Today
- In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface: this is the kind of thing that AI...
- Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of “How AI is changing software development”. We had a really great conversation. …
- TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The...
- Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes...
Yesterday
- I resigned. My last company, which worked in regulated industries (e.g. Defense) projects, became AI-first late December. Regular readers know my tiredness for genAI, its ethical failings, and how I think those tools are more destructive to the brain than the positive form. In...
- Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs...
- I made a smol client-side syntax highlighter that uses the CSS Custom Highlights API called MicroLighter. I’ll talk about why I made it in a bit but first I wanted to… ahem… highlight… some of the features. Zero-dependencies ~2kb minifed+gzipped Uses CSS ::highlight(token-name),...
- Anthropic recently announced that in compliance with a new EU AI generated content law, they will be watermarking content generated using their models. While there are differing opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing as well as excellent interactive explainers on how it...
- Yesterday, Stephen Hackett wrote about changes to the traffic light buttons in macOS Golden Gate beta 6. I think these new buttons are a big improvement, and the change gives me hope that other things could be “unflattened” in future versions of the OS. At the end of his post,...
This week
- I’m writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country , covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard...
- Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an...
- 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 18, 2026 A near-ubiquitous reference, or aspiration, for AI agents is J.A.R.V.I.S., the supercapable computer helper in the Iron Man...
- 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...
- 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 …
- 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...
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