Today
- The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car....
Yesterday
- Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps—sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and …
- Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. more…...
- TL;DR Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code Remix, hosted by Moderne. It was one of the more interesting panels I’ve done,...
- LLMs receive sequences of token IDs instead of raw text. For example, the GPT-2 tokenizer encodes what's the weather in goldshire? into [10919, 338, 262, 6193, 287, 3869, 10932, 30].While it's a small part of the overall latency of a modern LLM call, tokenization does sit on the...
- “Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem with workslop is that the effort…
- Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash: Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it. And here’s John...
- Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 “sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks”. Their announcement spends a notable …
- Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of signs of AI writing. That page points out that: Humans are...
This week
- 01 Sep, 2026 Hi friends, In August, Scour scoured 878,974 articles from 28,519 feeds. Also, 219 users signed up since my last product update email at the end of June so welcome to you all! If you've been enjoying Scour and would be willing to put a quote on the testimonials...
- The pace of change in software engineering is only accelerating, especially since January of this year. This is all to do with the industry-wide adoption of LLMs, AI tooling, and AI infrastructure. At The Pragmatic Engineer, we always want to capture as much of what’s going on...
- Frontier coding agents can compose shell workflows that replace entire catalogs of file tools. Here is what changes when Bash becomes the primary execution interface....
- Making and breaking grids I’ve been doing more front-end coding this year than I have in a while and every time I come back to write markup and CSS, it feels like there are new tricks. We’re closing in on the 30th anniversary of CSS (already a little past 30 years since Håkon...
- Five commands to install OpenClaw 2.0, connect Gemini 3.7 Flash, and start chatting with Google Search grounding in your terminal and web dashboard....
- It was a good month for me. Very productive, slower than usual. When the rest of the world races, folks go faster, produce more than ever with all these modern tools, I find more joy in doing precisely the opposite. My friend inspired me to re-watch a decades-old conference talk...
- Models are designed, not born. Over the last few weeks I’ve been increasingly annoyed by the media coverage of the OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face and other similar incidents. Articles recounting the event maximize the agency of the models while minimizing, if...
- Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media: “Just...
- OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here’s what I’ve figured out …
- Some time ago I visited a used book fair and came across this awesome piece of 80s scifi-asthetic. This book is a collection of short stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem originally published in 1964. Its English title is The Cyberiad. One story, about Trurl's electronic...
- In this second Forgejo Hack installment I'll tell you how to connect a git repository that lives in your self-hosted Forgejo instance to Read the Docs, so that commits to the repository automatically trigger documentation builds, exactly like it works with GitHub....
- I was catching up on my RSS feed and saw this post from The Pen Addict. In it, Brad Dowdy mentions some updates to his Analog Defaults page. That’s a cool idea, so I set one up, too. I also thought this would be a good excuse for me to write about notebook preferences for...
- In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they…
- My biased search expert perspective on where new AI teams run into expensive and unfortunate mistakes...
- Z.AI ran a full model release on domestically manufactured Chinese chips. Impressive, but EUV lithography is a hard wall and the gap with Western inference hardware is more likely to widen than close....
Rows per page
