VERSION 4 of Norman's Oven is HERE!

It's been a while since I last updated this site (No more Leptos). I updated the API and internal management site as well. API and mgmt were still using node.js, until now! Now, we are all rust powered using Snapfire, XWM, HTMX, Actix Web and Tera 2. AI played a big part in why this worked so well and how the data transfer was so easy and fast.

Personally, I've never would've bothered with anything of this, but the advent of AI made me very ambitious. Snapfire and Snapfir...

Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 have been much better than Gemini Pro hands down. Fable is miles ahead, it can look at Opus output and break out of the mold of limited closed minded thinking. Opus will say these are the 3 choices and Fable will be like nah, you have another choice and Fable is always the better choice over Opus 5. Fable also knows when to stop which further highlights why it is better for planning.

Opus 5 likes to do way more than needed and forget your CLAUDE.md exists, it's annoying. It was a problem ...

I've talked about how new libraries come in with high performance claims and how chasing high performance means making sacrifices here and there. Each little correctness compromise claws back each shortcut and regresses new library back. It plays out every once in a while. Knowing when to stop trying to optimize just because the AI told you so is for the best.

If I told you how many times AI was happy to optimize for the task and throw away constraints, I'd be a trillionaire. AI has no principles, it's there...

High Performance is elusive, not because you can't reach it, but because the sacrifices you must make to get there. There's always some hidden sacrifice you must make, going fast is not cost-free no matter what library sells that snake oil to you.

Dashmap, a self declared high perf map, hands you a footgun, the worst kind of footgun in a concurrent hashmap. It doesn't matter what experience level you are, you will shoot yourself in the foot.

The footgun is in the form of a shard lock whenever you grab a value...

I'm not saying that there were guarantees before, but given the speed of creation of software these days, expect many many many bugs and demotivated maintainers.

It's never the intention of the human or AI to add bugs to the software, but given the murkiness of how software is created where you go through a first version then iteration after iteration in hopes of bug free USEFUL software, well let's just say most AI-assisted or driven software development won't go through this because it's hard to find users...

Like the 3d Printers, the Internet, Television, the factories, the copy writer, the Printing Press before it, it does not change the core calculus of value. Worthless is still worthless, but just faster and amplified.

AI is an amplifier. An amplifier for many sectors. You still need ideas, money and community. Without these, you are going nowhere.

No idea?, AI will bring you towards the average. Worthless if anyone can do it.

No money? AI needs money. Material, rent, operational costs are still there.

No commun...

I don't even pick up the phone and they leave these AI scam call for a personal loan that i supposedly applied for or got rejected for or whatever. The funny thing is they don't even try to impersonate a real bank or loan provider nor do know your name. Why would anyone trust these idiots when their voice messages are very impersonal and general. I have no clue. Why are they burning through so much money doing this anyway given all the numbers they use, my god. How many of you f**king idiots are falling for...

Gemini 2.5 Pro March 2025 was the peak of Gemini. Ever since that, it's gone down hill. Somewhere around Summer '25 it regained some of that intelligence, but since Gemini 3 Pro Preview... yikes. Gemini 3 Pro is just not generally smart, it is so specialized and trash. You have to give it so much steering and explicitly tell it forcefully to stop going in a direction worse than any Gemini I have used.

It's really f**king annoying that they turned it into a coding LLM. That's not what the first 2.5 Pro was. T...

2025 was definitely something new, something different. 2025 was supposed to be the year of two financial related apps, but hah I failed at that. I failed because I discovered Gemini 2.5 Pro. 2025 didn't produce the two services I imagined, instead it culminated in the production of an entire ecosystem of open source MPL 2.0 licensed projects. It was a year where I produced far more than I ever imagined. There's no way I've would have been able to do all of this on my own in 10 or 20 years.

I've focused my a...

I find the idea of building (also with) frameworks these days annoying and boring because of churn. The problem with building a framework is that you are not going to be building it for general use, only your use cases. Once you want to expand the scope of your framework because you had a moderately good experience using it in your last project, you'll find yourself wanting to expand things but in a way that breaks the old, so now you have churn.

It's funny because when you build with front end frameworks li...