Today
- If you hear someone say 'agentic search' they probably mean one of these three very different implementations....
- 9 Jun 2026The degradation of search engine capability is fairly undeniable at this point. Google has been unusable for years, DuckDuckGo/Bing is steadily getting worse, and while Yandex is looking more impressive by comparison, it's still a few steps behind the old state of the...
Yesterday
- One of the many nice language features in Python are keyword arguments. They make some types of APIs concise and readable. Like so: Unfortunately C does not have keyword arguments and, by extension, neither does C++. Adding them as a language feature would take 15-20 years of...
- Some of the tech giants for the past few years have tried hard to kill the most important tool of the web, links. AI companies have stolen content from the web without ever asking for permission just to wrap it into the soulless chats that keep on forgetting to credit the...
- The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are...
- Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one. With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things. Change X, see Y react. If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it. Change X again, now Y reacts...
- In thirteen years at GitHub I was part of 25 reorgs—almost one every six months. Reorgs are a constant in tech, not a crisis. Here's how to navigate them....
- You don't really need to be good at prompting anymore. The thing to get good at is the loop that does the prompting for you. It's five building blocks plus somewhere to keep notes, and Codex and Claude Code both have all five now....
- I have been writing a lot over at aifoc.us for the past year (actually, my last post on this site was a year and a day ago), and I've spent a lot of time exploring the risks and opportunities for the web, and the challenges that I think we need to adapt to as an ecosystem. I...
- Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I...
This week
- I’ve been following Apple news and rumours since the year 2000, and I don’t think I’ve ever been less excited for WWDC. Apple’s software story is in rough shape, and I worry that this year’s event won’t do much to help. Perhaps it’ll be the beginning of an upswing, but we’ve got...
- June 7, 2026 Ken Shirriff powers up an antique pluggable vacuum tube, advertised here: Pluggable thyraton tube! Ken writes: One of the innovations of the [IBM] 604 was the pluggable module, which combined a tube and its associated circuitry [ … ] The insulated handle...
- Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity of the best hand-written software. However, not all the software is stellar, and...
- 7 Jun 2026Throughout my career, I've heard the same cliche repeated again and again. Here's some examples from the wild: "Customers don’t care about your testing at all. They care that the product works." "Users Don’t Care About Your Tech Stack" "First you must accept that...
- Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you never wrote - the goals, constraints and rationale that explain why the system is the way it is. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and the one...
- I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …
- The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev...
- 05 Jun, 2026 I recently completed my first long trail race, set in the Southern Drakensberg mountains with Emma, my siblings and their partners. It spanned 2 days with 30km on the first, and 15km on the second, winding through valleys and around mountains. It was spectacular. I...
- What It’s Like to IPO When baby sea turtles are born on the shore, they immediately rush by the thousand towards the ocean. Every predator in the area swarms to devour as many as they can. Only a few dozen make it to the water. An even smaller number make it to adulthood, and...
- I recently made some stickers for Loud Room and it turned out to be a bit of a journey trying out different vendors. I’m always asking people for recommendations, so I wanted to share my own for sticker printers. I went in with two goals 1) avoid Sticker Mule and 2) lean toward...
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. June 4, 2026 I believe (?) this is the crispest statement of this kind that Anthropic has yet made … We believe it would be good for the...
- Programmers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Back when we had real programmers. Not just people who got paid to write code, but people who lived it, who were obsessed with their craft, and whose code was a lively expression of themselves. Hackers were hackers in those...
- The UK is obsessed with building AI datacentres at home. But the arguments for sovereignty - latency, tax, control - mostly don't hold up....
- After Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat". "They're made out of weights." "Weights?" "Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights." "Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?" "The weights make the words. Are you...
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