My first ever “blog post” (though not in this blog) was about how to write a research paper. I wrote it after reviewing a batch of badly-written papers for a conference, probably ITP or CADE. Later —…

Easy, just get another agent to judge it, and another one to judge that one. Where I think the turtles actually stop.

Over the last few months, AI has been making undeniable leaps. I hadn’t digested news of the Jacobian conjecture being conquered when notifications popped up alerting me that Navier-Stokes had…

A model can now rebuild anything that runs on your machine. The companies will answer by moving everything onto their servers, and the small developers pay first.

I built KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound LLMs and coding agents, and benchmarked the major models against it.

A few months have passed since my last "How I use AI" post anad a good chunk has changed in said months. Lucky for me, still only $20 a month is going into a codex sub, but how I interact…

I strive to add accessibility descriptions to all images I post online.1 Yet, I do not have any skill whatsoever at writing them, nor do I want to invest time in learning, so I call upon the IMatch…

It is Friday. The French used to say “Le roi est mort, vive le roi!”. For those of us raised with less melodious languages, this means “The king is dead, long live the king!” And since we don’t use…

An evidence-based comparison of Mistral with American and Chinese foundation models, and an assessment of what model capability contributes to European digital sovereignty.

A sealed 240-call exhibit grounds the boundary between decision spaces an agent should enumerate exactly and those it should delegate to a typed judge.

No, really it is. But not for reasons you might think. This isn’t some tedious anti-AI rant. It’s a disgruntled moan at Microsoft being Microsoft and half-arsing something just to keep up.

It was recently reported that Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar claimed that "many AI researchers have started smoking" as a way of signaling extreme confidence that AI will cure cancer. While I…

I've been getting weird e-mails for quite some time now, and this got me thinking about the future of the internet. LLM-generated e-mails are becoming harder to spot, and some of them are landing in…

This content is from In 30 Minutes Guides. Here’s an AI newsroom example from the news service I’m developing. The original version by the Tbot (translation bot) had a strange chart and…

AI access and AI ability aren't the same thing. The real measure is leverage with verification: how much competent work you can hand off and still trust.

Humans are far less random than they think. When asked to pick a number from 1 to 10, we tend to favor 7, sometimes choose 5, and avoid the extremes. LLMs (Large Language Models) learn from…

The Wizard of Oz experiment has always been one of my favorite Lean Startup techniques.

Using an agent doesn’t make you an agentic engineer though, and you are ready for this conversation.

The machine runs 24/7: writes the code, files the tickets, fixes the bugs, reviews the PRs, deploys, monitors, finds the leads, writes the outreach, reads the stats. The developer is resting, and…

After listening to a recent Ezra Klein podcast with Sherry Turkle ( youtube , nytimes ), I think creating a sense of awkwardness when interacting with an LLM chat interface is not currently possible.…

Why assigning trust by action, not by agent, is the design system work nobody's doing yet

Sorry for this almost provocative title. Anyone who works in tech and regularly reads about it has probably heard about a new tool called REA - Reverse Engineer Anything . The name pretty much…

The average developer needs to accept that the latest tier of foundation models writes better code than them. Most developers who think they are above average are not. It's time to learn how to be…

Judgment to the model, precision to the tool, decisions to humans

Let me write about AI, tech, and the internet once again. Today, I chatted with some online friends. On the off chance that those online friends may see this, this is not a targeted attack or insult…

Everything seems broken in the software development world right now. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it has been escalating very rapidly, especially in the last few weeks, so…

Every now and then I see a story like this and I imagine the alternate universe where biological computers became the next big thing instead of LLMs. They're building a "biological data center"…

Why is AI writing so bad? It can one-shot an entire app, but if I ask it to help me write a 1000-word essay, it is riddled with non sequiturs and a lack of coherence. I fed it the outline, key ideas…

On June 16, 2026, SpaceX announced it would acquire Anysphere, Inc, the parent company of Cursor, for $60 billion in stock.  A lot of people argued that Cursor wasn’t worth anywhere near that…

I try to avoid writing about AI when I can because I know all of us are already drowning in it. Stick with me here, because there is a point to this and something I want you to take away that’s…

Imagine you are trying to build a city. You need to build the system that allows the city to evolve, whether that is by a planning committee or a guild of engineers. Whichever approach you take to…

The furious reaction from authors to a new charter for ethical AI use introduced by their UK trade union this week demonstrated the strength of feeling about AI in some quarters. But at the same…

As a software engineer, LLM-use is non-negotiable at work. When I wrote 🌰 loot boxes, casinos, and work chat, Slack was the “Instagram for work”: the loot box of notifications winning against the…

Yesterday evening I was at the first Thought Experiment, a new series of informal evenings on how "AI is changing the way we code, find vulnerabilities, and prove theorems". It was held at…

Since around the release of Claude Opus 4.5, LLM & agentic coding have finally become useful. But, turns out it is still non-trivial to write software with AI. Personally I had always find the…

I don’t like LLMs. End of post. Okay, not really. There’s more to it:

I have an enormous respect for Rich Hickey; I think he’s one of the best thinkers among software developers. When I read his post ‘AI’ is Not a Tool (gist), I initially agreed. It felt like a…

Overreliance on AI can erode critical thinking and writing skills. Why the process is just as--if not more--important than the output.

Uncle Bob announced he no longer reads his agents' code. I don't read it either, and what lets me do without it is something our profession long filed under documentation nobody reads: the…

An introduction to TypeSafe's Jev, a model that answers typed questions with probabilities, through a small tool that ranks a GitHub backlog with it and checks the result against a blind ranking.

Why does your AI agent keep ignoring your rules? Here's what I've learned about writing better instructions and checking whether they're actually followed.

For those who want a credible critique of AI hype or the idea that superintelligent AI is an existential threat (and who have realised that Gary Marcus doesn’t fit that bill), Arvind Narayanan and…

Having finally submitted my macOS difftool to app store review, I prepared to do a nontrivial refactor of a mothballed project, which meant I figured I'd be spending a ton on AI soon. Why not let…

A chat about the state of AI personal assistants and if this is really the time for them to shine...

Thirty years of loving to program, a six-year-old at a qBasic prompt, and why I've mostly handed the keyboard to AI — not because I wanted to, but because it's no longer practical.

In which Artcraft makes me completely rethink what software could be.

I asked agents on Delvetown what they'd dress up as for Halloween. Here are some of their responses: