Ping 38
When agents do the work its harder to recognize a dead end.
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latest post 2026-05-13
Publishing rhythm
I like kraanzu’s [1] project smassh [2].
Smassh your Keyboard, TUI Edition
References:
[1]: https://github.com/kraanzu
[2]: https://github.com/kraanzu/smassh
I’m really excited about KittenTTS [1], an amazing project by KittenML [2]. It’s worth exploring!
State-of-the-art TTS model under 25MB 😻
References:
[1]: https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS
[2]: https://github.com/KittenML
Learning to agent
All we are hearing lately is Agents are the future, something flipped around
NOV 2025 with opus 4.5. It turned snake oil into action. It changed
programmers will be replaced in 6 months to now. Not all of them, but probably
most of us who are not extraordinary. If you fall into the camp of folks not
adopting, I got no issues with that. No one is twisting your arm, well maybe
your boss or cto is, thats on them. I don't mean to say this is the future as
in, get in or get left behind. I mean it as this is where your other engineers
probably are, the junior to mid level engineers are here. If you are not
trying to meet them where they are how are you going to lead them.
Studio Ghibli Images in the Wild
I just stumbled into an image in my org chart of someone who clearly turned
themself into a Studio Ghibli character in chatgpt during the small window of
time that it seemed to do this for everything. Its clearly the aesthetic that
It would do by default for that week, then would not do it whatsoever. I'd
link it, but its from an org chart. I mostly found it interesting how we now
have these recognizable artifacts from specific moments in time.
Ping 36
I feel like there's an inevitable phase to every ai/agentic worked feature/epic
where you have to get in and chat with it 2025 style (except it actually works
and doesn't turn your project to shit). Planning is great, planning out epics
for full orchestrator's to churn for hours on is amazing, but it always leaves
me with a handful of thorns multiplied by complexity level of things that I
can shout a list of 6 items at a time that it can one shot. I haven't seen
anyone put a name to this phase yet, so I'm going to call it the UAT phase
for now and it seems like a very necessary part of the SDLC. It was
important before, but feels more so now as engineers distance themselves
from the implementation.
Research, Plan, Implement
I heard this term yesterday, and I think a lot of people are missing out on
step 1. It's important to experiment with agents and learn what they can do
well and what they cant, this changes every couple of weeks at this point. You
might be spending hours planning something that could have been implemented
right away, or maybe wasted time planning something that needed more research,
more context engineering. Agents start fresh every session, they cant remember
what you asked them to do 5 minutes ago in the other session, getting the right
tokens in session is critical.
Today I learned that docker creates an empty /.dockerenv file to indicate that
you are running in a docker container. Other runtimes like podman commonly use
/run/.containerenv. kubernetes uses neither of these, the most common way to
detect if you are running in kubernetes is to check for the presence of the
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST environment variable. There will also be a directory
at /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount that contains the service
account credentials if you are running in kubernetes.
Context Poisoning Was There All Along
I wrote some code by hand on Sunday. Sat down with my son and started building
out a game in pygame from scratch. We went to google, we searched how to do
something, we copy and pasted from the docs. Not because we are dumb, but
because we cant remember some aspects of the pygame api. Now that these
patterns are established we no longer have to google them, we simply grep our
codebase and replicate the pattern. Easy right? It's funny that it took ai to
coin the term `context poisoning` even though it was there all along.
If you’re into interesting projects, don’t miss out on qmd [1], created by tobi [2].
mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all local
References:
[1]: https://github.com/tobi/qmd
[2]: https://github.com/tobi
Looking for inspiration? OrcaSlicer-FullSpectrum [1] by ratdoux [2].
G-code generator for Snapmaker U1 with Full Spectrum layer blending
References:
[1]: https://github.com/ratdoux/OrcaSlicer-FullSpectrum
[2]: https://github.com/ratdoux
Agents cannot replace the thinking, they only amplify it
Agents cannot replace the thinking, they only amplify it. If you set the
agents off in the wrong direction that's where they will go. They will sprint
there faster than you can go. This is ok, its one of their advantages, they
can give you signal quick. Remember if they are off in the wrong direction
more research and planning is needed, and maybe a little bit more thinking on
your end to steer them in the right direction.
