Today
- Here's a reproduction of the infamous "Waterfall Diagram", from the landmark paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems (Royce, 1970): SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS PROGRAM DESIGN CODING TESTING OPERATIONS Behold, the enemy of Agile! Although,...
- sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python’s default sqlite3 package, including …
This week
- 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 19, 2026 I absolutely LOVE the premise of this upcoming conference at Georgetown Law: Life After Data, the conference on...
- Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted...
- Meet Alice. Alice is impatient. What do you mean? Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says...
- You’ve probably heard the term. It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something. “Blank page paralysis”. But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part. In software, they call it “the last 90%”. In logistics, they call it “the last mile”. It’s...
- Named slots are one of web components’ biggest superpowers ✨. Imagine a Button component with an optional icon; in Web Components we don’t need a separate Button and IconButton, a single Button component with <slot name="icon"> will do. Or a card component with a handful of...
- Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I’m going to expand on …
- I play Clues by Sam nearly every single day. I wrote about it before, but solving a little crime puzzle adds a micro-thrill to my day. A little blast of logic, misdirection, and wordplay. It’s a frequent topic of conversation in the ShopTalkShow Discord where people share their...
- Is this blog written by AI? No. None of the human-readable text on this blog is written by AI, and I have no plans to change that. The weird grammar, incorrect assumptions, spelling errors, and annoying tics are all mine. Including the em dashes. I don’t use LLMs for writing. On...
- Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in …
- 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 17, 2026 Rather than stand apart as some kind of revolution or rupture, language models should mostly cause us to reflect on the...
- June 17, 2026 We do not yet understand how to train language models! This seems obvious to me, because it ought to be possible — it will be possible — to produce a tight, capable “programmatic reasoner” with something like 30 billion parameters. The famous Scaling Laws only...
- Building a great organization is all about finding skills that complement each other. People tend to think everyone can do everything—especially at the leadership level. VP and above, the assumption is that for the amount they’re paid, leaders should be great strategically,...
- One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes its evolution from keyword-based...
- “Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young. Programming was how I could express myself. I wasn’t an artist. When I sing, dogs howl. When I draw, friends say, “Very nice. What is it?” I didn’t connect...
- Mastra is now an agent meta-harness. Starting today, you can run Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex subagents from within Mastra. Subagents inherit Mastra's stream ......
- Almost exactly three years ago the Oceangate submarine implosion happened. The disaster came about when a billionaire called Stockton Rush created his own unclassified submarine to go sightseeing on the Titanic. Ignoring all advice from experts he created a "macgyveresque death...
- I co-wrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I'm not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ideas in it I think actually matter, plus six figures you're welcome to reuse....
- People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most” under load1. The idea here is that once the AI bubble money drains away, current infrastructure will rapidly become obsolete, and there won’t be...
- In the previous post, we introduced algebraic topology through one of its most important objects: chain complexes. We saw how chain complexes can be constructed from cellulations of manifolds and how they give rise to CSS codes. But the main reason both mathematicians and...
- Agents made writing code almost free. Understanding it costs what it always did, which is why review is now the bottleneck. The 2026 data is strikingly consistent on this, and yet most advice about AI code review is wrong for most people, because a solo developer with no users...
Last week
- The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any …
- In my previous article I discussed about the necessary evil to change the coding tests to filter engineers. As LLMs become the ultimate coders (producing boilerplate infinitely, instantly, and without fatigue) the software engineering workflow is rapidly shifting, and day-to-day...
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