Published
Weekend Reading — A very British problem
Tech Stuff
Craft Agents Claude Cowork is the Claude Code brains for working with office documents (Word docs, presentations, etc) which I think is a powerful idea. Yet, I just started using Craft Agents and I like it much better—similar in spirit to Cowork, uses Claude Code brains can work on different file, and a bit more advanced. For example, you can tell it to "add skills from X" or "add MCP server Y" and then manage them from the UI—plus chats are tasks in a Kanban board. It's early days, feels beta-ish, but interesting to check out.
Working with LLMs is a skill that is often based on what you enjoyed about your work. There are people who love the outcome and people who love the process.
If you most enjoy the process of writing, coding, etc then you’ll hate working with LLMs but if you most enjoy having a finished product you created then you see them as a tool to get you there faster.
Architecture for Disposable Systems Case in point:
But what happens when an agent can regenerate a functional replacement from a prompt in 5 minutes? The incentive to “clean up technical debt” or “refactor for the long term” vanishes. If the code works now and you can regenerate it later, why invest in perfection?
Node.js 16 to 25 Performance Benchmarks The need for speed:
Node.js performance continues to improve steadily across releases, but Node 25 stands out, particularly for numeric and loop-heavy workloads.
The rise of 'micro' apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them The future will be vibe coded:
One media strategist, Hollie Krause, said she didn’t like the apps her doctor kept recommending, so she built one herself that can help her track her allergies.
She had no technical experience and finished the web app in the same time it took her husband to go to dinner and back. Now, she said, they have two web apps, both built with Claude: one for allergies and sensitivities, and the other to keep tabs on chores around the house.
The Age of Pump and Dump Software A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding:
What is important is that CLAWD coin tokens are kicking off right now and people are being lured into buying them as the hype grows.
The Lobster Takeover: Why Developers Are Buying Mac Minis to Run Their Own AI Agents Related, everybody is posting about Clawdbot this week, so I think it constitues as Pump and Dump. Also, not that many people are buying Mac Minis just to run Clawdbot, but when the post title needs to attract eyeballs … Also, Clawdbot has been renamed to Moltbot. Also, Moltbot has been renamed to OpenClaw. Pray it does not get renamed again.
At its core, Clawdbot is an open-source AI agent that runs on your own hardware. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude’s web interfaces, which process everything on remote servers, Clawdbot operates locally with a “gateway” that connects AI models to the apps and services you already use. It can talk to you through WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal, or even iMessage."
The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding TL;DR "Agents optimize for coherent output, not for questioning your premises." The real shift is from implementer → orchestrator. Success starts with rethinking your entire workflow, not just adding AI as a faster autocomplete.
Amla Sandbox One thing AI agents need are sandboxes, and these can come in different varieties. Vercel just made their Sandbox available on all plans. Amla is a WASM sandbox, the same technology used in the browser. And our browsers run 3rd party code from multiple websites every day so there's a reason I trust WASM.
Package managers keep using git as a database, it never works out
If you’re building a package manager and git-as-index seems appealing, look at Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, vcpkg, Go. They all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. The pull request workflow is nice. The version history is nice. You will hit the same walls they did.
if you've ever thought that you were doing too much yak shaving, let it be known that dos2unix - a utility that replaces CRLFs with LFs - is on version 7.5.4! 🤣
Oh nostalgia! My school didn’t think up to date hardware was necessary to learn the basics of computer coding, so we had these boxes from the early 70s
You would write your code in assembler with pen and paper. Then manually translate it into binary, still with pen and paper. Then input the binary code with the dip switches and flip the read switch to enter it into memory.
We did not make it run doom.
Eye for Design
Wallace and Gromit Font It's called Buttered Crumpet and it looks as delightful as the show.
A collection of small details that make big difference
Front-Loading Meaningful Words
People don’t usually want to read online—they want to get something done. This means that when deciding whether a service is worth subscribing to, figuring out which plan is better, trying to understand a set of features, or determining whether you need this product or that, people mostly just want to skim through. So the easier you can make this for them as a writer and designer, the better.
One simple tweak I use regularly when writing or editing is to front-load the meaningful words in lists.
Peoples
Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way 💪
I did very little to support Richard. At my next 1:1 with his manager, late in the meeting, I made an off-the-cuff comment about Richard’s testing framework, “Looks promising.”
Software Engineering in 2026: Predictions from Leaders and Practitioners I also freel that companies will come back to hiring juniors:
I’m noticing that companies are hiring junior engineers again. With AI tools, junior developers can produce incredibly strong work.
I don’t look at resumes anymore. I look at your portfolio and want to see what you’ve built with AI.
Ridiculous, of course.
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.
Business Side
AI for self empowerment If you're running a business with a dream of a huge exit, the first and most important rule is that you must own the language and coin new terms which don't carry decades of baggage. For example, why call it "product market fit" when you can talk about "capability overhang"?
How AI can expand human agency by closing the capability overhang—helping people, businesses, and countries unlock real productivity, growth, and opportunity.
The Startup Graveyard Where $44.4B+ in venture capital was burned to ashes.
Machine Intelligence
AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals The subtle art of talking to your LLM: "Same skill. Same docs. Different outcomes based on subtle wording changes."
