Today
- (This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base...
- Solod (So) is a subset of Go that translates to regular C — with zero runtime, manual memory management, and source-level interop. It's designed for two main audiences:Go developers who want low-level control without having to learn another language.C developers who like Go's...
Yesterday
- Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview. (If you like the interview, you should read his book.) Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups...
- In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM....
This week
- The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development. I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and...
- Top of mind for engineering leaders: what to do about the growing code review load, and how devs are starting to review code less thoroughly than before? Many questions, but few proven solutions....
- In the two previous posts, we learned about chain complexes and their homology groups. We are now ready for another foundational concept needed to understand QEC from a topological perspective: in this copost, we dive into cohomology! When learning about the surface code, we saw...
- Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this. Suppose some genius figures out artificial intelligence in a late-night coding session on their laptop. Because they’re a genius, they’re smart enough to...
- 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. July 22, 2026 What a SENTENCE from the gnomic Fringe Report: A nervous system is a good place to keep a word warm. !!! The short post...
- 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. July 22, 2026 I really like this prompt/provocation from Rex Sorgatz: Imagine you were the only person on earth with access to AI. No one else...
- This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …
- Even if you are as averse to semver as I used to be in the course of my programming activity, you can still think of open source software distribution as something that used to follow a fixed number of steps. There is a branch where developments happen, and this branch...
- SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
- Open and Async is the practical playbook for making remote and distributed work actually work—two habits, working in the open and communicating asynchronously, drawn from a decade of remote-first lessons at GitHub....
- With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They have five headline findings: Code generation is no longer the bottleneck —...
- Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World’s Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. We talked about Claude …
- The lofi girl was right Sometimes, fighting for a change isn’t worth it. You try. Again and again. And as hard as you can. So you speak up. Naively, you assume others will care. that people value integrity. That a company thrives when its employees do....
- A software factory is harnessing loops at scale - the system that builds your software instead of you. You can run the loop with humans in it (light factory) or you can ignore the humans (dark factory) and let those agents scope, build and ship code, without anyone really...
- Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP A paper! Our new paper, Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP, is now available on Arxiv. I’m excited about this one: it’s a fully end-to-end look at how Aurora DSQL works, from query processing, to transactions, to replication, to the...
- Hey, Niki here. This is a bit unusual. My sabbatical is coming to an end, and I am looking for a new opportunity. Full-time or contract, startup or research, remote or Berlin, individual contributor, ideally—tight team, ambitious product. I am a software engineer first and...
- What is usage-based billing? Tokens, credits, and outcomes, explained in the controlled language of aircraft manuals. The unit changes. The meter does not. The post What is usage-based billing? Tokens, credits, and outcomes, explained in Simplified Technical English appeared...
- A delayed education on the trenches and scales of suffering...
- Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro: Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning these habits of...
- There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something...
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