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Release: inaturalist-clumper 0.1 Part of the infrastructure I use for publishing my iNaturalist sightings on my blog . I've been running this in production for a few weeks now, inspiring some iterations on how it works, so I decided to ship…

Western Gull, Rock Pigeon, in Los Angeles Area (custom), CA, US I went for a bird walk in the morning before PyCon, and we spotted a local seagull enjoying a Starbucks.

Tool: QR code generator Claude helped me build this tool for creating QR codes, for both text/URLs and for connecting to WiFi networks. Tags: vibe-coding , tools , generative-ai , ai , llms

Release: datasette-llm-limits 0.1a0 This plugin works in conjunction with datasette-llm and datasette-llm-accountant to let you configure a per-user (or global) spending limit for LLM usage inside of Datasette. Configuration looks something…

This Mitchell Hashimoto quote about Bun migrating from Zig to Rust reminded me of a similar conversation I had at a conference last week. I was talking to someone who worked for a medium sized technology company with a pair of legacy/ legen…

[...] On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in pr…

Release: datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0 The datasette.io site was being hammered by poorly-behaved crawlers, so I had Codex (GPT-5.5 xhigh) build a configurable rate limiting plugin to block IPs that were hammering specific areas of the site…

Welcome to the Datasette blog We have a bunch of neat Datasette announcements in the pipeline so we decided it was time the project grew an official blog. I built this using OpenAI Codex desktop, which turns out to have the Markdown session…

“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase. If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing. — Boris Mann Tags: ai-agents , ai , agent-definitions

Tool: CSP Allow-list Experiment An experiment that shows that you can load an app in a CSP-protected sandboxed iframe (see previous note ) and have a custom fetch() that intercepts CSP errors and passes them up to the parent window... which…

Release: datasette 1.0a29 New TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette) utility method for creating "_r" dictionaries. #2695 Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains zero rows. #2701 Fixed bug with display of…

Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something.…

The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, a…

Release: llm 0.32a2 A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one: Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the /v1/responses endpoint instead of /v1/chat/completions . This enables interleaved rea…

GitLab Act 2 There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era. They're "planning to reduce the number of countri…

Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One th…

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles. I particu…

TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script Kim_Bruning on Hacker News : But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that wi…

Learning on the Shop floor Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack: River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a publi…

This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The report…

One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much…

WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The i…

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to request from Claude. The article is crammed…

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a host…

Release: llm-gemini 0.31 gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview . Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then. Tags: llm-release , gemi…

Tool: Big Words I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and tu…

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox: Suddenly, the bugs are…

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned i…

Tool: GitHub Repo Stats One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this p…

I'm at Anthropic's Code w/ Claude event today. Here's my live blog of the morning keynote sessions. Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , anthropic , claude , claude-code , live-blog

I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison . Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding…

Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked in” or “cr…

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was . Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved pro…

Probably one of the hardest lessons I had to learn

If you spend enough time in US business or finance conversations, one word keeps showing up: equity . Coming from a German-speaking, central European background, I found it surprisingly hard to fully internalize what that word means. More t…

Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace

Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has bee…

Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil . First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post . This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here…

I've sold out

About five months ago I wrote about Absurd , a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service , a compiler plugi…

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gard…

Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In man…

How I use Pi to distill multiple context windows into exactly what I need

Historically, writing code was slower than reviewing code. It might not have felt that way, because code reviews sat in queues until someone got around to picking it up. But if you compare the actual acts themselves, creation was usually th…

On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code

Don't let AI make you the boss no one respects anymore

A look back at 2025

Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.

An email I wrote over 2 years ago

A rambling rebuttal to Armin's claim that LLM APIs are a state synchronization problem.

Got Bash and some code interpreter? Skip MCP.

How I turned imposter syndrome into my learning superpower

It's not about working more - it's about caring more

Building a JavaScript AST interpreter in JavaScript: scope isolation, ES5 implementation, and all the footguns along the way.

are the best tool to shape the culture you want

... is what stands between you and what you want

A data-driven comparison of MCP and CLI approaches for coding agent terminal control

Why I share what I actually think and feel

cc-antidebug patches Claude Code to enable Node.js debugger support for SDK-based apps and restores the /cost command functionality for Max plan users

On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions

Exploring how to track and analyze changes in Claude Code's system prompts and tools to understand AI assistant evolution

Vibe code is legacy code by Steve Krouse

Reflections on how I transitioned from Engineer to Director of Engineering at Sentry

Some tips to land the best job you ever had

A story how I ended up at Sentry

Treating LLMs as shitty general purpose computers we program with natural language. Because throwing shit at the wall wasn't working anymore.

