Published
Weekend Reading — Penguin drama
Niki "Most useless sign in the universe"
Tech Stuff
ShowMD The Markdown space is heating up 🔥 Today I installed a Markdown editor (Scratch), upgraded my Markdown viewer (mud), and setup this Markdown QuickLook previewer (ShowMD).
erictli/scratch Minimalist, offline-first markdown note-taking app for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
My fave macOS Markdown viewer, Mud, now supports frontmatter. I'm so happy, not least because between me asking for it and Joseph shipping it lay less than a week. Legend
We Put Our Entire Company's Brain in a Git Repo Apropos Markdown:
And this is the part I keep turning over in my head — the agent isn’t reading from a static onboarding checklist. It’s reading from the actual knowledge base. So if someone wrote a great decision doc last week explaining why we chose approach X, the onboarding agent already knows about it. The new person gets the living, breathing version of the company’s thinking. Not a stale wiki page from 6 months ago.
Write It First, Then Let AI Drive This worked fantastically well for me. I wrote the initial codebase and now whenever I'm using the LLM it makes fewer errors — it follows my coding style, naming convention, UI preferences, etc:
When I write V1 by hand and then let AI extend it, something different happens. The AI treats my code as the authority on how this particular project should work. My naming conventions become its naming conventions. My architectural patterns become its architectural patterns. My error philosophy becomes its error philosophy. The AI becomes a faithful collaborator rather than an independent author, and the result is software that feels like one person built it — because one person did build the foundation, and everything else followed from that foundation.
New lines are removed from WHATWG URLs TIL
So, browsers discover newlines or tabs in URLs, recognize them as "invalid-URL-unit" errors, and then remove the invalid characters to get the job done. Nice job, browsers — I love it!
tsdown.dev Bundle TypeScript/JavaScript code into a standalone executable — a native binary that runs without requiring Node.js to be installed.
Claude Code is a vibe-coded mess. Some of it is actually good. 🤔
Claude Code is not well-architected. Some would even call it a pile of Al slop. But buried in the mess are real solutions to real problems: a model going in circles and nobody pulling the plug, context windows bloated with stale tool results, 50+ tool schemas burning tokens on every request, background work cascading out of control. Most agent builders are still solving these naively or not solving them at all.
How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
In short: software engineering projects are not dominated by the known work, but by the unknown work, which always takes 90% of the time. However, only the known work can be accurately estimated. It’s therefore impossible to accurately estimate software projects in advance.
hgayan7/gearbox Basically crontab but with a nicer UI that makes sense and that you can operate from the menu bar.
Your Agent’s Context Window Is Not a Junk Drawer Not an evergreen truth, but something worth observing in this era of strict usage limits and high token pricing:
Every token should earn its place
The context window is not a junk drawer. It’s a workbench. Everything on it should be there for a reason, and you should be able to say what that reason is.
So before you plug in another MCP server, add another RAG source, or write another paragraph in your system prompt, ask yourself one question: is this worth making my agent dumber?
We show you a CSS property name. You tell us if it's real or if we made it up. That's it. It starts easy. It does not stay easy. The CSS spec has over 600 properties. Some of them sound made up. Some of our fakes sound terrifyingly real. Good luck.
Eye for Design
Automated accessible text with contrast-color()
What Is Your Site's AI Chatbot for? Users Can't Tell
“I'm not trying to be very critical and rude, but (...) typing and asking for options is much more a waste of time for me [than] (...) just going to the Redfin homepage and choosing the home filter options. I think those things kind of save much more time than these [AI chatbots], so I don't see the point.”
Little design details that make the UI more enjoyable to use This post also references a SKILL.md you can install and your LLM will guide you down the right path.
Peoples
One unambiguously positive development that's followed is that software professionals are writing specs again. LLMs - like many of us - do not perform well with ambiguity, and specifying problems is proving to be an effective tool for generating correct code. Agile told us "Working software over comprehensive documentation". Spec-Driven Development is telling us "Comprehensive documentation creates working software". And really, LLMs or no, there is nothing new under the sun.
Simple ways to make meetings work better for employees on the autism spectrum
In Pilatzke’s view, many autistic people possess a strong sense of right and wrong, and feel a need to speak up when they perceive injustices. “I describe myself as a blunt person. I’m very honest. I’m going to say what I think,” she added.
Organizations can benefit from staffers’ frankness by building a culture where everyone isn’t expected to agree. Have a designated naysayer or devil’s advocate in brainstorming meetings, Jayroe suggested.
And I’m not the only one falling prey to the illusion of clarity. In a study, psychologists asked participants to rate how well they understood everyday devices like sewing machines, zippers, or cell phones and then asked them to write detailed explanations. After attempting the explanation, self-ratings dropped sharply. The act of actually trying to explain revealed how little people actually knew.
Business Side
Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions no longer hold true, and so much is going to change in the coming years. Reminds me of the first few years during the internet boom, but everything moving so much quicker:
Founders who started pre-2025 typically have built a technical stack optimized for a world where software development was bespoke and expensive. While Agile development and DevSecOps made us lean, they operate in a serial fashion, and startups hired a team sized for this structure. Companies that have spent years developing a “moat” of proprietary code and features are waking up to the fact that AI is commoditizing most of their tech stack. This leaves startups trying to raise money for a business model that may be partially (or wholly) obsolete.
