaming adoption patterns rather than changing preferences may explain hip-hop's declining chart share as late adopters bring other genres into the mix.Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:59:06 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/free-from-wordpress/https://elezea.com/2026/04/free-from-wordpress/After 15+ years on WordPress and Dreamhost, I migrated elezea.com to Astro and Cloudflare Pages in a weekend. AI-assisted planning is what finally made it possible.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:24:03 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/evals-are-the-new-prd/https://elezea.com/2026/04/evals-are-the-new-prd/For AI products, the eval replaces the PRD — it defines what good looks like and is the acceptance criteria.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:31:37 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/no-one-else-can-speak-the-words-on-your-lips/https://elezea.com/2026/04/no-one-else-can-speak-the-words-on-your-lips/Ben Roy on why LLMs can't write good essays: real writing is a bottom-up process of discovery, not a top-down application of what you already know.Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:17:00 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/zombie-flow/https://elezea.com/2026/04/zombie-flow/Derek Thompson traces the concept of "flow" from Csikszentmihalyi to the algorithmic feeds that simulate it, and argues the skill we need now is getting out of zombie flow, not into flow.Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:54:13 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/ai-might-actually-need-more-pms/https://elezea.com/2026/04/ai-might-actually-need-more-pms/Amol Avasare on why AI-accelerated engineering might increase the value of product managers, not replace them.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:51:22 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/04/eight-years-of-wanting-three-months-of-building-with-ai/https://elezea.com/2026/04/eight-years-of-wanting-three-months-of-building-with-ai/Lalit Maganti on building real software with AI — the slot machine addiction, the corrosion, and why design still needs a human.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:41:58 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/endgame-for-the-open-web/https://elezea.com/2026/03/endgame-for-the-open-web/Anil Dash defines the open web as the radical ability to create and share using open specs, free platforms, and no gatekeepers—and argues that every aspect of that architecture is now under coordinated attack.Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:57:15 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/negative-space-in-writing/https://elezea.com/2026/03/negative-space-in-writing/Tracy Durnell on how modern writing formats strip out the reflective pauses where readers build their own meaning.Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:14:41 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/agentic-manual-testing/https://elezea.com/2026/03/agentic-manual-testing/Two practical tips from Simon Willison on testing with coding agents: write demo files to /tmp to keep repos clean, and use red/green TDD to turn manually discovered bugs into permanent automated tests.Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:53:30 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/from-assistant-to-collaborator-how-my-ai-second-brain-grew-up/https://elezea.com/2026/03/from-assistant-to-collaborator-how-my-ai-second-brain-grew-up/Over the past few months my AI second brain crossed a threshold from tool I invoke to collaborator I dispatch — driven by multi-agent workflows, cross-session memory, and deep domain expertise.Sat, 14 Mar 2026 15:13:36 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry/https://elezea.com/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry/Research shows that "AI brain fry" — cognitive exhaustion from overseeing AI agents — is real, and that productivity actually dips after using more than three AI tools simultaneously.Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:58:45 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/ai-should-help-us-produce-better-code/https://elezea.com/2026/03/ai-should-help-us-produce-better-code/Shipping worse code with AI agents is a choice. Simon Willison and Mitchell Hashimoto both argue we should engineer our processes so agents make our code better, not worse.Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:43:35 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/on-meeting-your-child-again-and-again/https://elezea.com/2026/03/on-meeting-your-child-again-and-again/*Derek Thompson writes about three reasons to be a parent—the most compelling being that parenthood means constantly meeting new versions of your child, "a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme."*Sat, 07 Mar 2026 22:11:52 GMTRian van der Merwehttps://elezea.com/2026/03/why-its-still-valuable-to-learn-to-code/https://elezea.com/2026/03/why-its-still-valuable-to-learn-to-code/Carson Gross's essay on AI and junior programmers applies just as much to product managers: you can't build an effective AI-powered workflow until you've spent years developing the underlying judgment it's meant to amplify.Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:47:32 GMTRian van der Merwe