How I built a simple portable audio player for my boy, summoning the spirit of the Gameboy

A tiny tool to calculate when your baby might arrive

Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice by Chris Stokel-Walker for the New Scientist

Humanity's Last Exam by Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI

If you're not distressingly embedded in the torrent of AI news on Twixxer like I reluctantly am, you might not know what DeepSeek is yet. Bless you.

Common Misconceptions About the Complexity in Robotics vs AI by Dan Ogawa

A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study by Peter Scarfe, Kelly Watcham, Alasdair Clarke, Etienne Roesch

Unbaited by Daniel Petho

Welcome to the smidgeon stream. This is a new kind of content on the Garden. One that was

How to use Zotero's translator and Tana Paste formatting to easily import papers into Tana

Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

How to programmatically turn on LEDs and read button states

Exploring the absolute basics.

The story of a programmer trying to electronics

Fun little vacation project for fun and zero profit.

Reminiscing about the times I didn't watch TV at night but built stuff.

Thoughts on acquiring computational thinking skills based on my own experience.

Reflections on two years of working at Elicit and why it's time to leave

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse

How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars

Gaining a strange disease and losing my ability to see straight

Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is

How to gather people and create communities in ways that are low-stress and high-payoff

Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey

Designing with Language Models

Sketchy ideas for interfaces that play with the novel capabilities of language models

An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content

Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code

An archive of my high school desktop designs, circa 2009

Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

On the fuzziness of calling things “artificial intelligence” and moving the goalposts

Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut

Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes

People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems

A new role at an AI research lab working on tools for open-ended reasoning

How block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web

Last month, April 2022, marked the 10 year anniversary of my start as a professional programmer. I started programming earlier than that, but hadn’t been paid a salary. As a teenager I built websites and IRC bots and wrote tiny Python scrip…

Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems

Bringing visual explanations and embodied knowledge to programming tools

Agent-based note-taking systems that can prompt and facilitate custom workflows

Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web

Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web

Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations

Narrative essays that I consider ideal models of the medium

Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content

A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web

Algorithms that make their reasoning visible

How to write macros without touching the terminal

An anthropological look at the cultural norms of the React community

On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

Longing for the paleolithic past in the Anthropocene

Why there is nothing natural about the idea of 'nature'

What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move

How to build a digital garden without touching code

A Hyperlink Academy writing club where we mimic the work of others

A collection of observations on the rise of soft, sparkly, baby pink aesthetics among developers

Developer self-expression through coloured switches, keystroke actuation, and LED light displays

What's wrong with linear, static programming mediums and how might we improve them?

The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web

Data is currently dislocated – our narratives and metaphors around it try to convince us it is immaterial

Notes on how to use the position property in CSS to make scrollytelling stories

How to customise Roam Research with your own CSS themes

A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology

A collection of laws named for specific people in the field of programming

Notes on the history of cyborgs and why the idea still holds historical weight in Western narratives

A collection of interesting words that have recently been coined

A discipline at the intersection of cultural anthropology and binary logic

How to use the Greensock animation library inside React using React hooks

On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens

I grew up in a what I now know people to consider a really small town. There wasn’t a lot, but even in that small town we had 2-3 lawyers. And to make a point about technology and how we develop software I want to paint you a picture of the…

There’s a scene in Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s character, the manager of the Oakland A’s , is watching a recording of one of his players trying so hard to run fast that he stumbles and falls. Lying on the ground he’s angry at himself, be…

Notes on the basics of the Greensock animation llibrary

One of the eternal laws of the internet dictates that as soon as one person says they have a new thing that lets them type faster — a keyboard, a keyboard layout, an editor configuration, etc. — somebody else must say: “but typing is not th…

Whenever I’m not sure whether I’m spending my time on the right thing I ask myself: does it help me ship? If what I consider working on is not the thing we want to ship itself, but lies in the vast grey area of software projects where I cou…

Illustrated notes on the key concepts of how Gatsby.js works

The failure of drawing materials without mediums and meat

How to offend everyone with boundary-crossing steak and nuggets

Illustrations made for a set of episodes of the Cultivated Meat podcast

Illustrated notes on the idea of Gift Economies and cultural historys of economic exchange

Notes on the metaphorical varieties of synecdoche and metonymy

A video tour through how I build the old version of this site

Mary Douglas defined dirt as matter out of place – the crossing of boundaries

Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project

Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write them

Illustrated notes on the Knowledge Hydrant guide to collaborative learning

Questions I am often asked to answer

Notes on the academic field of CSCL and major papers in the discipline

Notes on how to run silent meetings and reading sessions

Illustrated notes on how React suspense works

Some insights into how I collaborative with experts to create illustrated notes on technical topics

Illustrated notes on how data unions work and what problems they might solve

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming

A collection of my favourite books on conceptual metaphor theory

A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam

I’ve been working remotely full-time at Sourcegraph for slightly over a year now and, in the five years before that, had 2-3 home office days a week at flinc and ioki. There are a lot of different blog posts I could write about remote worki…

Illustrated notes on common mistakes people make in Git, and how to fix them

A guide to the apps and tools I use to create illustrations

The introduction to my thesis on the Quantified Self movement and the culture of self-tracking

Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?

