Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Anthropic’s Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke
A former Mononoke engineer compares Anthropic's description of 'derived data' in its new Scion version control system with how Meta's open-source Mononoke source control server used the same idea years earlier, and argues that Anthropic should have credited Mononoke as prior art.
4 min · 855 words
A Markdown File Should Just Open
Joshua Morris argues that in 2026 a Markdown file should open as a readable document on an ordinary computer or phone without extra software or a private format, and looks at how operating systems and built-in apps could support the format natively.
13 min · 2,948 words
Types of types: Haskell's Kind system
A practical tour of Haskell’s kind system—values, types, kinds, higher-kinded types and data, and custom kinds—drawn from adding typed configuration to a Redis clone.
15 min · 3,422 words
Dan Luu argues that as it becomes easier to make real performance gains, it also becomes easier to game benchmarks with fake ones, surveying how reward-hacking shows up across regex, web servers, terminals, and other systems, and what to watch for when reading performance claims.
17 min · 3,940 words
Inside Slipstream’s Recall Pattern
Glide’s engineering team explains Slipstream’s recall pattern for handing six types of rote engineering maintenance work to AI agents: how issues are detected, recalled into agent workflows, verified, and measured, with the numbers they are seeing in production.
9 min · 2,016 words
Sanket Saurav argues that coding agents have inverted software economics, making building cheap and running expensive, yet products still look like 2015 because the industry hasn't shaken off doctrines born of rationing engineering time, and that winners will rethink categories from first principles and bundle more products.
6 min · 1,483 words
Non-Determinism Doesn't Matter
A short argument that AI non-determinism is mostly a non-issue for product work: teams already ship around flaky tests, humans, and networks—and should optimize for outcomes, not bit-identical runs.
3 min · 644 words
Religious Studies In Software Engineering
A Religious Studies graduate turned programmer applies ideas from the discipline to software: the insider/outsider problem, Walter Ong's orality-to-digitisation arc, the sect-church-sect cycle, and Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building, arguing that programs are also social and political artefacts and that elevating any program above the people holding its theory is where problems begin.
26 min · 5,937 words
The geometric model of maintenance
Using git history labelled as new development or maintenance, kqr tests James Shore's rule that each person-month of code induces 10 days of maintenance in year one and 5 days a year after, finds it does not track real projects like tmux, and proposes a geometrically decaying model whose fitted totals range from about 1.5x maintenance per unit of new work for nginx to 5.3x for Neovim.
12 min · 2,827 words
I Deleted 168,000 Lines of Comments. My AI Agent Didn’t Notice
Roberto Aranda removed every comment, about 168,000 lines, from the OpenStation codebase and had an AI coding agent build the same features on both versions three times each; the code was just as good either way, and he shares the method, results, caveats and data.
4 min · 871 words
AI writes most of the code now. Where does that leave software engineers?
Saiful Alam argues that as models write more of the code, software engineers’ scarce skills shift toward judgment, system design, verification, and taste—not competing with agents on typing speed.
6 min · 1,369 words
AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
Ars Technica covers research suggesting AI coding tools increase code volume without a matching rise in completed software deliverables, and what that means for productivity claims around agents.
2 min · 435 words
Redesigning source control at Anthropic
Anthropic explains how merges to its monorepo grew from about 2,500 to over 30,000 per day in 2026, why git hosting became the bottleneck, and how it built and migrated to Scion, an in-house version control system, in five months, plus lessons and ideas for the wider git ecosystem.
16 min · 3,745 words
The Creusot team announces version 0.14.0 of their formal verification tool for Rust, highlighting selected new features for contracts and proofs and pointing to the full changelog for the release.
4 min · 983 words
10 Years of the SRE book: Announcing the second edition of "Site Reliability Engineering"
Google announces a completely rewritten second edition of its Site Reliability Engineering book, ten years after the first: how SLOs, observability, automation, reliability testing, capacity management and SRE org models have matured, how SRE supports and uses AI, and why culture still matters.
3 min · 718 words
Three weeks of agentic refactoring: could we trust the result?
A case study of three weeks refactoring DATAMIMIC CE with coding agents: how a before/after verification harness was silently testing new code via an editable-install finder, which results were voided, the architecture guardrails used, and what the team will change next.
6 min · 1,375 words
AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill.
A response to Rich Hickey's "'AI' is Not a Tool": automation and tool use can coexist, an LLM can be wielded by a human even by Hickey's own definition, and using it well requires skill, feedback, and judgment like any other tool.
2 min · 555 words
Brooks Lybrand asks whether web frameworks still matter in the age of vibe coding and agents—and whether there is still room to build new ones after React’s win.
19 min · 4,419 words
Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
Peter Bryant argues that much of software engineering has always looked more like skilled trades work than the white-collar myth—and that AI is making that continuity clearer, not inventing a new class of work.
2 min · 531 words
Tobias van Schneider argues that AI-era small teams can finally build specialized software for "unsexy" physical industries long ignored by top engineering talent locked into ads and social products—and that switching costs for legacy enterprise software are starting to fall.
2 min · 448 words