Today
- I’ve written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents—the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents …
- Andrej Karpathy sees a widening gap in how people see LLM capabilities. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of...
- Many people think that getting “good at AI” is trivial. Sure, with some early models there were tricks you had to learn, but current models don’t need them…
Yesterday
- People get surprised when I mention that I currently maintain not one, not two, but 18 open source projects. For most of my career I handled this work on the side of a day job, but with my day job now gone I am dedicating more time to open source. This is my attempt to advertise...
- 27 Oct, 2026 A couple of weeks ago I quietly removed the upvote count from the discovery feed on Bear. The upvote button is still there on every post, and upvotes still decide what ends up on Trending. You just can’t see the numbers next to each post anymore. I made the change...
- If a design system’s components are slow to interact with, so are any apps built with it. I timed large dropdowns and checkbox lists in some popular design systems, worked out how to make the slow ones faster, and wrote tests that fail when they’re too slow....
- AI tools are only as good as the docs you feed them. Bold text isn't a heading to a model. Here's the fix, plus two free converters....
- The internet is becoming a more dangerous place, and fast. LLMs are only getting better at identifying security issues, and more people are taking advantage of this. Some people argue that LLMs will eventually make large-scale vulnerabilities a thing of the past. I’m not so...
This week
- There’s a lot to miss about Arc (RIP), but the feature I miss the most has got to be automatic picture-in-picture. You start a video and when you change tabs to jump to another task, the video anchored itself to the corner of your desktop. Go back to the video tab and it slurps...
- Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So...
- Want to prove you’ve improved search? Build a golden set of query-document pairs. Then begin experimenting. Or so you’re told. I wrestle mightily with search evals. Improvements on golden sets don’t always translate to better user experience. Sadly, futzing with ‘better’ evals...
- A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play...
- Recently, someone rebuilt a famous and expensive piece of software with an AI agent, and published it for free. Thousands of people installed it. It made a lot of noise, and kicked off a whole “Reverse-Engineer-Everything” trend. Almost no one read the source. The author had not...
- Bryan Cantrill has a great line from a talk where he cautions against anthropomorphizing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I think it’s also a mistake to treat any tech…
- The Job is Knowing When to Be Deterministic & When to Be Probabilistic This week, I gave a short talk at AGNTCon titled, “Context Fails & Fixes,” that functioned as a sort of “State of Context Engineering.” How did context engineering emerge, where has it gone, and where might...
- I spent the last few days decompiling my favorite computer game: Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator. But when I was a kid in 2004, I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't...
- Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes Pretty pictures help us learn, maybe? One of the things I love using LLMs for is helping me understand systems better. In the Strands Decider post I wrote about how I often ask ask me questions to check I understand...
- Good friends and family know this, but I am bad at email. Like chronically bad. If you have tried to email me, you know this too and you either never got a reply or received one 9-months later starting with the phrase, “Sorry.” I am truly sorry… but also I’m not. It’s a function...
- Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be…
- Herman's blog Home Now Projects Blog 22 Oct, 2026 People use the word just a lot when talking about problems. If people would just drive slowly near schools. If people would just pay their taxes. If people would just follow the rules. It's a sentence that sounds reasonable as...
- Git had too many performance problems at 30,000 PRs per day, so Anthropic built its own. I talked with the team, including asking why they didn’t open source its new system, ‘Scion.’...
- I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to...
- I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at...
- Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to...
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