Today
- This year Elon Musk has started banging the drum about building AI datacenters in space. As the only person who owns a successful space company and a (moderately) successful AI company, this is a sensible way to boost his profile and net worth. Is it a sensible way to build...
Yesterday
- tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi: so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years. Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, especially in Europe. For a while,...
- In retrieval, we know the lego pieces well. Embeddings. Rerankers. Query understanding. BM25. All the parts we put together in the standard stack. But a new power is rising: agentic search models. LLMs trained specifically on controlling the search task. Compared to GPT-5 and...
- Increasingly humans delegate writing code to agents. Will there even be source code in the future? To wrestle with this question, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a...
- Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”: the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction...
- Thinking Machines just released Interaction Models. This is their first real AI model release1 after a year of work and two billion dollars of capital. What is an “interaction model”? First, it’s not a frontier model. Thinking Machines is not yet competing with OpenAI, Anthropic...
- 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. May 11, 2026 I’m reading Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue, a chronicle replete with electrifying encounters. This is a book...
- May 11, 2026 For almost 20 years I’ve maintained a journal for my family. I recently met someone interested in this practice, so I’m documenting it here for both them and anyone else that might benefit from it. Why I journal Our memories are not only terrible, but they’re...
This week
- Yesterday, I wrote about the massive increase in security issues being identified by AI. Daniel Stenberg, the author of curl, was a key part of that story. At first he was being overwhelmed by a torrent of “AI slop” reports. In the last few months, the reports have become almost...
- I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions. Now I’m gonna post another example. On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the icons you’re looking at. Previously, I...
- No matter how you feel about AI, it’s changing the world of software. The “T” in ChatGPT was invented to improve language translation, and large language models (LLMs) are very good at this. Interestingly, translating between French and Japanese is effectively the same as...
- OpenAI winding down fine tuning is an interesting development and one to watch. On one hand, model maximalists will argue the largest models keep getting better at more things, so the need to adjust the weights of them is less necessary. On the other hand, the big labs keep...
- May 10, 2026 Chris Morgan is tired of people tacking query strings onto his URLs — e.g. www.robinsloan.com/lab/?like=this&and=this—so he’s set his website up to reject those requests outright, rather than suffer in silence. Naturally, anybody is free to set up their server in...
- In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment1 is partly a backlash to two unrelated events around the rise of ChatGPT: the crypto mania of 2022 and the pro-Donald-Trump push many big tech CEOs made in 2024. If the timing had been...
- Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create problems...
- I started running about a year ago. I had always hated the idea of it. I started anyway because I needed some exercise and running was the only thing I could practically fit in. No gym, no kit faff, no booking anything. Put shoes on, leave house. For the first six months I did...
- Incidents are boring. Most of what you actually do during an incident is wait: for some other team to investigate, or for a deploy to finish, or for the result of some change to become apparent, or for someone else who’s been paged to come online. It’s stressful, but there’s...
- GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted....
- There weren’t a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday’s Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they’ve struck with SpaceX/xAI to use …
- Dwarkesh Patel1 recently posted an award for the best answers to four key questions about AI. It’s partly a challenge and partly a job interview, since some of the winners will get offered a role as a “research collaborator”. I don’t want the job, but I do want to write down my...
- The Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC) document sitting in your governance folder is one of the most useful tools in the business. Most orgs never use it that way. They treat it as a compliance box ticking exercise, and teams see it as a governance burden at best. The SDLC is a...
- This is the seventh chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you! Starting with release 1.4, SQLAlchemy includes support for asynchronous programming with...
- I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my …
- I’m at Anthropic’s Code w/ Claude event in 2026, and I’ll be live blogging the keynote and a few other notes throughout the day.
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