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I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about what the end-game is for intelligence on tap in our society. But in the limited domain of writing computer programs these tools have brought so much exploration and joy to my work.

— David Crawshaw, Eight more months of agents

Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Hallo allemaal, Er is weer genoeg te vertellen! Zoveel dat ik vermoedelijk nog dingen vergeet in deze update. Dit is een kopie van een bericht op mijn nieuwsbrief. Schrijf u vooral ook in als u geen updates wil missen! Om te beginnen het meest actuele: Zondag 21:30 op TV NPO2, Bureau Buitenland (VPRO) met Barbara Kathmann en mij over de geopolitiek van onze absurde digitale afhankelijkheden. Kijk vooral, we gaan ons best doen er een leerzame uitzending van te maken!

Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public des...

In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast.

I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio and live broadcast for decades, so he enjoyed the experience as the engineer not on duty!

Today's links End of the line for video essays: America's worst copyright law keeps getting even worse. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Payphone phaseout; Nvidia sock-puppets; Love picking; Fake locksmiths. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. R...

I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.

[...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software shift from scarce to abundant. Compulsive behaviors around agent usage. Dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change. It's not fear necessarily just the cognitive overload from living in an inflection point.

— Tom Dale

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

There's a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone's building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic's latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python ...

Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry”. It’s more true than ever. There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies th...

Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the thre...

An Update on Heroku An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news. Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-rea...

Ever since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 was introduced, I wondered why nobody built a decent laptop chassis around it.

You could swap out a low spec CM5 for a higher spec, and get an instant computer upgrade. Or, assuming a CM6 comes out someday in the same form factor, the laptop chassis could get an entirely new life with that upgrade.

Or: Documents Retrieved from the Department of Best Practices, Third Sub-Basement, The Building

Today's links Luxury Kafka: US Immigration on the easiest setting. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Whisky PC; Anitfeatures; Silicon Roundabout; Steampunk Etch-A-Sketch; MLMs as mirror-world organizers. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent...

Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it.

When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for my experiment. All of this gets summarized in an extensive set of notes, with links back to where each piece of information was found. Using these notes, codex wires the experiment and makes a bunch of hyperparameter decisions I couldn’t possibly make without much more effort.

— Karel D'Oosterlinck, I spent $10,000 to automate my research at OpenAI with Codex

Tags: codex-cli, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms

Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked: Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding...

Two major new model releases today, within about 15 minutes of each other. Anthropic released Opus 4.6. Here's its pelican: OpenAI release GPT-5.3-Codex, albeit only via their Codex app, not yet in their API. Here's its pelican: I've had a bit of preview access to both of ...

ratios will be ratios

Your headphones may only let you get audio from one source at once, but Linux has no such limitations!