Half of the conversations I’m having around software engineering lately is how are the people around you adopting agents. The other half is around doing more with less. The ones I am closest to we probably hit the same inflection points at the same time and are really hitting our strides in our phycosis phase. It does not feel like we are early adopters it feels like we are just using the things that are ready, filling in the gaps when we need. We are probably a few months behind the twitter curve at any moment in time. Here I am really taking a look at this article from Greg Huntley 1 year and 10 months after he wrote it. At the time I would have thought this guy is insane, 10 months ago I would have thought he was insane. An "oh fuck" moment in time Over the Christmas break, I’ve been critically looking at my own software development loop, learning a new programming language, and re-learning a language I haven’t used professionally in over… Geoffrey Huntley · ghuntley.com And for tho…
Yesterday my daughter and I were waiting for her practice to start and we wanted to play a game. She downloaded an app on her phone that allows you to record your voice and play it in reverse. Here’s the game we came up with. say a word in the recording play it back in reverse to the next person The next person says exactly what they hear without thinking Every single one was followed up with a Suppa Hot Fire Ahh hhh hh reaction by everyone around. They all sounded like complete gibberish, yet came out like the person was talking in a weird accent. Everyone was shocked to hear it was understandable what they were saying reversing their speech. Seriously give it a try Especially if you have kids, it’s so fun to have a small group of people speaking gibberish and out comes something understandable. Next Day The next day I was out with my son and telling him about how cool the game was and how you just gotta hear it to understand it. I was driving so I handed him my phone and said downloa…
Bastardica A type foundry for bastard web fonts. Bastardica · bastardica.mitpit.com Oh this is such a sick way to make a cool fontpack of random fonts.
I watched through this video earlier of this guy roasting t3.gg and his level of agentic ai brain rot. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZumXpZzDsgo I really do think this guy had a lot of valid comments about people not being able to look at long form content, not being able to focus long enough to read a page of ai output. Losing our ability to think critically. He points to some of t3.gg’s videos at certain points where Theo says, I’m not even going to read this I’m going to have the agent xyx and move on. The guy roasting Theo seems like a really smart guy, an academic kind of guy. A guy that really values knowledge. Mad props for this and his ability to avoid the brain rot. I think we have a lot of folks out there that are talking the talk without walking the walk. This guy seems genuine. He seems like he really knows what he is talking about and that he is still reading and writing every line of code himself. I think we still need people that can carry this torch. It’s going to be a lo…
dax (@thdxr) on X in the next version of OpenCode we added /btw which is a long awaited feature it lets you ask a quick question without interrupting the current session - i use it to get status updates on long run… X (formerly Twitter) · x.com oooh, excited for this upcoming feature to opencode to be able to gracefully ask a side question without interruption.
Lex Speedman — Lex at 2x, guest at 1x Play Lex Fridman Podcast episodes with Lex sped up and the guest at 1x by default. Lex Speedman · lexspeedman.com This is such a cool site. It parses lex’s transcript and sets the speed for lex and the guest at different speeds, so you can get through his super long episodes quicker without sacrificing the guest responses.
Justin Searls @searls /goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather so... justin․searls․co · justin.searls.co LOL, interesting I just heard DHH talk about how we needed goal for a minute blip in history, it did its job. Then new models come out trained on our use of it and the models just do it whether you ask for it or not it does not really matter much either way. /goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather some much easier objective was the real goal all along. — @justin
A quote from Linus Torvalds And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Will models become more stubborn as we use them more and feed us using them as long running agents where we simply ask for what seems to be an impossible task to be spit out by the almighty clanker with all of the time in the world to try every way possible, add obnoxious amounts of telemetry, and somehow digest the flood of data it brings back?
I have so much more appreciation for Hetzner after seeing how the sausage is made. Their drive for efficiency is unparalleled. Not top tier performance, straight up well done engineering on the things that matter. No showing off or fancy stuff. The way they rack up their machines on a piece of sheet metal, that Linus likened to a desktop PC case without the front and side panels was a chef’s kiss.