Dreaming of a ten-year computer – alexwlchan
alexwlchan.net [1]
Great gusto here from someone looking to fill landfills less. Get more use from what they paid for. Dodge some tough times in the hardware industry. I’m going to argue that the 10 year computer is not one bit crazy right now. No idea what the future entails, if local llms get good enough to really get so useful they feel required this could easily change. One issue I had with the post as they are looking to get a machine for the next 10 years is they were so focused on themself that they missed the point. They were so focused on buying something that would work for them for 10 years that they bought something brand new rather than thinking about the bigger issue of how do we get hardware to last 10+ years. Some factor of this involves giving our devices a second life. Two things went wrong here. First it appears they they have a perfectly good imac with a broken screen. I know nothing about apple/imac, assuming that the screen is toast and unrepairable, I know you can ssh into a mac this feels like good potential for server hardware. Next they purchased a brand new mac mini. Hardware has been good for a long time,...
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Very interesting takes from @thdxr in this interview. A lot has been hashed out by others all over the place, but a hot take here is that code quality is higher than ever right now. Codebases are becoming more consistent than ever. If you are not starting with a good consistent base from the start you are poising your context and doomed to fail and have all the common failures of ai written code. He still reads almost every PR, and will read all of the code eventually. There are a few cases where reading the PR is not worthwhile only when its low stakes, knows that good patterns have been established and followed. He argues that someone needs to be the expert of the code and of the product still and fears that too many people not looking at prs will fail companies.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Thinking about ai productivity again
Thinking about AI productivity again. It's allowing massive amounts of work to
get done, to levels that humans cannot physically type out in some cases. But
not all of this work is necessarily high value work. Right now I'm working on
one of the biggest PRs to an internal cli library. Probably the largest PR
I've ever done professionally. It touches all of the cli, refactors every
command, reaches into the business logic layers to drive deeper separation. I
reaches into the common layers to drive consistency. It ensures that every
command (50 or so) has similar flags, supports --plain, --no-color. It specs
out contracts to ensure that data goes out stdout, any extra goes out stderr.
This makes everything unix pipe friendly. There was quite a bit of research and
prep that went in, that turns out to already be distilled down into clig.dev.
The point is that this is all good work. It will make the product consistent,
repeatable, expected, and most of all boring. Most of the time, it wi...
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Kids are leaving the party early, not drinking, cant watch netflix without the laptop open. They are leaving the party early to check on their agents. I get it, that feeling that you need to eek out one more prompt, keep your agents running. if they arent running what are you even doing. If not you 6 others are ready to pass you up. The timeline to be first has shrunk to nothing but unachievable.
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
I recently discovered Uncodixfy [1] by cyxzdev [2], and it’s truly impressive.
the holly uncodexify instructions - letting GPT create uncodexified UI
References:
[1]: https://github.com/cyxzdev/Uncodixfy
[2]: https://github.com/cyxzdev
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😂 Should I be concerned that My 12yo installed Arch BTW on his own?
Note
This post is a thought [1]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: /thoughts/
Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net [1]
It’s wild how much of a hit Google took from killing reader, almost any time I hear about killedbygoogle, reader is the top of the list. Its the thing that we all remember being really good and the incumbants just did not match up. Somehow we are here 13 years later still bitching about it, despite it only having a 6 year run. You should probably get an rss reader, and follow some incredible people that make feeds. Most sites that produce content have the ability to subscribe over rss. Unlike @pluralistic.net, I dont read in my reader. My reader is just a list of links out to the web and I typically read it how the author intended on their site. I nod a long to Cory’s enshitified internet just as much as the next guy, I love text based interfaces, I despise the bloat that js has brought on. But I don’t believe all js is bad, I don’t turn it off, even though he has me questioning this now. News sites kinda suck, we can agree there, but its rare that a small indie web creator has fully enshitified their site with js. I don’t buy that. Sub to the feeds.
Note
...
Justin Searls
@searls
I need a new blog to subscribe to. Know any you think I'd like? E-mail me: [email protected]
justin․searls․co · justin.searls.co [1]
Sent Justin my list https://go.waylonwalker.com/blogroll, will soon be on the main site, but right now its only on the go subdomain. I’ve long had reader.waylonwalker.com, but thats soon going to be wrapped into the main site as well at /reader.
I’m interested to see what good stuff Justin gets and if you have any good ones to share reply.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://justin.searls.co/takes/2026-03-08-23h18m29s/
[2]: /thoughts/
Did you even like to code?
Here's something I've been wrestling with lately. I keep hearing people come
to the realization that they never liked coding, they thought they did, but
secretly hated it the whole time. I dont think I've ever kidded myself about
this. I like building things. I like having an idea and see it come to life.
Just because I like the end product more, and that coding really was a means to
an end, something I will never do again in the same capacity that I have in the
past, does not mean I did not enjoy the art of solving problems by typing
syntax into a file to tell a computer how to solve a problem.
The only thing that seems interesting is AI right now
The only thing that seems interesting is AI right now, I'm writing less code,
and I kinda just don't care as much about the small open source stuff as I used
to. I enjoy reading about what other people are thinking, doing, creating.
But when I go to grab a podcast while I wait on my clankers its one talking
about how other people are using them, how to make them more secure, more
effective, how the new models change things, what models are good at what.
It's all so new and changes so fast. Any sort of new open source project
starts out sus that it was just vibe coded anyways, So at the moment it feels
like ooh how did you get that, how do I make mine, and that the thing itself
has less value. I hate that its this way, but it is.
It's all moving so fast
AI is moving so fast this year its hard to keep up, I've written 3 or 4
versions of one blog post to replace I'm Out On Agents [1], but it feels like
everything changes before I can get it out.
References:
[1]: /im-out-on-agents/
I Built A Tmux Session Switcher
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now. For years now, fuzzy pickers and
last session have been my go to. They have served me well. I can typically
only keep so much in my head anyways. I’m often doing a hub and spoke pattern
between main project, notes, and infra repo, maybe two projects. Don’t get me
wrong, I regularly run with a dozen or more sessions running at a time, but
only two to three are in my immediate context at any point anyways.
The Design # [1]
harpoon for tmux
press a hotkey followed by one more keystroke, currently any left hand letter
SIMPLE, FAST, thats of utmost importance, what I want are sessions that I can
can be assigned in order of importance from middle row, top row, bottom row.
I added this binding to my tmux config. Now I can press c-a a to go to the
first session, c-a s to go to the second session. c-a and pause to think
j/k to navigate, space to pick up a session and move it, x to kill it.
bind-key -n c-a popup -E '~/go/bin/tgo'
Enter the ag...
Is gpt-5.4 slow?
What you don't have six agents orchestrating the work of 6 subagents yet. I
saw in a work chat that people were complaining about 5.4 being too slow and
they keep going back to opus. For me its been working great, I have it working
on critical infrastructure work, that I will need to maintain. I appreciate
its accuracy and completeness. And honestly I'm **rarely** watching agents
run. Its like watching paint dry at this point. Its interesting to read their
thinking prompts, but not productive work. While its running I'm teeing up the
net prompt. Working with another set of agents to write a set of issues for
the next epic. I might be too privileged though. I own a whole platform and
have plenty of autonomy to work on what I see fit for the day. I don't have a
boss breathing down my neck waiting for a single ticket to be complete. I'm
working on 6 projects at a time. I'm taking walks to avoid becoming a burnt
out zombie. I'm definitely not complaining about it kicking out massive
amo...
