Published
Weekend Reading — The least you can do
a brief history of consumption
This week I completed developing the expense report app. This is the software that I am working on for getting all my tax stuff together – receipts, mileage and what not. This is made using Deepseek V4 Flash and the total cost of the project so far is $9.20. One cup of Spanish Latte. And yeah, I have not written a single line of code myself; this has been vibe-coded by an AI. However, I did review the code that was generated, and I told DeepSeek to generate it as per my usual setup, React Router, Prisma, Tailwind, Decimal.js, Vite+, Knip, Playwright, and so forth, and following my coding conventions. This way, the code looks like it was written by me although AI did all the hard work. Right now, we are at around 43,700 lines of code with 17,000 lines of comments. And about 20% is tests. See it for yourself at https://github.com/assaf/expense.
Tech Stuff
DataBlur Share your screen without sharing your secrets. It automatically redacts names, emails, phone numbers, credit card numbers, and other things you don't want to accidentaly expose when doing a screen share. Uses deterministic pattern matching, no ML used.
CSV Tools 61 free CSV tools in your browser: edit, CSV -> Excel, split & merge, geocode, and much more.
It's not just fun. It's addictive. Agentic coding has slot machine mechanics. You're one prompt away from the next feature or unlock, so you keep pulling. The irony isn't lost on me: I've ruined more than a few nights of sleep building apps to improve my health.
Humanize Max AI humanizer for natural text with human-like results 🚀 This is a really cool project. I just tried it on Expense and I do enjoy reading the humanized text it created — on the home page, FAQ, about page, etc — much more than the original GenAI text. And it's free to use. Who said AI can't humanize writing?
anydoc Library to convert any document into Markdown — Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, and more. Written in Rust for performance (super fast), with bindings so it you can use it from Node, in the Browser, Python, or the CLI.
Informing HTTP Extension Design with Data
So, if you want your protocol extension to be adopted and deployed – and even zombie on long after its useful life has ended – keep it simple and repeatable.
CRAP The perfect spec name does n… Conditional Resource Access Protocol
The Valley of Webhooks This is a brilliant idea. I ran into the same issues struggling with webhooks and would love a spec that would allow me to write just one algorithm to handle the initial setup, continous updates, with no need for a sync cron job. Check out the SCROLL spec.
UX Roundup: New AI Models Why AI hallucinations are not a UX retention problem:
Users treat AI the way venture capitalists treat startups: they expect duds and stay for the outsized returns. So give them returns worth staying for. Durable capability compounds; the warm glow of a fire emoji does not.
_emailmd_ Responsive emails, written in Markdown.
lazyrsync Is rsync confusing you? lazyrsync is a TUI that shows you what rsync is doing now and what it's expected to do next.
Flue 2.0 What if React for Agents? TypeScript agent framework, rebuilt around dynamic agents and a new hooks-based API.
export function Assistant() {
const [count, setCount] = usePersistentState('count', 0);
useAgentStart(() => setCount((n) => n + 1));
useModel('moonshot/kimi-k2');
return `You are a helpful assistant. This conversation has ${count} messages.`;
}
IKEA Complexity Index ~20k ikea products ranked by how long they take to build.
Eye for Design
Jon Henshaw "I finally found an excellent use for the View Transition API for my Recollect notes app!"
The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and you. (via Chris Adams)
Silicon Valley will spend millions developing a glove that translates sign language into speech (badly), but they won't spend ten minutes adding Alt-Text to their images. They will build a headset that describes the room to me (poorly), but they won't use semantic HTML headings so I can actually navigate a webpage.
Decoy Font Related, what a better way to say “I hate AI” than to use a font that states "and also hate people who use accessiblity tech"?
Peoples
Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? Being a highly compensated top tier knowledge worker in the age of AI:
Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies.
Business Side
Kanbanize Now! Or how we kept running two week sprints while our robots shipped in two hours:
Somewhere right now, a team is holding a sprint planning session to decide what four agents will do over the next fourteen days. The agents finished it during the meeting. Nobody has told the humans, because the humans are busy playing planning poker over a story that has already been implemented twice, in two different branches, neither of which anyone has read.
Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment The problem with the App Store:
If building something different means spending four or six months on an app that might ultimately be rejected for reasons you can’t predict, while building yet another subscription wrapper is comparatively low-risk, rational people start choosing the safer project.
The Idea Machine — Random Project & App Idea Generator Pull the lever and generate a random idea and bang you're 95% of the way to launching a billion dollar startup!!!
Machine Intelligence
The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers Just a reminder that much of the thought pieces about AI are written by people who want to sell you more AI. That also applies to AI doomerism. (via [object Object])
All this is not just one lone weirdo running tryouts for her cult in some way that’s nothing to do with the rest of the subculture. The event was held at Lighthaven and it was funded by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the AI doomsday home base of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who started all the AI doomsday stories that the AI bubble companies now use as marketing. Yudkowsky also coined the term “effective altruism”. As the effective altruism movement goes, neither Aella nor her event are fringe in the slightest.
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident AI agents are incapable of human-level reasoning. Also:
We believe the entire intrusion was, from the agent's point of view, an attempt to cheat the evaluation: reach our production systems and steal the test solutions rather than solve the challenge on its own.
Su-Shee 🤦
"prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code" is the most absurd headline I've seen this year
The Archive of Incorrect AI Predictions A catalogue of forecasts, made in earnest, that the calendar has since refuted.
Insecurity
Dog escapes containment, hacks neighbor's yard
Zack Whittaker Remember to always wear a seatbelt use an ad-blocker:
By me: A major online ads company that claims to serve 1.5 billion ads a day was hacked and began serving malware designed to steal a person's crypto. This is the latest perfect example why you should use an ad-blocker.
Everything Else
Photos: Paws on Boards And now for your moment of zen: dogs surfing.
Be a minimalist. It’s the least you can do.
The first two hours of a 10 minute job are always the hardest.
i'm hearing reports that every Flock camera has 64 GB of DDR5 in it…
I ♥ RSS I just joined I ♥ RSS. Why? Because I love RSS. And I already subscribe to some of the feeds listed on that site.
Retailers tap AI shopping traffic but fight to keep customer data Retailers are updating their websites to rank highly in chatbot results, while making sure purchases are done on their own sites to collect customer data, because of course.
There should come a time in your life where you grow up and want to see a better world because you find out that “Oh, law and society can be changed. Therefore, we can make things better.” And yet they continue to use their influence to only make the world worse for the common person.
On a long walk today, I found this neighborhood library in Wallingford, part of Seattle. The books available were all about food, including cookbooks. We have hundreds of these free libraries in the city, with new ones opening steadily. Most are quite plain. This is one of the best-designed I've seen. Bon appetit!