An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web

Explaining React through visual metaphors

Notes from my podcast episode Open Source and Gift Economies on Maintainers Anonymous

Illustrated notes on the Building A Second Brain course

A lightening talk on second brains and cyborg embodiment

Illustrated notes on the essentials of web security

A few months ago, while looking at some code, a little light bulb that I didn’t even know existed went off in my head: “This was only written in this way, because the tools allow it to be written in this way.” Maybe it was a question mark,…

A case study showing how I make illustrations for abstract programming concepts

Illustrated notes on how to build state machines with the xState library

Illustrated notes on how routing works in Vue.js

Illustrated notes on the core concepts in Rust

Illustrated notes on building Gatsby themes

Illustrated notes on advanced but fundamental topics in JavaScript

Visualising the cultural narratives around cultured meat

Illustrated notes on building custom React hooks

Illustrated notes on how work with immutable data in the Immer state library

Illustrated notes on the basics of the GraphQL query language

My favourite resources for learning to draw and developing your visual thinking skills

Illustrated notes on the new language changes in JavaScript ES2019

Illustrated notes on the JAMstack, Gatsby & Contentful

Illustrated notes on how to implement web sockets with Vue.js and Socket.io

Illustrated notes on building VR web apps with React360

Illustrated notes on how to test web apps with Cypress

Illustrated notes on how compilers and transpilers are different

Everything you need to know about what API's are and how they work

This article has been translated into Spanish: Por qué debes aprender más lenguajes de programación (incluso si no los vas a utilizar) Imagine we’ve been handed a task and we’re free to choose the programming language. The assignment involv…

The absolute minimum you need to know about data storage

Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's comparison operators work

Illustrated notes on how Babel works

Illustrated notes on how JSX in React works

Illustrated notes on how the React virtual DOM works

Illustrated notes on how JavaScript's spread operator works

This article has been translated into Russian: Полезные инструменты для написания книг Thank you Vlad! In the beginning, there is always a single text file, nothing more. It’s called ideas.md or book.md . It contains a list of thoughts and…

Well, that certainly went quicker than I planned. I knew from releasing the paperback edition of Writing An Interpreter In Go that a lot of people still prefer paper over eBooks. So it didn’t come as a big surprise when, right after the rel…

If you don’t care about the Who, Where, When, Why, How and the Why Is It A Lost Chapter? and want to skip to the What: I wrote a new chapter for Writing An Interpreter In Go and you can read it for free at interpreterbook.com/lost . Otherwi…

If you’d asked me a only few months ago if there’ll ever be a printed version of Writing An Interpreter In Go I’d responded with a “Huh, uummm, well, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if I’ll find the time and if there’s any interest.” As it turne…

There are certain tools that provide incredibly high value. Much more so than others. They provide so much value by acting as a multiplier of power and leverage. And I think there’s something they all have in common. I’m talking about inter…

I wrote my book “Writing An Interpreter In Go” over the course of 11 months. The first four months were spent on building the Monkey programming language and its interpreter. In the following seven months I wrote the book itself and at time…

You’re a programmer and your product manager walks up to your desk, taps you on the shoulder and asks if you have a couple of minutes to spare. She needs to talk to you about something. You sit down together and she has a serious look on he…

Last week I’ve self-published my first book called “Writing An Interpreter In Go”, which you can get at interpreterbook.com . I want to tell you a little bit about why I chose to write this particular book. Sometimes I jokingly call the sum…

Over the past year I’ve spent a significant amount of time reading through Go’s go packages , the packages used by the Go compiler and other Go tools. But only recently did it occur to me that these are real, public packages. I can actually…

This post has been translated to Chinese . In the last couple of months I developed a certain approach to writing code. Whenever I write a new function, class or method I ask myself: “Is this code stupid enough?” If it’s not, it’s not done…

This post is based on the talk of the same name I gave at the Arrrrcamp conference in Ghent, Belgium on October 2nd, 2014. You can find the slides here and the video recording here . Unicorn is a webserver written in Ruby for Rails and Rack…

There is an interesting thread on the Go issue tracker about daemonizing processes. Most of the thread is not about daemonizing processes though, but more about why Go has no Fork() function which you can call directly in your code. The fir…