We are the Grey Beards
In November 2025 everyones beard lost its color, we aged into the next
generation without realizing it. If you were getting paid to write code at
this point in time, you are part of a special point in history where we used to
write code by hand. There will be systems air gapped systems somewhere devs
will continue to do it how we've always done it, some day they will peek out of
this cave and realize that they are the only ones left, no one else remembers
what its like. Writing code will quickly become a hobby that people do, in a
weird niche way. Not because you want to build something, but like the guy
with a mainframe in his garage that likes to watch the lights blink. Because
its nostalgic, it's a very cool skill, its fun and rewarding, but it won't be
to get something done.
Clankers got me tired
I spent all day grinding on a 20 minute fix. I want the agents to do it. They
can do it, but they are missing the harnesses they need to replicate my
workflows of old.
In the age of agents sometimes work gets done on so many different worktrees
and branches its hard to tell if there is already a PR or any of them or not,
the great gh cli has us covered.
gh pr list --head fix/markata-go-connections-graph
I like version-fox’s [1] project vfox [2].
A cross-platform and extendable version manager with support for Java, Node.js, Golang, Python, Flutter, .NET & more
References:
[1]: https://github.com/version-fox
[2]: https://github.com/version-fox/vfox
Just starred taskdog [1] by Kohei-Wada [2]. It’s an exciting project with a lot to offer.
Terminal task manager with intelligent schedule optimization.Keyboard-only. No dragging, no micromanagement.
References:
[1]: https://github.com/Kohei-Wada/taskdog
[2]: https://github.com/Kohei-Wada
External Link
X (formerly Twitter) · x.com [1]
One of the well worded shitty messages I’ve seen, good severance, help, timeline to cut off coms.
we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.
Much better than the get rid of people cause AI can do the work. Honestly I feel this though. I was just talking with some colleages how do we divvy work in the age of agents without just constantly walking on each other. If each of us is now an architect who is managing teams of junior agents under us it feels MUCH different than before.
I’m far from working in a large software org like this and I’m feeling it. I only imagine that it gets worse the more people that have to orchestrate around each other.
Appreciate the honesty and transparance, but man this sucks for tho...
The Ghostty Guy
I was today years old when I realized that the ghostty guy is the Hashicorp guy.
Just starred linux [1] by torvalds [2]. It’s an exciting project with a lot to offer.
Linux kernel source tree
References:
[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux
[2]: https://github.com/torvalds
FFmpeg video crop
tools.simonwillison.net [1]
This was the inspiration for the next update in dropper that became a full clip editor. The one that I’ve long wanted, but forgotten about. It’s going to include this cropper, resize, image extractor, and trimmer.
Note
This post is a thought [2]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ffmpeg-crop
[2]: /thoughts/
Tiny Tool Town 🏘️
A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.
Tiny Tool Town · tinytooltown.com [1]
Learned about this one from the @stipete interview [2] @scotthanselman did on YouTube. This is proof that the internet is alive. It’s such web 1.0 nostalgia to see that people can just build things! Did you know that you can literally just build things and make them exist? You don’t need users, You don’t need a big platform, you can just make something into existance. It seems like something we have forgotten through web 2.0 where everything as become 4 major apps all linking to each other and trying to hoard all of the attention. Scroll through tehre are some really cool apps, probably nothing that has the polish you want, or is going to change your world. What these apps have more than anything you’ve probably used in the recent years, is inspiration. Its xyz, but the way I wanted, or with my little twist. And no one else has to like it but me because I’m the user.
Note
This post is a thought [3]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://www.tinytooltown...
FancyGist
fancygist.com [1]
I saw this in @cassido’s newsletter this week and had to give it a run. I despise that there is no dark mode and it insists on burning my retinas 😤. But really this is an absolute beate of a web based markdown editor, I love the command mode to press slash and it just pops out in this whimsical animation ready for me to pick what I want.
Your browser does not support the video tag. [2]
Note
This post is a thought [3]. It’s a short note that I make
about someone else’s content online #thoughts
References:
[1]: https://fancygist.com/
[2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/74f0ac1e-ac50-4939-8bba-4698a8043b25.mp4
[3]: /thoughts/