Today
- A key challenge working with coding agents is having them both test what they’ve built and demonstrate that software to you, their overseer. This goes beyond automated tests—we need artifacts …
- I was listening to the excellent (now completed) Waste Not Why Not podcast when I first heard the term ‘wishcycling’. If you’re not familiar with the term, wishcycling is basically what happens at the end of any house party comprised of adults in their thirties. In a sincere...
- February 9, 2026 I’ll be away from the blog for a few weeks, so let me just pin this to the top here: I still write my own code, and I enjoy doing it. I have never been a normal programmer, and maybe you aren’t, either. So, let’s just do things the way we want — the way we like....
- Handling Your Long Context Today & Designing Your Agent Tomorrow Context Rot is the Worst Context Failure “Context Rot” is a common problem agent designers must avoid and mitigate. The Gemini 2.5 paper was one of the first technical reports that flagged the issue, noting that...
- February 9, 2026 A new edition of my pop-up newsletter has arrived: Flood fill vs. the magic circle, about AI automation and its limits. Also, the actual email I send out contains a compendium of don’t-call-them-tweets, i.e., stray thoughts adjacent to AI. These are fun to...
Yesterday
- Skills are the newest hype commodity in the world of agentic AI. Skills are text files that optionally get stapled onto the context window by the agent. You can have skills like “frontend design” or “design tokens” and if the LLM “thinks” it needs more context about that topic,...
- Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments since we were operating under the Chatham House Rule, but should the sources recognize themselves and would like to be attributed,...
- I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons. I built a feature on my icon gallery sites...
- You don’t need more performance heroes on your engineering team. Make the fast path the easy path....
This week
- Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? Conway's law appears true if you observe organizations and systems as they are, but the...
- Large tech companies operate via systems. What that means is that the main outcomes - up to and including the overall success or failure of the company - are driven by a complex network of processes and incentives. These systems are outside the control of any particular person....
- Bill Hoffman, the original creator of the CMake language held a presentation at CppCon. At approximately 49 minutes in he starts talking about future plans for dependency management. He says, and I now quote him directly, that "in this future I envision", one should be able to...
- You Are Here Where to next? The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of building...
- Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks …
- February 6, 2026 The latest Disquiet Junto assignment is out, and this blog provides a link in its creative chain. The assignment is: Write a piece of music emulating the dopamine engine that is social media. Click through for Marc’s instructions, which are, as usual,...
- There’s a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone’s building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic’s latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in …
- Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold...
- It’s been a month since I launched whenwords, and since then there’s been a flurry of experiments with spec driven development (SDD): using coding agents to implement software using only a detailed text spec and a collection of conformance tests. Github Could Use a ‘Docs Review’...
- My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering discovery.
- Workspaces give your agents a place to actually do work, letting them read and write files, execute commands, search content, and follow reusable skills from co......
- This is a cross post of an article I wrote for Ada, the National College for Digital Skills All the available evidence suggests that GenAI-assisted coding is most powerful in the hands of highly experienced software engineers, while having neutral or even negative effects for...
- Feb 5, 2026 Let's compile Quake like it's 1997! The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A. In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned...
- Claude Code now supports agent teams - coordinated swarms of AI agents that research, debug, and build in parallel. What was feature-flagged is now real. Here's what it means and how to use it....
- People tend to get attached to a specific concept of what they are trying to accomplish rather than the idea it represents...
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