As always with Charity Majors this was a pretty great interview. Lots of repeat ideas with some good nuggets. One common new theme here is getting comfortable shipping code you have never seen before. Pointing out there are few real differences in the before and the now, a lot of the same principle apply to get the right #observability stack set up, the right deployment patterns setup. Now we don’t have a person that immediately jumps up and yells I wrote that, Sorry everyone, and has a fix in 2 minutes because they know the exact failure mode they caused in an instant. Charity truly believes the kids will be alright. She is working with some high school aged kids making some incredible projects right now. The industry will need to learn how to re-embrace juniors and the non grey-beards. Why I’m sharing this link.
A quote from Florian Herrengt But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net We are entering into dark times, dark times I tell ya. An era where we have all the greatest tools to build software by hand, with decades of experience to do it. Yet it’s a time where none of it matters. Machines can spit out glorious amounts of slop in an instant. They can do weeks of the average mans work in minutes. Yet the core principles still apply now more than ever. Observability into our production systems matter more than ever. Things are changing fast, and big. Prs are not the same size they used to be. We have not yet developed the tools and intuition into this new world to manage it effectively. This will come with time, but for now, these are dark times filled with the glitter and glisten of promise, hope, and shiny new things cranked out upon first thought
Hyrum’s Law Any implementation detail in your software will be depended on whether you like it or not. Parkinson’s law Work will expand to fill its space.
Helix has got to have one of the easiest configurations. It is this easy to get
the markata-go lsp in helix.
I had no idea how these pipes worked, I’ve accidentally spawned so many that have sat there and waited for something to come down the pipe, but did not know this was what was happening.
Every Dax Raad interview is worth a listen. This one does not disappoint. They talk about running local dev setups in a vm in the cloud. Always connected, seamlessly upgrading hardware without you needing to buy, sell, or trade a thing. They talk about the one model that drove them into psychosis, I’m pretty sure it was 5.6 sol, but it could not be revealed at the time. Software engineering is still required and alive and well, even in the agentic era.
Interesting thoughts from a real OG Kent Beck. He argues we are witnessing the biggest advancement in computing in 40 years. For 40 years we have been almost exclusively writing in compiled languages. Languages that output to some sort of binary compiled assembly instructions for each processor type. Before that it was all hand written instructions directly to CPU. Now we are seeing the genie revolution. The genie is good at writing in many different programming languages given English prompts. It loves to complete problems and is not afraid to write lots of code very quickly. It’s quite good at skirting around our best judgement in order to accomplish the goal we set. One takeaway from this talk is that NO ONE knows what the fuck is next. No one knows the best ways to use these things. Everyone has their own opinion wrapped around their experience that might be wildly different than yours. It seems clear this is changing every day in ways no one can measure, predict, or prepare for. So much sits in the hands of model labs and model providers. Without real access to any of it, it’s all magic.
The Internet I Grew Up With Doesn’t Exist Anymore A thorough retrospective of my time on the internet. cleberg.net I align a lot with this post. From growing up in a rural house where internet access was harder to get. It was slow and only had one line, if you were on the internet, no one in the house could recieve a phone call. Idk if what is now the smol webl, the indieweb, is seeing a resurgence, if I’m just noticing it more. It does feel like along there has been a very small number of users willing to get their own domain, their own server, and host their own shit. A few of these are starting to really break out occasionally, see things like wordle hitting mass adoptioun before being swooped up by a giant. I too miss the internet of old, heck I really dont even mind the middle era of fb, twitter, instagram dominance, but what we have now is dominated by political undertones on it all with everyone shouting “Fake News” at each other. These sites are the easiest place to stay in touch with those you have met online, yet they are riddled with so much toxicity its impossible to have a great experience on them. I’m about a year and a half of not having a single one on my phone, and…
Today I got sick of my go to online keyboard tester not supporting holds and fighting an issue with holds on one of my boards, I vibed out a replacement. I did a bit of work with it to get it how I wanted. gpt5.4 still likes to make lots of cards and build readable sites with a reasonable width for reading, not full page apps. keyboard tester A keyboard tester that works for me, how I like it keys.waylonwalker.com The main feature is to be able to see when alt+key or shift+key is pressed, the keyboard tester was not able to do this. I tend to use keyboard tester a lot as I build a lot of weird keyboards so I suspect this one to get a lot of use and may grow over time, but for now it works good enough for me. I can already think of a whole list of features like supporting keycodes for js, pygame, zmk, qmk. But for now I’m just building what I need and not overcomplicating it. test commit
