Fresh Reads

How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier…

Sometimes when I read a post, I get the growing feeling that I'm reading the output of an LLM. I can't necessarily define why, although there are the common tells (it's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries). As I do this my desire to read on atrophies, sometimes…

every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath. except for our product, of course. in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much. we're special that way. — Ben Hylak Tags:…

TL;DRGood developers’ caution about agentic development comes from knowing that built isn’t the same as working in production. I’ve been surprised by how many excellent developers have been hesitant to go all in on coding agents. These are people who usually try new ways of…

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…

One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency: being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for what you build, but it’s also true for how you build. AI models are improving so quickly that most of us are bottlenecked1 on noticing that AI agents…

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…

Andrej Karpathy sees a widening gap in how people see LLM capabilities. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of…

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…

Many people think1 that getting “good at AI” is trivial. Sure, with some early models there were tricks you had to learn,2 but current models don’t need them. Even if there are different tricks3 that work on current models, the next generation will render them obsolete, so why…

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…

Bryan Cantrill has a great line from a talk where he cautions against anthropomorphizing1 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I think it’s also a mistake to treat any tech company like a person. Here’s the full quote: You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower.…

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…

Cluster idempotency in Module of the Week. A big push on EventLog and a native McpClient land in Effect v4. Effect Miami 🌴 speakers announced.

Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be meaningfully sped up by rewriting them in C or Rust. How can this be true? Some languages are orders-of-magnitude faster than…

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

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from last week’s issue of The Pulse. Full…

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,…

Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to…

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).…

New Effect release featuring the effect/crypto modules, Glob module, streaming CSV, HttpApi Problem Details, Decision.locate, and more!

Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something1 like this: It…

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…

We look at idempotency and the dual-write problem, then use idempotency keys and transactions to safely handle messages that arrive more than once.

When designing software, the requirements you don’t have are as important as the requirements you do. Identifying what you can compromise on — what can be slow, or stale, or inflexible — is usually the key to an elegant design. Elegant systems drop some requirements For…