Today
- I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities. One of the points Klein made was that at no point did any of these...
- On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color. Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s kinda neat to be able to browse a wall of...
- There’s some talk today about how agentic coders are balking at Anthropic’s pricing and adopting alternatives. I was reminded of a thought I had in the weeks following Fable’s release: the free lunch was over. When Moore’s Law was in effect, it didn’t make sense to ruthlessly...
This week
- I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If…
- Aug 21, 2026 My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality The first time I tried to use an LLM to speed up coding was in mid-2025. I was not impressed. I was working on libadbmdns back then, an mDNS implementation in Rust. The code produced would not even compile. I...
- Agents can already edit their tools, skills, and harness. Recursive self-improvement still needs a system that can raise the verifier without capturing it....
- In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it doesn’t make the outputs any…
- I used an AI agent to make a big update to my GiftyWeddings.com website, taking it from a gift registry to a full website builder in 275 commits....
- In what was predictable: Meta’s layoffs and forced reassignments pushed engineers not impacted by either to look for a new job. Meta is now offering large equity retainers, and it doesn’t seem working...
- A software factory is a repeatable loop around software work. If you’re building a software factory, code good enough to ship still needs human taste and ownership. We’ll discuss this including whether you need a factory just yet. If so: You’ll likely need humans in the loop...
- In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface: this is the kind of thing that AI...
- Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of “How AI is changing software development”. We had a really great conversation. …
- TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The...
- Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes...
- I resigned. My last company, which worked in regulated industries (e.g. Defense) projects, became AI-first late December. Regular readers know my tiredness for genAI, its ethical failings, and how I think those tools are more destructive to the brain than the positive form. In...
- Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs...
- I made a smol client-side syntax highlighter that uses the CSS Custom Highlights API called MicroLighter. I’ll talk about why I made it in a bit but first I wanted to… ahem… highlight… some of the features. Zero-dependencies ~2kb minifed+gzipped Uses CSS ::highlight(token-name),...
- Anthropic recently announced that in compliance with a new EU AI generated content law, they will be watermarking content generated using their models. While there are differing opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing as well as excellent interactive explainers on how it...
- Yesterday, Stephen Hackett wrote about changes to the traffic light buttons in macOS Golden Gate beta 6. I think these new buttons are a big improvement, and the change gives me hope that other things could be “unflattened” in future versions of the OS. At the end of his post,...
- I’m writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country , covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard...
- Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an...
- Blog About Moonbound This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. August 18, 2026 A near-ubiquitous reference, or aspiration, for AI agents is J.A.R.V.I.S., the supercapable computer helper in the Iron Man...
- One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the computer Multivac, who evolves over the course of ten trillion years from a single datacenter to a...
- My book has a linter, ~5,500 automated checks, and a Pandoc pipeline that rebuilds five formats — EPUB, Kindle, paperback (×2), and web — on every git push. For a book one person wrote. Here's how I built and published it the way I ship software....
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