Yesterday
- January 14, 2026 The opening section of this post from Dean W. Ball ticks off a list of projects he’s accomplished in the past month using LLM coding companions. The volume is intended to be striking, and it is, but/and by the fourth or fifth bullet (of thirteen) it’s also …...
- Learn how to build AI agents using the new Gemini Interactions API, featuring server-side state management and simplified tool orchestration....
- 1/14/2026 I am an LLM productivity skeptic. I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful1 in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines. But doing...
- Learn how to write effective specifications for AI coding agents to improve clarity, focus, and productivity in your AI-driven development workflows....
This week
- I, too, have (or as you can probably guess from the title of this post, had) a Facebook account. I only ever used it for two purposes. Finding out what friends I rarely see are doing Getting invites to events Facebook has over the years made usage #1 pretty much impossible. My...
- Jim Highsmith notes that many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But he feels this misses the point that both of these are important, and we need to manage the tension between them. We can do this by thinking of two operating modes:...
- New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a “research preview” that they describe as “Claude Code for the rest of your work”. It’s currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 …
- Agent Safety is a Box Keep a lid on it. Before we start, let’s cover some terms so we’re thinking about the same thing. This is a post about AI agents, which I’ll define (riffing off Simon Willison1) as: An AI agent runs models and tools in a loop to achieve a goal. Here, goals...
- It is not enough to assess whether an idea is good or not but rather necessary to compare it to all other ideas you could be pursuing...
- I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”. Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made...
- As I was playing around with contrast-color(), I got a wild idea that you could use contrast-color() to invert its return value by nesting it: contrast-color(contrast-color(var(--some-color)). When would this be useful? Uh… Good question. I couldn’t come up with an example right...
- Last month I wrote about porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in a few hours while also buying a Christmas tree and watching Knives Out …
- I use ai coding tools a lot. I love them. I’m all-in on ai tools. They unlock doors that let me do things that I cannot do with my human hands alone. But they also scare me. As I see it, they offer me two paths: ✨ The glittering vision ✨ The glittering vision is they let me...
- I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to...
- There has been so much written about the "unsustainable" AI capex recently. Thinking through this recently it occurred to me this is potentially the wrong way to think about it, and it's actually more likely from my research we're going to experience a very significant crunch on...
- A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged. This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some...
- In my first post on contrast-color() I demo’d using color-mix() to change a background-color on hover, but I will be honest… mixing black and white isn’t always what you want. It would be cool and helpful to coerce contrast-color() to return either 1 or -1 so that we could...
- If you ask people why they are using AI (or want other people to use it) you get a ton of different answers. Typically none of them contain the real reason, which is that using AI is dirt cheap. Between paying a fair amount to get something done and paying very little to give...
- One predictable pain point with contrast-color() is that it only returns black and white named colors. From a design systems perspective, that’s not ideal because you want your colors. You want your harmonious brand and the colors you and your team spent thousands of man hours...
- Mcp-cli is a lightweight CLI that allows dynamic discovery of MCP, reducing token consumption while making tool interactions more efficient for AI coding agents....
- Instead of pursuing what you love you should pursue what you are good at as the success will compound which is what will really keep you engaged. This goes for hobbies as well as work and keeping them in balance is key....
- All You Need is Specs? Today I’m releasing whenwords, a relative time formatting library that contains no code. whenwords provides five functions that convert between timestamps and human-readable strings, like turning a UNIX timestamp into “3 hours ago”. There are many...
- Long term readers may wonder – VS Code, Ben? Really? Let’s not getting into that now, instead, just the issue before us. The problem before us is that we want to highlight just the active indent guide of the code in the editor. By default, VS Code highlights both the active...
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