Today
- One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the computer Multivac, who evolves over the course of ten trillion years from a single datacenter to a...
- My book has a linter, ~5,500 automated checks, and a Pandoc pipeline that rebuilds five formats — EPUB, Kindle, paperback (×2), and web — on every git push. For a book one person wrote. Here's how I built and published it the way I ship software....
- Aug 17, 2026 Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium, was a CD-ROM drive. With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed...
Yesterday
- Use Gemini 3.7 Flash Computer Use with about 150 lines of Python to control an Android emulator. The model plays Wordle from screenshots: opens Chrome, clears popups, reads tile colors, and solves in two guesses....
- Stuart Robson’s post Solving CSS @layer Ordering in Design Systems with Design Token Metadata, a response to Chris Coyier’s Thinking Horizontally in CSS @layer, came to me at a serendipitous time. You know I love a good blog-and-response, but these posts on the topic of lowering...
- For as long as I can recall, there's been a 'thing' in parts of the UK – honesty boxes. As part of our (once) high trust society, people put their 'wares' – whether that be cakes, jams, vegetables etc – at the end of their driveway, with an 'honesty box' for you to deposit the...
- Book the Meeting Before You Need It As companies get larger, scheduling a decision starts to take longer than making it. Decisions that used to get alignment in an hour now “can only happen three weeks from now, once Michael and Melissa are both back.” The problem goes deeper...
- Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do...
- Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an …
This week
- People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful change for users?
- We recently sped up our integration tests by a factor of ten by running many of them in parallel. There were several flaky tests in the new test suite. Claude was really useful in getting rid of almost all flakyness, … Continue reading →...
- August 15, 2026 Steve Krouse, talking about Val Town’s growth in July, writes: The majority of those customers were referred to us by AI. Previously, we heard about Buttondown’s first glimmers of AI referral business. Val Town makes even more sense, because it is literally...
- The best way to define a harness is as a “situated agent” Harrison Chase once excitedly shared an insight that agents are comprised of 4 things: a system prompt, a planning tool, a file system, and subagents. In the year-plus since he said that, I think this remains largely...
- My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do). But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage. Nothing big. Just this feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as well. The strange novelty of this phenomenon...
- Blog About Moonbound This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. August 14, 2026 I’m on the road, so just posting a quick link: here is the first episode of KQED’s Dream Machines, the podcast miniseries...
- Your Mastra agents can now use five built-in tools for common tasks like: creating a TODO list, or searching the web. The following tools are included in @mastr......
- GitHub was a source of joy for me since day one: a platform to connect with other nerds, discover new cool projects, read code and learn, which made me better… This was great. But over time, the platform, and the internet, has deeply changed. I don’t follow the current AI trend...
- August 13, 2026 How delightful to follow a link to the new RSS reader and article archive called Cove, only to discover, right there on the front page, peeking out of the big beautiful demo screenshot … Good crew … some very good feeds already loaded 😉 Sincerely, very fun to...
- Imagine that you’re in a board room, locked in an intense negotiation. Maybe you’re selling your company, maybe you’re signing an NFL contract, maybe you’re fighting a legal case. During a negotiation, there’s a lot of meaning to what side of the table you’re on. Most...
- In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching filme with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact...
- Use Google Maps and Google Search in the same Gemini API call with Gemini 3.6 Flash, then add custom functions or MCP servers for actions like booking a table....
- You can now add dynamic workflows to your live Mastra server without changing or redeploying code. Users, external systems, or agents can build workflows on the......
- Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but this line stood out: I was careless in relying on AI [...] without doing the...
- My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was curious if this really makes a difference, so conducted a few experiments. more…...
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