Today
- AI coding assistants respond to whoever is prompting, and the quality of what they produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating the instructions that govern AI interactions (generation, refactoring, security, review) as...
- So I got an email earlier, which you’ll find out about in my next post, which made me think “hey, the reply to this would make a great blog post”, and then I thought “…and it would be even better if people could add their own comments to it”, and so I plugged in the rather...
- One of the folks who joined my presenter workshop last week (which was awesome, by the way!) emailed me this morning with a follow-up question: I first saw you speak at DDD South-West in Bristol (it was the “There’s No Such Thing as Plain Text” talk), and what stuck with me was...
- I originally posted this as a Twitter thread in March 2018. It went viral, probably because Charles Stross quote-tweeted it with the comment “This thread. You read!” - yes, _that _Charles Stross. 😮 It was at https://twitter.com/i/web/status/976852582084808704, and I bookmarked...
- What a month! After losing a job at the end of January, I started looking for a new one straight away. Seeking a new job nowadays is very different from how it used to be. Very long, multi-step and mentally draining processes are the new norm. The recent explosion of AI tools...
- I used to post a lot of stuff on Twitter when it was good. It’s all still on there somewhere, and I have archives of it all, but I’m reposting this thread, which I originally wrote back in 2019. Partly because I dug it out of some archives tonight and thought “hey, that’s not...
- Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to ourselves and other people based on these stages): the design phase, the coding phase, the testing phase, the integration phase,...
- I wrote yesterday about some visual changes I’d noticed in Apple’s 26.4 series of OSs. Today I noticed that I’d missed a couple of real doozies, both related to the new mega-corners in macOS Tahoe. First up, Apple fixed the corner resizing area! It’s not surprising that this is...
Yesterday
- I’m Robin Sloan, a writer, printer, & manufacturer. The best thing to do here is sign up for my email newsletter: This website doesn’t collect any information about you or your reading. It aspires to the speed and privacy of the printed page. Don’t miss the colophon. Hony...
- See below for links to recent things that have made me think. It’s quite the mix of mediums (animated videos, short posts, letters, and 6-hour podcasts), but it wasn’t until I gathered them that I noticed a recurring theme: sacrifice Sometimes the world imposes constraints on...
- To evaluate search we typically build a judgment list We transform clickstream data into evaluation data This labels a result......
- Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it: Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely …
- Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature....
This week
- Apple recently updated all their OSs to 26.4, and there were plenty of Liquid Glass updates. Most of them for the better! Here are some of the changes that stood out to me, as well as a bit more grumbling about Liquid Glass in general (sorry). When I last wrote about Liquid...
- I read three recent technical reports from Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5 paper, Cursor's Composer 2 report and blog post, and Chroma's Context-1 write-up. Each report introduces something distinct. Kimi K2.5 trains an Agent Swarm where the model learns to decompose tasks into parallel...
- I’ve worked on a lot of unpopular products. At Zendesk I built large parts of an app marketplace that was too useful to get rid of but never polished enough to be loved. Now I work on GitHub Copilot, which many people think is crap1. In between, I had some brief periods where I...
- I have a new laptop—a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be very capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided …
- Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development....
- According to the FT, demand for software engineers is rising again, and in relative terms is outperforming the wider jobs market. That’s the headline most people will take away. But the more important detail is that the growth is concentrated in more experienced roles, while...
- The shift from conductor to orchestrator: how to coordinate teams of AI coding agents in real-world software workflows. From subagents to Agent Teams to purpose-built orchestration tools, this talk covers the patterns, tools, and discipline required to thrive in the era of...
- A few days ago I wrote and published a blog post about how Swift interacts with C projects, using Raylib. Somehow, much to my delight, it has been posted on multiple social networks, like Reddit and Hackernews. Yesterday, again, I was bored. So I tried....
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. March 26, 2026 This is a genuinely interesting document: the Claude chat transcript, very well-presented, from a software developer’s...
- What about juniors? Start at the beginning. Last week I wrote about how the role of the most senior tech ICs has changed. Today, I wanted to share some thoughts on a more difficult topic: how the role of junior software engineers, folks just starting out on their career, has...
- Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI pessimists, divided into separate...
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