SwordSearcher 10

SwordSearcher 10

I released SwordSearcher 10 today.

The main new feature is something I’ve been thinking about for close to twenty years: natural language Bible search.

Take this example: what if you want to find verses that talk about morning thoughts? How do you make a keyword search for that? You really can’t.

And how does someone who is new to the Bible find verses with keywords that they don’t yet know exist? They can’t.

This can be solved with semantic searching and indexing techniques that came out of information search and retrieval, and web search research.

So now in SwordSearcher, you can use the Find Verses About search feature to look up “morning thoughts” to find Psalm 5:3:

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.

And Psalm 143:8

Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.

So instead of constructing keyword searches, you can just describe what you’re looking for in plain language. SwordSearcher finds the verses that are semantically similar to what you type, not just the words. It means you can search without having to think in keywords.

Of course, precision is still vital. Keyword search isn’t going away. But I hope this feature makes finding verses you can vaguely recall, or finding verses based on a concept, much easier than ever before.

There’s a lot more than this in the new release, so take a look.

Writing Software Without Writing Code

November 2025. That’s when we officially “got there.”

Any software developer who is not learning how to make the most of these tools is going to find themselves left behind in short order.

I have never been an “AI optimist;” I’ve always thought of AI as glorified autocomplete.

That changed when I tried Claude Code + Opus 4.5 at the end of 2025.

I’m not speaking just for effect when I say that software development has changed, practically overnight, and it will never be the same again.

If you’re a skeptic, read this article:

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-writes-almost-all-code-what

Woke up too early, decided to take a picture of the moon.

The Moon, Waning Gibbous, 80%.

This image is composed of 30 stacked frames taken without a tripod. The exposure was decent at f/11, 1/1600 and ISO 1600 using a lens at 500mm. I would have preferred a slower shutter speed (with lower ISO) but did not feel like setting up the tripod at 4am. Stacking was used to align the images and average out the noise, then some processing was done to bring out more detail and color.