Fresh Reads

With my kids I’m currently building a little dungeron crawler and we’re trying to learn a bit about game development along the way. However given that we live in the modern times of increasing capabilities we wanted to get a narrator and voice over. But we also wanted it to not…

In general, LLM performance is incredibly multidimensional. There's no guarantee of a fixed ordering where the model that is best at math is also the model that's best at jokes. Despite that complexity, much of the variation in performance is explained by just a single variable:…

exe.dev integrations let you store secrets with exe.dev’s control plane so your VMs (and the agents on those VMs) can access services without seeing the secrets themselves. The next step is to avoid having the secret to begin with. When exe.dev and the other service both support…

GitHub Octoverse 2026 I'm at GitHub Universe today (GitHub gave me a free ticket through their "GitHub Stars" program). EVP Jay Parikh just announced this year's Octoverse report, and highlighted these numbers in particular: This is a pretty stark representation of the impact of…

I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new…

If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing. Document why, share it with your community of peers, bring it to your manager, and work to find solutions. An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating…

Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge I'm at GitHub Universe this week and, similar to last year, the conference badge is a full-blown color screen computer. I've been hacking around with it again, and then I ran into with Steve Francia... who worked with Gemini to get a full…

When it comes to LLMs, context rules everything around us. An agent loop is inherently quadratic: messages accumulate and every iteration you send the full stack of messages to the model. That stack of messages is the context, and it starts with a system prompt, descriptions of…

GPT-6.1 Terra It's always interesting to note which aspects of a new model are emphasized in the release announcement. In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, OpenAI went with visual reasoning and computer use: We’re introducing GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast, efficient model that combines…

Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech…

Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden headless web view and outputs console.log() to standard…

Tool: Seam Cutter I built this weird and very specific cropping tool - it lets you create a horizontal or vertical cut across an image, then slide the two sides relative to each other. Effectively it lets you crop out a section in the middle of an image. I wanted this because I…

Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works…

Tool: Quick Study Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High: Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a…

If you’re looking for bugs, you’ll get better results if you focus the agents’ attention. The usual loop is roughly: for f in files: "please look for important bugs, using $f as a starting point" But I've found this to be more effective: for c in commits: "please analyze $c for…

Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Kimi K3.1 Pro landed on the Kimi API today - it's not yet open weights, but Moonshot promise "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026". They're also offering a "Highspeed" version that's 2-3x faster, at twice the price (except for input token…

DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat: The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it. Via flir on Hacker News Tags: music, ai,…

Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation News today from Anthropic: We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which we…

Without the Internet, agents are useless. With the Internet, they're dangerous. One approach is to allow Internet access, but through carefully controlled sippy straws. Let through only requests to destinations that you trust and deny all of the rest. exe now makes this easy.…

As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins. — Armin Ronacher Tags: security, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, ai-security-research, llms

Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night,…

Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork by Gabriel Turpin which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro!…

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any…

My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is actually fun to play. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it…

When I look at a new agent, I break it down by focusing on its topology. An agent is three things: A model. Your model choice defines the agent’s “smarts,” i.e., which tasks it can accomplish. The agentic loop (see: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of an LLM Agent Loop with Tool).…

My obituary for programming Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic…

Maybe it's the years we spent on Zoom? San Francisco seems hungry for in-person events, and we're no exception. We're hosting our first technical meetup for developers on Monday, October 26, from 6 to 9pm at the Sentry office in San Francisco. The question of the evening: Are we…

Release: llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 When I switched LLM over to httpx2 in LLM 0.33 I forget that this would break any plugins which used httpx without directly depending on it. llm-tools-datasette was one of those plugins, now fixed. Tags: datasette, llm

Release: llm-echo 0.5 I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the prompts that have been fed to it. The new release now…

Inline rendering with document​.currentScript Lean Rada describes a neat trick that takes advantage of the document.currentScript property. You can use that to drop in a tiny inline <script> element that replaces itself when the page loads: The year is <script>…

Release: web-edit 0.1a2 web-edit (previously) is my tiny web app for browsing and editing files in a folder. I mainly built it for editing files on different machines via Tailscale. I added a "copy to clipboard" option for both text and image data. I needed this because I was…

We think "did a human read the code?" is an imprecise proxy for "what could go wrong with this change, and which check—automated or human—is the right one to catch it?" Asking that question also changed when review happens. Before, review was a gate at the end of the road: write…

When I want to improve one of my iOS apps, I shake my phone, type in a prompt, and off it goes to Shelley, together with a screenshot! Iteration (culture) is eating planning (strategy) for lunch. I'm finding that grinding down the friction, even as minimal as getting myself to…

Research: sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust This research task is really an experiment in running Claude Code for web in "Ultracode" mode, as described in Orchestrate subagents at scale with dynamic workflows in the Claude Code documentation. With Ultracode…

Tool: Chirp Pong Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work! Build a two player competitive pong like game…

Snacking—focusing on small, shippable tasks that make the product better but don’t necessarily help it grow—is addictive. Sometimes your main project is a slog. Why not take a break and fix something? You get that sense of accomplishment and suddenly your main project feels less…

thinking for yourself is a terrible business model.

We have a choice in front of us. In his latest op-ed for Transformer, Yoshua Bengio invites employees of frontier AI companies to ask themselves if their work is truly leading us toward a safer future. Reflecting on these questions is hard, but we no longer have the luxury of…

The other day I was doing some ops work, live migrating some VMs from one physical host to another, as we sometimes need to do. This process is nearly transparent (except a pause) to our users, but I wanted an extra set of “attention heads” on it, so I built shoulder (as in…

Notes on reputation; A thing I learnt from dad

Modern processors have multiple CPU cores, and the physical CPU cores in turn have two logical CPU cores. The latter permit the physical core to run two independent programs simultaneously, an approach known as hyper-threading. Hyper-threading uses CPU resources more…

More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code. With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP…

I spent years becoming the engineer people reached for. Now they still reach for me, but for different reasons.

When your browser reads this blog, it looks up blog.exe.dev using DNS, and sends an HTTP request with a Host: blog.exe.dev header to our servers. Our anycast network receives the request and uses Host: blog.exe.dev to figure out which of all the exe VMs to proxy your request to.…