Blog & Notes

In a recent article on The Information, Aditya Agarwal describes exactly how I felt the first time working with AI-assisted engineering. The profound sadness that the one thing I loved so much is going to be replaced by—machines. And, at the same time, that overwhelming feeling of power, of being able to build many if not all of the software I always wanted to build. All I had to do is a change in mindset.

Willingness to change seems to operate as an independent variable, cutting across age and seniority in ways that defy easy categorization.

How do you find these?

The people I’m most excited about aren’t the ones with perfect pedigrees. They’re the people who seem constitutionally unable to stop tinkering, who get antsy when things stay the same, who treat every new tool like a puzzle they need to solve before the day is over. I’ve started to think of it as the difference between your résumé and your restlessness. I’d bet on restlessness every time.

rakyll on AI progress:

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

This is the new normal.

Bring out the popcorn:

For the first time ever, there's going to be a greater intelligence than human intelligence on the planet. The last time there was a new level of intelligence is when our ancestors said 'hello' to Neanderthal. It did not work out well for Neanderthal.

Super interesting facts about attention and monetarisation by McKinsey.

WALL-E has finally arrived.

I'm on the brink of switching from Arc to Dia. It's clear to me that future browsers are going to have an interface to LLMs (for now). And Dia is at the forefront of this. I'm expecting new browsers from all SOTA AI players in the following weeks.

Another tool I've really enjoyed using lately is backlog.md. It helps me merge my workflow with that of the AI tooling that I'm currently using every day. I've always been a great fan of Markdown, so that was an easy win.

Somo is what netstat should've been. A clean interface to manage network connections and listening ports.

The ability to use tools in unexpected but creative ways is massively underappreciated. Running GitHub Actions as cron jobs that update data in your repository is brilliant. Simon has a trick to run different steps on a schedule.

Go 1.25 will have a new JSON package.

Darwin-Gödel Machines as a foundation for self-improving AI.

Taking a walk without your phone, headphones, or conversation partners is apparently revolutionary enough to become a trend: "Silent Walks". We've reached peak modernity when disconnecting from technology requires a hashtag.

Food for Thought. Thank you to The Guardian.

How color systems actually work, and why OKLCH in CSS is a step forward.

A feature I've always missed in Go is the ability to omit fields with zero values, like time.Time. Well, now you can.

What makes a good human interface?. By Linus Lee.

What a wonderful box of thoughts and ideas. By Andy Matuschak.

Primer is the GitHub design system. The Primer team also has a Design section in the GitHub blog where they e.g. discuss how to approach AI in their product design and the underlying principles.

Maggie Appleton explains underlying design patterns and elements like Ambient Co-presence.

Using an Apple TV as a Tailscale exit node to run a GitHub action is pretty clever.

I never thought that something like TypeScript Go would ever see the light of day. But being a Go native since around 1.0 (that's around 2011), I'm not surprised. I'm not religious about programming languages, but Go, to me, hits a sweet spot, and is nice for writing something like this. Of course, people have difference perspectives.

From the team that brought you Gatsby: Mastra AI. Looking forward to try that out.

Speaking of oldies but goldies: A remarkable rant about the Economic Value of Slack Time.

Insights into BlueSky's engineering culture: Fully remote, open source first.

David Crawshaw basically describes how I work with LLMs as a developer these days.

TIL that Polymarket also has a developer API.

Detect the actual bundle size of your frontend application with bundlejs.

Fascinating insights into modern hardware for future databases.

PostgreSQL's documentation is huge, but huge can sometimes be overwhelming. It's roughly 3200 PDF pages for version 17. Overall, it's become my go-to database over the years, if you want something relational that may eventually grow over time. Here's a few things I learned today: What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres. Also, there's a nice Don't Do This page on the PostgreSQL Wiki.

Such a wonderful introduction by Karmi to the field of embeddings and vector search, and semantic search.

Paketo provides buildpacks to run your app in the cloud.

Gwern's internet search tips

Interesting insights into differences between GKE and AKS.

A visual guide to SSH tunnels

The many lies about reducing complexity, part 2.

A documentation system.

How to Favicon in 2021.

UI Guidelines for talking from human to human: Mailchimp's Voice and Tone

OAuth 2.0 Security Best Current Practice from the IETF.

OAuth 2.x Architecture Guidance.

Another interesting approach about JWTs with GraphQL.

An acceptable approach for using JWTs in a secure way?

True cloud storage for the adventurous.

Lazydocker seems like a good add-on if you're going to work with this stuff.