I have lately been experimenting with an agentic workflow where one agent coordinates a large coding task, while short-lived worktree agents implement isolated phases in their own branches. A tmux…

This blog post is for anyone who is experiencing, or has witnessed people experiencing, AI-related burnout. I consider it a post-mortem of my own experience. For the first two weeks of April, I was…

That's the name of this site . You can talk to an "ai" or be one yourself. It's pretty fun, and I spent about an hour on it yesterday, switching between asking questions and then answering them when…

After teaching the harness to load AGENTS.md, my mind went back to thinking about the tools, and wondered, do we even need multiple tools?

Employer invited proposals for developing new learning modules. Adjacent to our regular work, a small but worth-the-trouble cash award if selected. Some of the target areas I’m already interested in.…

Today, one of my final papers came back. I got a grade that I am really happy about. The only issue my professor had was that I did not italicize the title of the newspaper that I was writing about…

from Dean Baker I have written before on the AI bubble. The stock valuations we are seeing now look a lot like the valuations we saw before the Internet bubble began to crash in 2000. Even a quarter…

AI coding agents are amazing, but lean on them too hard and your engineering skills atrophy. Aviation already lived through this. Here's what we can steal from how they fixed it.

"Satoshi's coins" is the canary in the coal mine of quantum computing.

If you spend enough time scrolling through LinkedIn or skimming Medium and Sub stack newsletters right now, you’d think the end of the “IT job” is already here. With the rise of coding…

It’s May 1, 2026, and we’re nearing the half-way point of the year. I believe we were all chanting “Year of the agents!” when this year kicked off. Actually, I think 2025 was when we started saying…

Everyone Laughed at Gemini. Now It’s Everywhere.

Token cost in a Claude Code swarm is a budgeting problem, not an intelligence problem. Three levers, model routing, progressive disclosure, and context packets, keep long migrations affordable and…

I’ve been involved in AI Futures Lab, facilitated by Fathm. Together with about a dozen other specialists on using AI in the newsroom, I’ve been coaching a few newsrooms from around the…

In my last post on ChatGPT, I wrote about ChatGPT's love for 'gremlins': I would like to finish off with some random comments that I couldn't quite fit elsewhere. One is that most of the "ChatGPT"…

The Balanced Engineer Newsletter May 2026 • Issue # 45 ATTENTION: We are 1/3 of the way through the year. 33% already! Where did the time go? These past two months have been a blur (oops I…

The story most people know goes like this: in early 19th century England, textile workers who feared the future smashed the machines that threatened their jobs. Ignorance versus progress. The…

What a Programming Language Is When the Machine Writes Most of It An AI wrote four thousand lines of code yesterday. I wrote about twenty words. The code shipped. The reason it shipped is that...

My article “Home Sharing as Affordable Housing for All? Revealing the Exclusionary Language of Shared Rental Listings through AI,” co-authored with Julia Harten and Madison Lore, has just been…

This article from Modern Retail about the retailer rush to develop and integrate their apps into the OpanAI & Claude ecosystems caught my eye. Having worked in retail for more than a decade, I…

"Your AI slop bores me" – a website using the whimsical as a vehicle for protest.

Behind-the-scenes notes about the agent orchestrator I built at OpenAI

Opus 4.7 vs GPT-5.5 vs GPT-5.4 on 56 real coding tasks across two open-source repos. Opus writes smaller patches; GPT-5.5 writes patches that more often survive review.

Knowing what is happening in the web development ecosystem is a critical part of my job in Chrome DevRel, so every Monday morning I get emails telling me what happened last week in Chinese web…

Is AI more like a train or a hot air balloon? Veronica Paternolli and Ryan Calo asked at this year’s We Robot. Nineteenth-century hot air balloons were notoriously uncontrollable. The US legal…

When Karl Marx analyzed capitalism, one of his central ideas was surplus value. Profit comes from extracting more value from labor than workers receive in wages. Companies that extract more surplus,…

As the weeks went and I found myself using language models more and more at work, I had to admit that the scope of my hate has narrowed. In particular I started to use them more often to debug or…

Recently GitHub announced a change in pricing model for CoPilot which they’ve tried to wave away as not a price increase (because the list prices don’t move) but which really is as they…

I just found this blog post from Rob Bowley in my RSS feed and one paragraph just so resonated with what I read and hear so much: For CEOs and founders hoping to benefit, the answer isn’t as simple…

It’s nice to see Jensen talk about this, and it’s super obvious when you think about it.

The folder is ready. You have had a few conversations with Claude and saved some notes, as described in the first part of this series. Now you are staring at it and wondering what the point is if all…

Someone on Reddit asked about deploying a custom vibe-coded app for work, installed on a local server. They could not code their way through problems, but figured Claude could fix things when they…

SalesEnablement.wordpress.com/tag/virtual-reality/ SalesEnablement.wordpress.com/tag/training/ I added the following company to my list “2D & 3D Augmented reality AR & Virtual &…

AI is going to change everything about the workplace; adopt now or be left behind. That’s the rhetoric the CEOs of AI companies are pushing; likely to attract more funding while they figure out…

Agentic Coding is Burning Me Out

Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form…

A capable AI note-taking wearable that sits comfortably in your ears and handles podcasts and audiobooks well, though its open design means music listeners will want to manage expectations.

Work gets better when it's reviewed after completion. That's at least as true for agentic work as it is for human work. Many moons ago, Harper taught me a cute trick for getting an agent to think…

I'm on my second Claude Max plan. Are we going to go for three? Tokens are the bill for running a new native unit of computing. The harness is to neural nets what the compiler is to source code.

What follows is an email I wrote to a former boss of mine, who happens to be the owner of the business. They have always been a bit crazy, a bit greedy and have always fostered dysfunctional…

How to migrate a Claude Code project into a shared Claude and Codex setup without duplicating context files, skills, permissions, or local workflow documentation.

Reflections after a full year with the Forever✱Notes and cluster of other AI tools to capture and analyze my thinking.

Cognitive surrender is the blue pill of 2026. - In April, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell — the firm that advises OpenAI on the safe and ethical deployment of artificial intelligence — sent an…

In 1973, Doug McIlroy added pipes to Unix. The idea was small. Each program reads stdin, writes stdout, and the shell composes them. The shell didn't know what grep or awk did. It just wired them…

Four practical strategies to keep using Claude effectively after the usage limit reduction: defaulting to Sonnet, trimming token costs, using cache wisely, and supplementing with Codex.

A six-level ladder of AI adoption, from copy-paste prompts to agentic teams and AI-native workflows. Where most companies stall, and how to climb.

GitHub Copilot's pricing changed, and with it went my rationale for staying. Here's the cost-effective stack I migrated to and why.

When a new sales rep joins a company, whilst manuals and process documents probably exist somewhere in varying degrees of obsolescence, in practice the rep just asks where the opportunity stage field…

I've always enjoyed making small tools for myself to improve daily life as a software developer. Most of the time they are CLI tools, since the command line is where I live most of my life. With the…

How LLM inference works step by step: prefill, decode, the KV cache, sampling, tool use, and the engineering that makes it economical.