Dare Obasanjo For example:
Had my quarterly call with my financial advisor yesterday
- I learned I’m not saving enough to retire in 2 years which is when I joked in our last call that AI would be able to do my job.
- He spends $200/month on Claude to build financial apps for his business that he’s wanted for over a decade.
It led to a discussion of whether Claude would harm SaaS companies in the long run as people like him drop some services or if this was a new market of custom software that will exist in parallel.
Build to Learn vs Build to Earn | Silicon Valley Product Group That was always the problem — cue MVP, lean startup, move fast/break things, RAD — AI just made Agile Team Scrum Retrospective even less relevant:
Now, it’s clear that the real bottleneck is in discovering a solution that’s worth building. A solution that solves for both the customer and your company. A solution that generates the necessary outcome. A solution that not only solves the problem, but solves it sufficiently better than the alternatives that the customer chooses to switch.
The more I use AI to create something, the better the output becomes. And it’s not simply a matter of getting better at prompting. These cycles push further back into my process, causing me to rethink foundational aspects of how I make things, knowing that new points of processing and acceleration are now available.
I’m iterating more quickly. Testing more variations. Learning from failures faster. The feedback loops are tighter, which means I can refine my judgment more rapidly.
The craft hasn’t disappeared. It’s just happening at a higher level of abstraction.
Allbirds pivots to AI after selling off assets last month
Once, everyone pivoted to an internet company, then it was crypto. Now, companies are scrambling to cash in on the AI boom. Former crypto-mining companies have retooled their utility power contracts and facilities to score huge contracts with AI companies desperate to feed their power-hungry operations, and a former karaoke company almost decimated the trucking logistics industry after being reborn as an AI business.
Machine Intelligence
8 Tips for Writing Agent Skills Quite helpful advice if you're writing a SKILL.md.
Insecurity
Deleteduser.com —a $15 PII Magnet 😮
I saw a discussion on the internet where someone mentioned that they deleted users in their app by overwriting their email addresses with
[email protected]. Mmm, I thought — I wonder how common of a thought process that is? I bet whoever owns deleteduser.com gets loads of emails!I decided to check it out, but to my genuine surprise — no one owned deleteduser.com, so now I do.
It was my job for a decade to try to keep tweens and teens safe online. Let me tell you what you already know: no law or technology can do it. There are no lengths kids won't go to to talk to friends without prying eyes. The harder you try to lock it down, the dodgier their solutions will be.
Anders Eknert "Vibed account verification. (via LinkedIn)"
Everything Else
fabio "We are very close to inventing water from first principles"
Few people have been proven wrong in life as much as teachers who said "you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket everywhere you go, you know!"
And to the folks on here: If you see someone post about topics you're not interested in, or in ways you don't approve of, it's fine. Just mute or block that person.
No need to get all worked up. No need to yell at a stranger. Life's too short.
SomaFM Player macOS menu bar app to play SomaFM. A super simple UI — starts playing when you launch, picks from top 10 channels (can't go wrong with Groove Salad), media keys support, maximum minimalism at only 35MB process size.
Me: why doesn’t the stupid fob unlock all the doors when I press the button?
Spouse: they must have had a woman on the design team.
Me: wha?
Her: If someone is following you to your car, you don’t want to unlock ALL the doors. Just the driver door. Literally any woman could tell you that.
Me: huh!
The Kyoto Aquarium in Japan keeps a wall-sized flowchart tracking the romantic relationships, breakups, and drama between their penguins. They update it every year.
After a lifetime feeling socially inept because it’s like everyone else speaks a language I don’t, I just avoid in person people now. Mostly an autistic recluse. I’m happy being available to my business 24/7. It is my heart and soul, and my everything.
I don’t consider my business “selling to” or “targeting”, I see it as I’m serving the autistic, ADHD, and neurodivergent community I love with all my heart.
I’m an autistic recluse because I know I’m serving something greater than myself.
Waddleloo Live map of the University of Waterloo so you can navigate your way between classes without the risk of bumping into geese, because Canadian geese are fiesty.
World’s “Pinkest Pink” Color Is Being Given Away for Free to Everyone Except One Person Congratulations! 🍰 You too can use the world's “Pinkest Pink” color any way you want — the trademark has been lifted! Unless, that is, you're the person who trademarked Vantablack (aka world’s “blackest black".)
The Last Quiet Thing Your possessions came alive. Now they won't stop talking.
Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and reorganized your dashboard while you slept.
Your earbuds won't play music until they've updated their firmware. Your refrigerator wants to be on your Wi-Fi.
None of this is broken. This is the product functioning as designed.
Outrage in Bend as Forest Green Subaru Shortage Forces Residents to Rethink Entire Personalities (via Michael)
For those in particularly dire straits, trained therapy dogs (all named Luna or Maverick) will be available for emotional support. Free oat milk lattes will also be provided, though participants are encouraged to bring their own reusable mugs—because, despite the crisis, Bend still has standards.
