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Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.
— Linus Torvalds, Another silly guitar-pedal-related repo
Tags: ai, vibe-coding, linus-torvalds, python, llms, generative-ai
A Software Library with No Code
Provocative experiment from Drew Breunig, who designed a new library for time formatting ("3 hours ago" kind of thing) called "whenwords" that has no code at all, just a carefully written specification, an AGENTS.md and a collection of conformance tests in a YAML file.Pass that to your coding agent of choice, tell it what language you need and it will write it for you on demand!
This meshes nearly with my recent interest in conformance suites. If you publish good enough language-independent tests it's pretty astonishing how far today's coding agents can take you!
Tags: testing, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, drew-breunig, coding-agents
A field guide to sandboxes for AI
This guide to the current sandboxing landscape by Luis Cardoso is comprehensive, dense and absolutely fantastic.He starts by differentiating between containers (which share the host kernel), microVMs (their own guest kernel behind hardwae virtualization), gVisor userspace kernels and WebAssembly/isolates that constrain everything within a runtime.
The piece then dives deep into terminology, approaches and the landscape of existing tools.
I think using the right sandboxes to safely run untrusted code is one of the most important problems to solve in 2026. This guide is an invaluable starting point.
Via lobste.rs
Tags: sandboxing, ai, generative-ai, llms
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Devastating critique of the new menu icons in macOS Tahoe by Nikita Prokopov, who starts by quoting the 1992 Apple HIG rule to not "overload the user with complex icons" and then provides comprehensive evidence of Tahoe doing exactly that.In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.
But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.
And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.
Via Hacker News
Oxide and Friends Predictions 2026, today at 4pm PT
I joined the Oxide and Friends podcast last year to predict the next 1, 3 and 6 years(!) of AI developments. With hindsight I did very badly, but they're inviting me back again anyway to have another go.We will be recording live today at 4pm Pacific on their Discord - you can join that here, and the podcast version will go out shortly afterwards.
I'll be recording at their office in Emeryville and then heading to the Crucible to learn how to make neon signs.
Via Bryan Cantrill
It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point - one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up.
Tags: anthropic, claude, openai, ai, llms, gpt-5, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, claude-4
With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.
This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.
Design your deprecations as migrations with time, tooling, and empathy. Most “API design” is actually “API retirement.”
— Addy Osmani, 21 lessons from 14 years at Google
Tags: api-design, addy-osmani, careers, google
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Depending on how you measure it, the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger appears to be 123.45 beats per minute.This is one of those things that's so cool I'm just going to accept it as true.
(I only today learned from the Hacker News comments that Veridis Quo is "Very Disco", and if you flip the order of those words you get Discovery, the name of the album.)
Via Kottke
Tags: music
My experience is that real AI adoption on real problems is a complex blend of: domain context on the problem, domain experience with AI tooling, and old-fashioned IT issues. I’m deeply skeptical of any initiative for internal AI adoption that doesn’t anchor on all three of those. This is an advantage of earlier stage companies, because you can often find aspects of all three of those in a single person, or at least across two people. In larger companies, you need three different organizations doing this work together, this is just objectively hard
— Will Larson, Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint
Tags: leadership, llms, ai, will-larson
I sent the December edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month:
Here's a copy of the November newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
Tags: newsletter
[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away.
Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms
[...] The puzzle is still there. What’s gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some obscure AWS IAM permission error. That work wasn’t the puzzle for me. It was just friction, laborious and frustrating. The thinking remains; the hitting of the keys and the frustrating is what’s been removed.
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, llms
