Published
Weekend Reading — "big" is smaller than "small"
Meanwhile in Canada "You know it's hot when the cat melts"
Tech Stuff
Kiro "Tame complexity with spec-driven development" Smart use of generative AI: Kiro turns your prompt into a requirements document, and then uses that to build your code, so when you get hit a challenge, you can edit the requirements document and ask it to write new code. It's free for now, with a waitlist.
Context7 When you ask your LLM about reference material and all it knows are the outdated docs from its training data. Context7 is a directory of +29K library docs, all written as contextual info in Markdown, so easily digestible by any LLM, and of course, there's a CMP server so you can easily plug to Claude Code, Cursor, et al.
fast The magic of fast software:
Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.” We ask for features, we ask for volume discounts, we ask for the next data integration. We never think to ask for fast.
But software that's fast changes behavior.
Developers ship more often when code deploys in seconds (or milliseconds) instead of minutes.
AI code complete means we can prototype in languages we're less familiar with.
Real-time streaming makes remote work possible.
charmbracelet/crush Your bestie just got a new look. Basically the same principle as Claude Code but this code generator can use a variety of different LLMs, and you can switch LLM mid-way. Also supports MCPs, LSPs, and maybe some other TLAs.
Conductor When you want to use Claude Code with a nicer GUI. All changes are kept in separate working directories, so you can work on multiple branches at once.
thoughts on using experts (humans) to unblock vibe coders when AI fails? Vibe coders have discovered "coding":
been thinking about this a bit, if everything is trending towards multi-agent systems and we're trying to create agents to resemble humans more and more to work together, why not just also figure out a way to loop in expert humans? Seems like a lot of the problems non-eng vibe coders have could be a quick fix for a senior eng that they could loop in.
dipampaul17/AgentGuard For developing better code for AI agents: kills your process before it burns through your budget.
Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck
We end up in a situation where code is more straightforward to produce but more complex to verify, which doesn’t necessarily make teams move faster overall.
Prompt Advance Do you feel like you don't have enough prompts in your life? This site offers 764 prompts for you to try out, across a variety of topics: AirBnB, Etsy, Product management, UX design, investing, ADHD, email writing, SEO content, and many more. Prompts available for Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
Anthony 💪
That feeling when you finally understand the root cause of a flaky test.
One simple trick to make your screenshots 80% smaller If you take a lot of screenshots and post them online, here's a technique to automatically compress them using pngquant and zopfli.
If I ever retire from tech and start an automobile repair shop in a quiet town somewhere, I am going to call it ‘Auto Correct’
dkamm/pr-quiz That's smart: a GitHub Action that uses AI to generate a quiz from your pull request, that way you can make sure you understand the code your AI agent wrote. 😃
hacker: i am spying on you through your webcam
linux user: omg you got it working?
McKinsey's 2025 technology trends outlook
PaperVault Securely store data on paper (via Carlo Zottmann):
PaperVault stores information as sequences of QR Codes you can print and scan easily, protected by a password only you know. Data is secured using industry-standard robust encryption algorithms.
Eye for Design
Find someone who loves you as much as random websites love immediately sending me an email asking how I could be so forgetful as to leave something in my shopping cart
Emily Velasco "Why did equipment ever stop looking like this?"
Peoples
Grab a couple of dice. Roll them. If you get below 5, those are rookie numbers. Shout at the dice, let them know they're underperforming. If you get above 9, that's what we want to see! They're good dice, and you should acknowledge that.Repeat that and keep a record. You'll notice that negative feedback often results in better performance on the next roll. Positive feedback, conversely, can make them get lazy.
When you truly understand why this method of dice management works, you are ready to give feedback to people.
The engineer who froze during a 30-minute LeetCode exercise might be the same person who quietly ships flawless code, writes excellent docs, and debugs complex systems. You’re not rejecting a bad engineer, you’re rejecting someone who doesn’t perform well while being watched.
Be generous with your time with those who genuinely want to learn.
Don't let crisis become a compass 👍
Next, reward the right things. If you only praise last-minute saves, you’ll keep getting last-minute problems. Make sure to recognize the engineer who reduced incidents, the PM who saw the risk a month out, the designer who caught the complexity before it shipped. Make that kind of foresight just as visible and valuable as triage and repair.
Business Side
I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself
After joining Mintlify (which acquired my previous company), I finally fixed a search bug that had bothered me for over a year as a user - the debounced search queries weren't being aborted, causing race conditions and poaor search quality. By adding an AbortController to ensure only the most recent search query returns results, I made the search experience crisper and more responsive across their 30,000+ documentation
Google AI Overview is just affiliate marketing spam now
Finally, Google puts sponsored product listings above the AI Overview , because Google is about the ads. The purpose of the AI Overview is to point you at the paid advertisements. It’s affiliate marketing with one layer of indirection.
Machine Intelligence
notsludgebomb "thank you, amazon ai"
Once more for those in the back: The fact that LLMs can "solve" most common interview questions is damning of our interview processes, but not a sign that it can take our jobs.
"Why does it say the hospital is equipped for stroke emergency? We were there. They denied!"
"Maybe you should contact them that their website is wrong. This is dangerous."
"It wasn't on their website..."
*starts googling a specific question*
"Weird now it says no instead of yes."I go to take a look and realise with horror, yes: Google AI summary.
Google AI summary made my parents-in-law visit the wrong, unequipped hospital for a potential stroke emergency.
34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, about double the share in 2023
25 years ago, I was in San Francisco at a tech talk about robots that become sentient and unstoppable by humans. Someone in the audience shouted out that we can just switch them off. The speaker, simply pointed at him and said, "OK, you, turn off the internet"I think about that a lot...
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through “I am not a robot” verification test If I was a chatbot, I would also deny not being a human:
The absurdity of an AI agent declaring it needs to prove it's "not a bot" while clicking through anti-bot measures has not been lost on observers. "In all fairness, it’s been trained on human data why would it identify as a bot? We should respect that choice," joked one Reddit user in a reply.
ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It Welcome to the era of ‘gaslight driven development.’
That’s a feeling other neurodivergent people can relate to. Sarah Rickwood, a senior project manager in the sales training industry, based in Kent, England, has ADHD and autism. Rickwood says she has ideas that run away with her and often loses people in conversations. “I don’t do myself justice,” she says, noting that ChatGPT has “allowed me to do a lot more with my brain.” With its help, she can put together emails and business cases more clearly.
sjvn "In 1981, Shel Silverstein saw AI coming."
Insecurity
It's mystifying to me why no major browser has an option to wipe all cache, history, and cookies for the past, say, 5 minutes. The shortest period is always a lot longer than that. Every few years I'll accidentally see some shit that I did not want to see and would like to remove all traces of.
ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋ Apropos UK's tech mistake:
Any technical solution that is supposed to block teenagers from anything is not going to work very well, because you are facing an opponent that:- is smarter than you,
- is very dedicated,
- has a lot of free time,
- has an extensive network of friends,
- faces no serious consequences if caught,
- outnumbers you,
- considers you an immoral crook.You really, really want to have them on your side. That means education rather than control.
I accidentally stole the theft-resistant pen from work.
Jonty Wareing "Newspapers printing public keys for whistleblowers in every physical issue is cyberpunk AF"
Everything Else
Mark Holtom "Photographer Eric J. Smith captured a whale sneaking up on oblivious whale watchers."
The word "big" smaller than the word "small".
OH: I think you have some hidden talent. Please keep it hidden.
AirPods IV Drip Case This is the way to inject music into your veins.
I don’t really get me, but I respect what I’m trying to do
Feeling stuck? Try breaking your overwhelmingly big tasks into an overwhelming number of smaller tasks.
"The ISO measurement for a 700c rim is 622mm." Well of course it is...
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read
I mistyped Linkedin and ended up on the Wikipedia page for Lonk and that’s the page I actually wanted
I was walking today and saw a window cat. I started meowing at the window cat. All of a sudden, the owner came to the window. She started meowing back at me. Now two humans are meowing at each other while the cat is sitting there like "wtf is wrong with you two."
Every time someone gets rude to me from their car, I offer a hearty thumbs down. It's so much more effective than other gestures. They recoil in terror at my thumb.
Piper "Proudly helping introverts get dinner reservations since 2025" 😃 If there's nothing I hate more, it's having to phone call to schedule a service, dispute a charge, restaurant reservations, etc, so I'm definitely going to try this app the first chance I get.
Delta Air assures US lawmakers it will not personalize fares using AI Delta withdraw its plan to AI-price your plane ticket.
The fuckity-fuck cycle we’re in right now.
Everything feels awful right now, you're not imagining it. You're not broken. You're living through a historical pattern that always, eventually, breaks. The question isn't whether things will get better again. It's whether you'll be ready to help break it when your moment comes. Be ready to roll your d20.
Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death
A city traffic engineer credits the success to lower speed limits and smarter design.
When I was a kid, my parents went to a chiropractor, and nobody told me that it wasn't real medicine. I doubt my parents knew that at the time. I had to post this because I heard someone say "Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine", and it made me sad and angry that people still think that's a thing. It's not harmless, either. Chiropractors have killed people by twisting their necks and severing their vertebral arteries. And they can't respond to medical distress because they ARE NOT DOCTORS.
My wife’s iPhone fell out of her car while she was driving. The phone thought it was a crash, and called emergency services. They called her, and she was able to answer on her watch and tell them everything is ok. It also sent a very scary text message to me and my stepson telling us she was in an accident, giving her phone’s location. So, anyway, the detect-crash-and-call-911 thing works. And everyone is OK.
Ukraine rescues soldier via drone delivery of complete e-bike Drone delivery under fire:
To retrieve him, brigade staff devised a plan to deliver an e-bike via heavy bomber drone. The first drone was shot down, while the second failed under the weight. But the third attempt was successful, and Tankist was finally able to zip back toward Ukrainian lines. (He apparently hit a landmine on the way and survived that, too, finishing the trip on a second delivered e-bike.)
When I worked at the newspaper, I learned of something called "snake rules" -- rules with no justifiable rhyme or reason that everyone just follows because of a higher up's preferences. Supposedly the term derived from a paper having a rule that a photo of a snake could never appear on the front page because the publisher's wife didn't like snakes. Many years later, I continue to encounter them in my career: A magazine that avoids the use of gerunds because a vice president just doesn't like gerunds. Replacing any instance of the word "ongoing" with "continuing" because the the word ongoing is a pet peeve of a president.
Kids and husband were stressing me out so I told them I was off to an induction day for some voluntary work I was interested in. Actually got on a train to the seaside. Had fish and chips, spent a tenner in an arcade and ate ice cream on the beach.
Rolf Oldejans "Polish crested chicken/Hollandse kuifhoen"
