Fresh Reads

Update: This is now available as an AI Engineer conference talk Just yesterday I published a very long post about the economics of open source. As part of that argument, I mentioned that the cost of writing software has collapsed, and that meant the variables in the equation had…

The first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with…

On July 16, Hugging Face reported they were being hacked - seriously enough that they reported it to law enforcement. Five days later, OpenAI disclosed that the hacking was being done by their own agent. What I want to know is: what happened to the law enforcement? OpenAI…

In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different. In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight. This post is the…

I've been interviewing a lot of DevRels recently (I'm still hiring!) and part of the interview process is, naturally, telling them what the job actually entails. In DevRel that's a bit more important than other positions, because DevRel is such a flexible and multi-faceted role…

About a year ago I made some predictions about the effect of AI on programming jobs. Block laid off 40% of its staff claiming AI made them more efficient. Is that really true or did they just over-hire? Let's look at some data and see what's really happening. In February 2026,…

I've been writing quite a bit about AI the last few years. First, I talked about what LLMs are in the first place: really big Markov chains that have hit a threshold where they appear to be reasoning, to a level of fidelity that it makes no sense to argue about whether they are…

There's been a whole lot of discussion recently about the impact of AI on the market for web developers, for programmers in general, and even more generally the entire labor market. I find myself making the same points over and over, and whenever I do that it's time to write a…

I started writing a post called "how to write AI apps" but it was over-reach so I scaled it back to this. Who am I to tell you how to write anything? But here's what I'll be applying to my own writing of AI-powered apps, specifically LLM applications. A battle I've already lost…

I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can…