I’m bringing a new server online today to improve background queue performance. If you see Lilly in the logs, that’s it. Follows our train naming theme.

The new Codex for Mac update is really good. There are a bunch of new features, but computer use is particularly well done. Some great Mac-specific touches. Ari Weinstein worked on it — from the original Workflow team, and Shortcuts at Apple.

Jeffrey Zeldman blogs about taking time to edit now that text is free and abundant:

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this.

Updating version strings today, so here’s my official guide to acceptable version numbers:

❌ 0.1
❌ 1
❌ 1.0.0
✅ 1.0b1
✅ 1.0
✅ 1.0.1
❌ 2
✅ 2.0
✅ 2.0.1
✅ 2.1
✅ 2.1.1
❌ 2.1.10
❌ 2.123
❌ 2026.1.2
❌ 2026.123456789

I’ve been versioning apps like this for 30 years. It’s just how it is. 🙂

Inkwell beta for Android is now in review over at Google. Feeling good about 1.0 on both mobile platforms, will ship fairly soon. All the client apps are open source too — web, mobile, Mac.

Time for a home screen update. A few recent changes: Inkwell beta, Duolingo, Orion. Dock row is Hey plus our Micro.blog suite of apps: Epilogue, Strata, and Micro.blog.

Inkwell for iOS is now available as a beta! You can join TestFlight here. We’ll be improving a few things this week, getting it ready for an official release on both iOS and Android.

This profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker is extremely long. I read it on the train and while standing in line at Disneyland Paris. But for all the research the reporters did, it’s essentially just a rehashing of the “not consistently candid” argument against Sam from ove...

First coffee back in Austin in about a month! Glad to be home. Still miss Europe a little too.

Internet Archive quietly continues to do great work. TechCrunch reports on digitizing Aadam Jacobs’s personal collection of taped concerts:

Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings from influential artists like Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole bunch of other punk groups.

So cool to see this kind of thing preserved.

Another very good analysis of the AI market from Ben Thompson. OpenAI has invested heavily in compute, which will help them, but they are also squeezed by Anthropic on the enterprise side and Meta on the consumer side. It’s hard to compete with everyone.

Back in the United States after my extended trip across the ocean by ship, around Spain and France by train, and back to Malaga for Release Notes. Had an incredible time. I feel very lucky to be able to do this.

I also got a bunch of work done. Inkwell for mobile is looking great, beta this week.

Early morning in Madrid. The moon still out and train station on the left.

Steve Troughton-Smith posts about Apple’s software quality:

The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it’s been for years: Apple doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That’s why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.

A related question: why does Apple have so many apps? Certainly they should have Safari, Mail, and Pages. But what about Journal, News, and Freeform? A bloated lineup of apps is like an app with too many features — difficult to maintain.

This new essay by JA Westenberg about pessimism comes at just about the perfect time, relating to many things in the current tech world:

Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say “I think this could go well,” you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology.

And:

When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be different don’t vote, don’t volunteer, don’t start companies, don’t run for office, don’t build the thing that might have mattered.

I always want to be the naive optimist who believes in people and believes in ambitious new projects that probably won’t work. Everything good I’ve done is a result of that.

Another view from Malaga. Had an amazing time here for Release Notes. @DazeEnd has also shared some fun photos from the last couple of days.

Just released an update to Micro.blog for iOS that addresses a bunch of little bugs. Glad to get this one out there. We’ll get an Android version ready soon to sync up with the changes.

Playa de la Malagueta. 🏖️

Peter Steinberger temporarily blocked from Claude:

When multiple people asked him why he’s using Claude instead of his employer’s models at all, he explained that he only uses it for testing, to ensure updates to OpenClaw won’t break things for Claude users.

I think there is one of two things going on, maybe both:

• Anthropic is generally less open, as I blogged about last week.
• Anthropic is constrained by limited compute, so they optimize for profitable users.

OpenAI’s massive investment in new infrastructure will look either foolish or brilliant depending on how the next year plays out.

Castillo de Gibralfaro. 🇪🇸

For people who like the view from trains as much as I do, here is a minute and a half video of us just rolling through the French countryside.

The new ChatGPT Pro at $100/month seems essentially just as good as the previous $200/month plan. It appears to even include Pulse. I’m gonna try to switch to get a feel for the token limits. I could never come close to hitting limits before.

Garcia Coffee House.

Morning in Malaga.

Interesting points in this blog post by Andrew Murphy (via Nick Heer) about how writing code faster isn’t the problem. But most of it is really about large teams that have bureaucratic delay fish.

AI can be empowering for small teams. I’m probably shipping software twice as fast with half the bugs.

I’m fixing several things in the iOS app for Micro.blog… If anyone wants to get on the beta, you can join TestFlight here. Will ship to everyone and Android in about a week.

While walking around Disneyland Paris yesterday, I was thinking about the parks I’ve visited and the others around the world. So today on the train I decided to make a list on my blog.

It was a good excuse to use Micro.blog photo collections too. See this GitHub Gist for the source.

Kimberly KG reflects on the latest from our president:

And yet, he’s still in office. Still not being held accountable. Who are we?

To keep our sanity, over the last year we’ve gone from outrage to mocking. Watch how late night TV makes fun of the ridiculous and dangerous things that Trump says. But surely with the Iran war this has turned a corner from the absurd and mostly bad just for our country to the potentially catastrophic.

He must be removed from office as soon as possible. See also this video predicting exactly that from James Carville. 🇺🇸

Really enjoyed my short time in Paris. I generally think that Europeans have gotten so many things right that we Americans are still struggling with. But… what is with all the smoking, still, in 2026? Someone should tell them it’s bad for you. 🚬

I like this thought from @patrickrhone:

The biggest danger with AI is that it is a shortcut around things that matter. Things that matter intellectually, things that matter socially, and things that matter emotionally.

I think that’s right. We have to make deliberate choices, which is hard right now because AI is like, “Hi, I can do everything for you.” But what actually makes us uniquely human? What has more value and meaning if we do it ourselves? I want shortcuts that give us more time for those things that matter. (And it’s complicated because that might not be the same for everyone.)