Yesterday
- I'm currently working on migrating my open source projects from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. As part of this effort I often end up looking through the Forgejo source code to figure out if there are hidden ways to configure certain things to my liking when I can't do...
- Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day. Then, like I do with so many things, I let it sit...
- Modern IDEs let you jump from project to project with ease. Neovim doesn’t have this feature, so folks usually keep a few terminal windows or tabs open or jump between Zellij or tmux multiplexer panes. As you can imagine, there are also a gazillion plugins to fill this gap. None...
- 25 Aug, 2026 I write about journaling a lot, since it’s honestly my most important practice. In my most recent post on the subject I made the case that active recall is an effective way to remember things, whether that be ideas, thoughts, or events. I'd like to expand on that...
This week
- 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...
- 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,...
Last week
- 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...
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