Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try
Austin Z. Henley recommends algorithms and data structures worth wrestling with beyond the usual interview set—pieces that stretch intuition about performance, representation, and problem shape.
4 min · 870 words
Everything Is a Leaky Abstraction (in machine learning)
Elijah Potter, building on Andrej Karpathy's case for understanding backprop by hand, argues that unlike sealed abstractions such as TCP/IP, TLS or PostgreSQL, every part of a machine learning system leaks into the cost function, so practitioners should understand the whole model and training regimen before they start.
2 min · 402 words
Basis researchers show how LLMs can invent a programming language, write an interpreter, and prove that the interpreter follows the language's rules—arguing that shipping a verified interpreter is becoming a practical unit of AI-generated software, not just generated code snippets.
19 min · 4,264 words
AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects
Sean Goedecke answers the question of where all the AI-built software is by comparing install counts across about twenty marketplaces, plugin registries and modding platforms between 2022-24 and 2025-26. He finds 2x to 20x more new software overall, roughly 2x more modestly successful projects, and no growth in wildly successful ones, then speculates on why.
4 min · 1,008 words
What is a forward deployed engineer, and do you need one?
Denys Zaichenko explains what forward deployed engineers actually do inside customer teams, how they differ from solutions engineers, and when a company needs one.
6 min · 1,404 words
Epic's EAC2 v2 seems fairly easily bypassable
Matthew Garrett looks at Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat Linux v2 announcement and argues the design still looks bypassable in practice—walking through why userland anti-cheat on Linux is a hard security problem.
3 min · 683 words
Karri Saarinen argues that good products carry the perspective of the people who make them, and worries that agent-driven 'software factories', where individuals ship independent changes, dilute that shared point of view into an average of outputs. He hopes easier software-making leaves more room for people to develop and follow a perspective.
3 min · 587 words
AI Can Write the Code. Who Verifies It?
Mihai Avram argues that AI coding agents have outpaced human code review, citing Faros data on rising bugs, review time and incidents, and lays out layered automated verification: AI code reviewers (Claude, Codex, Copilot, Bugbot), CI/CD checks from lint, tests and SAST to architecture review, and when to run them from pre-commit to production.
16 min · 3,785 words
My old job feels very distant now
A software developer reflects on how ChatGPT and coding models went from a better Google, to generating copy-pasted specs, to the default way of working, what the author misses and does not miss about the old way of programming, and how quickly both the models and developers have adapted.
9 min · 2,014 words
Comparing Chromium Development at Google and Igalia
Sharon Yang compares building Chromium inside Google versus at Igalia: process differences, review culture, release cadence, and what changes when the browser is your product versus one of many engines.
13 min · 2,902 words
Gleam case exhaustiveness, as a fan
A Gleam enthusiast walks through how the language's exhaustiveness checking shapes nested decision trees, pattern matching and day-to-day refactoring confidence, celebrating compile-time guarantees that catch incomplete case analysis.
12 min · 2,860 words
How Codex HappenedInside OpenAI's comeback in coding, from a failed launch to the app that took over ChatGPT
Dan Shipper's longform traces how OpenAI's Codex went from a rocky coding-agent launch to a dedicated model line and desktop app, growing past 5 million weekly users by June 2026 before merging into ChatGPT—and how Codex and ChatGPT for Work together reached about 40 million weekly active users.
39 min · 8,864 words
More on Anthropic's Scion ripping off Mononoke
In a follow-up post, Rain (sunshowers) reports receiving private confirmation that Anthropic's Scion source-control system intentionally copied Meta's Mononoke, explains that the resemblance extends to the whole data model including Bonsai-style changesets, answers reader objections, and notes Anthropic later added attribution after responding on Hacker News.
5 min · 1,168 words
Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's Product Assurance team introduces Voxel, a tool that emulates a full Oxide rack, including its real control plane, switches, service processors and customer-like networking topologies, so the team can test current software without scarce hardware; it covers image creation, launch, SP emulation and the MPL 2.0 release.
18 min · 4,170 words
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
Popcar surveys how coding agents are mass-decompiling game binaries, unlocking preservation and modding—while raising awkward questions about IP, security, and what ‘source available’ means when AI can recover readable code at scale.
6 min · 1,336 words
I built the RealWorld app in Lean 4
A Leangineering write-up on building RealWorld, the Medium-clone reference app with official API and website test suites, entirely in Lean 4, from the HTTP server to the frontend. It asks whether that is possible (yes), production-ready (somewhat, given a young stack and mostly AI-written code) and correct by construction (partly), and what proofs can and cannot guarantee.
11 min · 2,641 words
The Decoherence Trap: When AI slop drowns out the signal in an endless sea of noise
Maevyn introduces decoherence: the build-up of locally valid but mutually incompatible or redundant models inside a system, so that the cost of change is dominated by translating between them. The essay argues it compounds with a system's rate of change, that AI is producing it faster than ever, and that this rules out a runaway intelligence explosion.
39 min · 8,856 words
Scaling agent teams: reach the frontier at 30% of the cost
Cohere Labs finds that heterogeneous coding-agent teams—pairing a strong lead with many cheaper planners—can reach frontier ProgramBench performance while cutting cost about 70% versus an all-frontier team (e.g. $510 down to $155), with lessons on where extra agents actually help.
20 min · 4,528 words
rust-djinn: You Should Specify Your Code Unambiguously (and Prove That You Did)
Simon Henniger introduces rust-djinn, arguing developers should write unambiguous specifications for their code and prove those specs hold—bridging documentation, types and verification so correctness claims are checkable rather than aspirational.
13 min · 3,029 words
A new model for open source: closed to pull requests, open to remix
Geoffrey Huntley revisits The Cathedral and the Bazaar and argues that in the AI era open source needs a new model: keep code open but close it to pull requests, and instead publish guidance so people remix and patch software for their own needs, as he now plans to do with his own GitHub projects.
3 min · 680 words