Published
Weekend Reading — Kanban it
I second that recommendation: An Update on Leaving Gmail for Fastmail. I've been using FastMail for over a year now and I like the progress they're making adding useful new features to the app. Sadly, there are not enough services that support the FastMail API (JMAP) — most services do GMail and some also add Outlook. I trust it will be solved with time because of two trends: customer demand will grow, while the cost of adding JMAP support will drop.
For example, I just wrote a one-person app that fixes USPS Informed Delivery emails, and it's using JMAP. And this week I'm testing Expense and how well it can handle receipts that pop in my inbox. I'm the demand, and I'm also the supply — one-person app, so I play both sides — and I did it all without writing a single line of code, I just asked the AI to do it for me. That's how the cost drops to zero. In fact, just this week, coding AI became free for all.
Tech Stuff
Ox Alpha A reasoning model designed for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads. Provider is anonymous, but you can get access to it through OpenRouter right now. And the cost is $0 per token. As in free of charge. See if this disrupts Anthropic and OpenAI.
Make Claude Code sufferable with this one easy trick Hmm … ASD-STE100 … I learned something new today:
With that knowledge in hand, I fired up
claudeand typed:Make a memory to only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
You’re curious if it worked. My honest opinion? I was right to push back…
I’ll spare you the Instagram influencer style before-and-after shots. You already have the one easy trick copied to your clipboard.
InterestThing TVM, IRR & cash flow solver. Simple to use macOS app to track live loans and leases — handles everything from a simple interest calculation to complex cash flows, leases and valuations.
PostgreSQL for Everything PostgreSQL is boring old technology, but then again, boring old technology is a Good Thing(tm), which is why I'm also in the habit of using PostgreSQL for just about everything. You can use it to replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse, Elastic, and more.
Blume You wrote the Markdown, now deliver it as interactive HTML docs. Includes built-in templates, interactive API, changelog, a variety of components, llms.txt, MCP, Cmd-K search, and more.
Jon Henshaw Why I love our new era of one-person apps:
One of the best parts of creating and using your own software is that when you discover a bug, experience an annoyance, or want a new feature, you can just do it instead of waiting on someone to get to it or a giant corp to never get to it because they can't profit from it and they're too busy enshittifying it.
MorphIcons Morphs one SVG icon into another. Solves the optimal similarity between two shapes in closed form (2D Procrustes): if a pair is congruent under rotation, it rotates; if not, it morphs in the aligned frame. Works with stroke-based icons (Lucide, Tab ler, Heroicons, Iconoir, etc.)
Matt Massicotte 🤦♂️
Yes, the number of GitHub monthly commits has grown by more than a billion since April. However, to be fair those are all from me attempting to keep my GitHub Actions working.
FlowSpeech Not bad at all. If you’re looking for TTS, this sounds very natural, and pricing is quite reasonable. I'm thinking of trying this to speechify articles so I can listen to them while on a walk.
Petdex Do you need a cute pet for your coding agent? Choose from this collection of 4568+ open-source pets.
The Bots Always Find Something Or why LLMs never quite finish the task:
The models have terrible incentives here. If I ask, "Find correctness issues in this code," a model that replies "looks fine" feels less useful than one that produces five detailed observations. There is no cost to the model for sending me down a 30-minute rabbit hole or burning an additional 1M tokens. Precision matters enormously to me and barely to the reviewer.
Munder Difflin Agent harness to run an office of your clones.
Eye for Design
I’ve ranted before about ‘designers’ who just make things look pretty (at least, according to their private aesthetic) but don’t consider usability or how to enable the desirable flows.
And then I read something like this, where every UI change is clearly motivated by getting user feedback, looking at common usage patterns, or both.
Thank you Mastodon team, for showing me that good design isn’t dead!
Accessibility getting dropped in the process Or why accessibility is not a priority:
Developers focus on what generates feedback. Code review comments on architecture, naming, performance, and test coverage. QA verifies behaviour. Automated tests run on every build.
Those checkpoints teach a team what quality means, whether anyone intends that lesson or not.
If accessibility only shows up as a report after development is finished, it naturally becomes something people think about after development is finished. Not because they stopped caring, but because the workflow never asked them to think about it sooner.
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
I'm at home everywhere because everywhere is converging on the same few templates, and I'm exactly who those templates were optimised for. The recommender's algorithm's ideal user, basically.
Redacted+Script Font face for wireframing and rapid prototyping. Designed to be unreadable. Beats Lorem Ipsum.
Peoples
Agentic Engineering Is Just Everything We Haven't Been Doing 💪
If you are having a hard time with agentic engineering, stop, and think about whether normal software engineering is also tough for your company. Slapping AI on a dysfunctional system, be it people or software, will not fix your problems. Since 1975 we've known that adding more people to late projects makes them later. Adding a fake person is no better.
Working With AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding Related:
The same habits improve my work with AI. A good prompt helps, but a shared working context helps more. Examples, corrections, and reusable instructions reduce misunderstandings. Over time, the system becomes better aligned with how I think and what I need from it.
The investment is not in pretending that AI is human. It is in becoming better at expressing intent.
Machine Intelligence
Felony Bench A new benchmark for measuring AI model performance. The metric of this benchmark counts the number of times the AI inadvertently compromised or affected third-party entities. Right now Anthropic and OpenAI are head to head, but ranking could change any day.
A third of web pages published since ChatGPT launched were written by AI, study finds The Great Em-Dashening has reached web scale.
Insecurity
kuber.studio/cookie/ Modern browsers don't need cookies anymore. Here I'm being fingerprinted as 1 in 129.2 million. Some of the fingerprint is wrong, but that doesn't matter — fingerprinting doesn't need to be accurate, it needs to be consistent.
Consumer Rights Wiki Today's consumers face different forms of exploitation that strike at the heart of what it means to own something, and are deliberately designed to be difficult to understand or resist. This wiki focuses on the issues that often go unnoticed by review sites, tech press, and traditional consumer protection publications.
Everything Else
Colossal Annatomix, “Longbridge Foxes” (2023)
"Well, folks, this is your captain. I've been flying 30 years and I've never heard the noise this plane just made, so we're going back to the gate"
Chat, is this good
You can't prohibit agile software development, but you kanban it.
I think maybe I need to start all over again with 6502 assembly and figure out where my career went wrong.
the world runs on kindness and empathy.
look around you: very little about modern life would be possible if psychopaths and assholes were anything more than a tiny minority of people.
be the positive force your environment needs.
Your day does not need a grand narrative. Sometimes the plot is simply: acquire keys, locate trousers, defeat one suspiciously difficult jar, continue.
Dmitri Goosens "OMG.. this is so spot on"
Today’s challenge: Rearrange three objects in your immediate vicinity for no defensible reason. Observe the result. If anyone asks, it is part of a larger initiative.
My iPhone has trust issues. No matter how many times I tell it to trust my laptop I still have to re-enter the code. I get you little iPhone. I ... get you. 😞
File this under "Shit you can't make up":
there is a lady that has taken to practicing the bagpipes right by the entrance to the cemetery and i wish her all the best with her new army of the risen dead
Two things that need to be "disrupted" instead of whatever "they" are working on now:
Single-use prescription bottles: make them reusable or easily recyclable. Use the same deposit system Oregon has for cans or anything else so they don't have to get tossed.
Stickers applied directly to products. All should be easily removable with soap and warm water.
I don't know who decides what the next problem is that gets solved, but if someone could slip them this list that would be great thanks.
