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Glyph Lefkowitz contrasts the concerted push against generative AI across writing, art and music with how many programmers keep using it anyway, and argues that programming is art like any other creative medium, so AI encroachment on software development is just as worth resisting.
8 min · 1,807 words
What should we tell our students?
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Álvaro Lozano-Robledo addresses students worried by AI progress in mathematics: keep calm and carry on studying, because there is still much research, explanation and communication of mathematics to be done, with and without LLMs.
19 min · 4,466 words
A short personal essay on loving to program while watching AI coding agents become addictive: feeling late to agents, mourning craft, and wondering what happens when the fun part of the job is handed to a machine.
3 min · 686 words
Diomidis Spinellis argues that better performance, lower cost and higher availability mean AI will take over most cognitive work, and reflects on moving from making a living by thinking to making thinking part of a life worth living.
2 min · 534 words
What ArtCraft’s Vibe-Coded Apps Say About Adobe
Tedium's Ernie Smith looks at ArtCraft, a project rebuilding Adobe's Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop with clean-room, AI-first vibe-coding techniques, asks whether it is ethical, and argues it shows what happens when a company like Adobe ignores its users.
5 min · 1,049 words
"Robot" Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot
A roboticist and former industrial safety standards committee member rebuts the claim that a dishwasher is a robot, arguing that beyond the technical definition the word, born in Capek's 1920 play, is a social construct applied to automated machines that make us uneasy about what it means to be human.
4 min · 988 words
Bengio: 'If you prioritize safety, leave frontier AI companies'
In an open letter op-ed for Transformer, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio urges researchers at frontier AI companies to recognise the risks of the race to build ever more capable systems and, if they truly prioritise safety, to leave for AI safety institutes and mission-driven groups such as his non-profit LawZero.
6 min · 1,304 words
The Deeply Impersonal Personalized Recruiter Mail
A software engineer dissects a new breed of LLM-written recruiter email that opens by narrating your own career back to you, then pastes a mismatched job description — and argues the fake personalisation is worse than an honest template.
2 min · 512 words
OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics
Set theorist Asaf Karagila responds to OpenAI's claim about the Partition Principle and the Axiom of Choice: why he will not send Sam Altman whisky, what formalization still misses, and what the episode says about math, AI and publicity.
5 min · 1,182 words
Why Isn't The Industry Freaking Out About DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
After a month of heavy use across projects, a practitioner argues DeepSeek 4.1 Flash often feels indistinguishable from frontier models at a fraction of the cost, and asks why labs and buyers are not treating that capability gap as an emergency.
3 min · 691 words
All our houses are built on sand now
Paul Battley measured how many recent commits to major programming language implementations are LLM-assisted, finding about a third for C# and Ruby and over half for Julia, while Perl, Lua and Chicken Scheme stay near zero. He notes that GCC and LLVM also take LLM commits, invokes Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust, and shares his method and data table.
3 min · 792 words
Scott Aaronson reacts to OpenAI's release of 372 AI-generated mathematical results, including a claimed proof of the Unique Games Conjecture his wife Dana Moshkovitz worked on for years. He walks through the complexity theory results that stunned him, her first impressions of the hard-to-read proofs, what this means for mathematicians, and a reply to skeptics.
10 min · 2,293 words
A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over
Front-end developer David Bushell gives career advice for web workers in a rough market: don't quit a paying job without a fallback, invest in skills in short supply such as accessibility, CSS in stylesheets and communication, and drop dead weight like React, GitHub dependence and influencer culture, because the web remains a human creation for human needs.
4 min · 937 words
An open-source developer recounts trying to share GitHub projects on Reddit: every attempt, from posting links on a new account to slowly building comments, adding typos to avoid AI-slop flags, starting his own community and finally earning 1k karma through the mobile app, ended with deleted posts and banned accounts.
2 min · 459 words
Graham Lee walks through common objections to AI coding: code as art, AI as job thief, humans as prompt-relaying meat proxies, software engineering as rule-following, and AI companies as bad actors. He finds each rests on a contestable premise, drawing on Marx's Fragment on Machines to argue it is the mode of production, not the technology, that takes the job.
3 min · 711 words
David Heinemeier Hansson follows up his Rails World talk telling programmers to put down the pencils: coding agents are now good enough that writing most code by hand is no longer economically viable, AI is more like gaining capable new coworkers than another tool, and programmers who refuse to collaborate with agents are the ones who should worry.
2 min · 382 words
AI was great until it was not.A cautionary tale.
Nia Robles, a theoretical physics PhD student at Harvard, describes how ChatGPT first helped her learn during a master's at Oxford by turning dense notes into concrete examples, and how its spread through academia has since left her more isolated, with mentors and peers answering questions with 'just ask ChatGPT' instead of debate, collaboration and teaching.
15 min · 3,471 words
Software developers are not okay
Baldur Bjarnason looks at the wave of software developers posting about burnout, layoffs, the 2026 job market and AI taking the fun out of programming, and argues the comment sections reveal an industry in real distress. His essay explains why so many are not doing well and suggests people in software consider a possible future outside the tech industry proper.
10 min · 2,208 words
Do you actually like hard problems?
Sunil Pai argues that engineers who say they love hard problems mostly love puzzle solving and pattern matching, which AI now does with near-infinite breadth. The genuinely hard problems left mix engineering with product, society, culture and politics, and he reflects on missing being the go-to engineer for the grind even as people still seek his higher-level judgment.
1 min · 312 words
Meta's Muse Is An Adorable Privacy And Security Dumpster Fire
Karl Bode argues that Meta's agentic AI assistant Muse, launched with a zero-day flaw that let attackers spy on Mac users, shows how tech giants are rushing out highly privileged AI agents with little regard for privacy or security while lobbying against regulation and open alternatives.
4 min · 825 words