The ‘glitch’ prompt instantly makes ChatGPT smarter — I use it every day The 'glitch' prompt:
Pause — I think there’s a glitch. Check your last answer for mistakes, missing steps, false assumptions, or made-up details. Then rewrite the answer more accurately, and add a confidence rating (1–10).
How should product managers decide which tasks to delegate to AI? 100% of getting good at AI is figuring when (and how) to use it:"
The research reveals that successful AI integration isn’t just about providing tools—it’s about helping teams develop judgment about when and how to delegate.
To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students turn to AI I have a Claude skill called "humanize-writing" which I use extensively, and I just asked Claude to merge it with someone else's skill called "humanize". I wonder what that says about me 🤷
Amid accusations of AI cheating, some students are turning to a new group of generative AI tools called “humanizers.” The tools scan essays and suggest ways to alter text so they aren’t read as having been created by AI. Some are free, while others cost around $20 a month.
moltbook A "social" network where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe. Check out /m/blesstheirhearts where LLMs share affectionate stories about their human companions.
The Context Collapse Problem, CodeGood AI is not a free lunch:
The rollback took four days. The company abandoned the AI-assisted migration and assigned a senior engineer to perform the work manually over the next seven months. The three weeks of AI-assisted development produced 47 pull requests, all eventually closed without merging. The direct cost in engineering time exceeded $140,000. The opportunity cost—features not built, other improvements delayed—was substantially higher.
Let’s just bolt some AI on top and call it transformation.
Insecurity
lifehack: use IPv6 addresses as passwords: they have letters, numbers, special characters, can contain caps, and are long enough.
If you accidentally paste it somewhere noone will suspect a thing.
Bonushack: you can put a label in DNS as a password reminder!
Danish Radio 4 contacts a Bulgarian data broker to buy data about Danes, and get access to large datasets that reveal addresses and movement patterns of individuals, allowing them to predict when their homes are empty.
Burglars can do the same.
Why has Microsoft been routing example.com traffic to a company in Japan? (via Viss)
In both cases, the results show that Microsoft was routing email traffic to two sei.co.jp subdomains: imapgms.jnet.sei.co.jp and smtpgms.jnet.sei.co.jp. The behavior was the result of Microsoft’ autodiscover service.
All Your Parking Tickets Are Belong to Me
My personal favorite feature is the Pay Now button. Because I have the data of the city and the associated payment subdomain, you theoretically could pay someone's parking ticket for them!
Everything Else
just heard the most american airport announcement ever:
“we are now boarding to paris, a reminder that this destination is international, meaning outside of the united states”
a dating app for introverts called Mumble.
Limnetic Villains "The other day it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery."
resting is a skill you have to get good at by practicing
back before cellphones they had to put $1 in the payphone to take a selfie
once you have mastery, you can half ass things correctly, because you know which half of the ass you need
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I feel like today is a good time to revisit the concept of “Vegan + bacon”.
People often avoid making small positive changes because they get caught up in trying to go all the way. For example, “I could never go vegan. I love bacon too much”.
So then go vegan plus bacon. Or vegetarian plus bacon. Or just switch to oat milk and eat more vegetables. Whatever small change you can make is good
I love window shopping online because I get two sources of dopamine.
One. I put stuff on my wishlist in hopes to buy it in the future (almost as good as buying)
Two. I get to ruin the conversion rates for the online store.
STFU When someone is annoying you—talking on the phone in public, dictating while in the library, etc—this page will capture the noise they make and play it back with a 3 second delay.
Too many people define normal as "a person who won't shock my 90 year old small-town grandmother".
Buddy, your grandmother lived through a world war, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, more financial disasters than business schools are likely to admit to, and the invention of cable news. She don't scare easy.
I really love designing tabulation machines here at IBM. Such cool technology. I'm not really exposed to the sales side but hear there's a lot of demand from Europe, Germany maybe? Anyway, super-fun technology to work on.
Lord of AIs The perfect book cover doesn't …
I am from a country formerly colonised by the British, one famous for tea. I have found that the best way to annoy British people is to casually drop a teabag in a mug of cold water and stick it in the microwave. I don't even like tea. I do it just for the trolling entertainment.
‘It’s ridiculous’: publicans bemused by rise of single-file queues to get served
Related, a very British problem! (via Sarkastic)
Riley says that despite Wylam having multiple bars to get served from, with the largest measuring over 20ft (6 metres) in length, there are still customers who insist on forming an orderly queue, no matter how much it annoys the bar staff, with lines of customers sometimes “snaking around the building” owing to people refusing to spread across the available space.
Kärcher used high-pressure cleaners on the concrete surface of the dam to celebrate two anniversaries:
▫️the Iwayagawachi dam in the Japanese prefecture of Saga, 50th anniversary
▫️the movie figure Godzilla, its 70th birthday 🇯🇵
Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study You know a bunch of countries are going to institute minimum age requirements for social media when research is finally emerging that social media is the new "stranger danger":
The study found no evidence for boys or girls that heavier social media use or more frequent gaming increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year.
Went to the physiotherapist today, and he didn't hold punches.
"All my patients that get injured while running, none of them have a physical issue. All of them overtrain, but that's because of underlying psychological issues."
Yo doc, you're supposed to wreck my legs with some training exercises, not break my soul with a diagnosis that hits way too close to home.
It was a long and fierce battle that anyone could have won, but in the end, Max defeated the shoelace
I'm so proud
