Published
Weekend Reading — A sourdough finisher
CrankGPT The human-powered, local-first, private AI.
Tech Stuff
Lettera Based on Bear's remarkable Markdown editor, a standalone app for editing Markdown files from your file system. I like Bear's Markdown editing, so I think Lettera is an interesting idea. Currently beta release, so no price yet. (via Christian Tietze)
tuxedo A TUI for your todo.txt. For people who want to manage their todo list without overcomplicating things — has Vim keybindings, natural language add, Ctrl-P, and other cool stuff.
nub All-in-one toolkit for Node.js. Cool thing is that it can run .ts files (no need for tsx dependency), starts 24x faster than pnpm, yet supports all the same configurations, and can pick Node version from .node-version. Mind you, that's not a 24x speedup, it's still Node underneath for the majority of the code, but if you run a lot of pnpm commands, it could feel responsive enough to make the difference
Billy A tool crafted with love for freelancers and small businesses that want their bureaucracy to be a little more organized and beautiful. The design, the UI, the animations, all just impeccable.
Trace Captures your microphone and system audio, transcribes locally on your Mac, and hands you a markdown transcript with flagged moments inline. If you transcribe key meetings, you can benefit from the privacy of a local transcription tool.
Why DIY Software Is Great Until It Is Not Building for others introduces demands that building for yourself does not require:
Software engineering is heading to the same place. People will keep building their own tools with AI, and that is good. But when the stakes go up, when it is someone else’s data, someone else’s money, someone else’s business, they will call in a professional. Not necessarily to write the code, but to assess what was built, identify the risks, and decide whether to build on top of it or start over with a proper foundation. Exactly the way a carpenter assesses a renovation job today.
NetNewsWire Status Ok … fine … I'm going to give NetNewsWire a try, maybe I end up using it as my default RSS reader.
Quarkdown So I just used Quarkdown to generate a nicely formatted legal-looking document and I like it. The document is 90% plain Markdown, 10% styling of document title, page footer, fonts, page breaks, etc, and 0% wasted on proprietary data formats (docx et al). It's surprisingly fairly easy to use even without a dedicated editor (I'm using Zed).
Swytchcode If your AI uses a lot of different APIs, this might be the tool for you. It supports 2000+ APIs, handling auth, retries, idempotency, etc.
NameQuick Set it up to watch folders where you add new files and it will suggest new file names based on contents, with easy click-to-rename, which I find quite useful.
O Fidget A desktop fidget toy you can play with: bounce it, spin it, juggle it, cut the rope.
Tinfoil Pigeons A live radar scope: enter your postcode and see the flights overhead right now, then tap one to find out what it is.
Eye for Design
How I Validated Design Decisions Before Writing Production Code
AI-assisted coding is changing this. Before, exploration like this was possible in theory but rarely happened in practice. Now it only takes a couple of days, so it actually gets done.
Peoples
The Dialogue Dividend Why does a five-minute hallway conversation sometimes solve what a week of solo thinking couldn't?
A team can keep ten unscheduled minutes after a meeting instead of filling every block. A person can ask a colleague to argue the other side before a decision is made, or prompt a model to do the same, rather than taking its first answer as settled. Neither costs much. Neither happens unless someone decides it should.
How to Strategically Sequence Career Change Goals Don't bite more than you can chew:
Here’s the thing about goals that try to do too much at once: they aren’t really goals. They’re dreams. And I don’t say that dismissively. Dreams are important. But a dream without a plan is just a source of frustration.
The Architecture of Focus Most companies use a schedule made for managers. Managers go to lots of meetings, talk to people, make decisions together. This schedule works for them, but fails people who build things. Writers, programmers, and designers need long blocks of quiet time. The companies that figure this out treat the schedule as a design choice. It might be the most important design choice they make.
Business Side
Anthropic’s Safety Superpower "the most beautiful coincidence in the world":
The company gets to sell to researchers the creation of a machine god, with the mantle of being the sort of person who cares about the dangers and is smart enough to navigate them on behalf of humanity; that every policy change that falls out of that happens to be great for business is the most beautiful coincidence in the world.”
The Death and Rebirth of Programming
What's being born is something closer to systems design as an ongoing process of regeneration:
Code becomes an intermediate artifact, not the final product. Rewrites become routine, not traumatic. Tests and evaluations define truth, not files. Stability emerges from replacement, not preservation.
This is not nihilism. It's pragmatism under new constraints.
Machine Intelligence
My boss has become an LLM proxy. A problem comes in -- a ticket, an internal report, whatever -- and he copy-and-pastes it into whichever model he's using this week, and then copy-and-pastes the result into Slack. I don't think he reads any of it.
Are You in the Weights? Type your name in and find out if you exist in GPT-5, Opus 4.8, Kimi K2, DeepSeek V4, GLM 4.7, et al.
Everything Else
they should invent a sourdough finisher
LinkedIn Bro: Where others saw “a single point of failure,” I saw a single point of SUCCESS.
Are there any words more beautiful than "modest cost of living adjustment"?
Bubbles Hacker News but for Independent Blogs.
I had this epiphany in the middle of the night.
Like woke me up. Life altering.
Said, "this is it." So powerful, enlightening, and empowering.
Knowing it was so impactful.
...
Cannot remember it at all today.
"marketplace of ideas" implies the existence of "subprime derivative thoughts" and I have some examples
Scott Hanselman 🚴♀️
I have a $30 stationary bike that I got at Goodwill and I have an old Android tablet stuck to it, but I don't have a Peloton membership. Nor do I have the interest to ride 80 miles to the beach. So I made http://PedalScape.com It's a local PWA, no backend at all, no tracking, just 4k bike rides.
There once was an X from place B
Who satisfied predicate P
The X did thing A
In a specified way
Resulting in circumstance C.
The room the economy can’t see (via Carlo Zottmann)
The problem is not that someone is shirking their duty. The problem is that we built an economy where the loving, useful, unpaid choice is a luxury most people simply cannot afford.
Instead of making benches inaccessible to the homeless, my city has installed normal benches alongside trashcans with a special shelf where you can place empty bottles, so those in need can pick them up and collect the bottle deposit (typically EUR 0.5).
The sign says "pass it on".
I love that. ♥️
We need to move on from the obsession with growth as a proxy for “better”, or “success”; and instead dig in on, just improving.
It doesn’t need millions of people to make something better, it needs a few, or just one.
We make better communities by helping one another, fixing things; seeing things that need some love, and finding new ways to give that to them.
I’m not going to stop participating, or making things, or encouraging others, just because a thousand people don’t show up tomorrow.
How To Get Unstuck: 6 Secrets From Philosophy
James understood a better life isn’t built by waiting around until you feel like the person you wanna be. It’s built by acting, choosing, and occasionally telling half the contents of your brain to shut up and sit in the corner. Which, frankly, is advice today’s world could use.
Archaeo-Histories "He's back 😄"
