Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality & Value?
Gustavo Pezzi of Pikuma reflects on whether AI tools that make software and games trivially easy to produce will flood the market with cheap, generic work, drawing parallels with past shifts in other crafts and asking what will make people care about what you make.
11 min · 2,431 words
Christopher Drum of Stone Tools takes a hands-on look at Lotus Improv on NeXTSTEP, the cult-classic spreadsheet that separated data, formulas and views into named categories, testing how its model holds up today, what it got right, and where its rigidity frustrates traditional spreadsheet use.
33 min · 7,630 words
Where is all the new, good software?
Nate Meyvis lists candidate answers to the skeptic’s question—if AI coding is so powerful, why isn’t more great new software obvious—covering quieter quality gains, limited adoption, political bottlenecks, ephemeral and private tools, leisure capture, and AI sometimes reducing software use.
2 min · 511 words
Developer Agency in the Age of AI
David Scott Bernstein argues that AI gives developers leverage but not agency: the real work is understanding problems, choosing tradeoffs, testing assumptions and preserving changeability, and teams must keep asking whether they can still understand, verify and change what they build.
5 min · 1,084 words
"200 OK" doesn't mean your AI agent did the job
Prathap K argues that a success response from an AI agent's tool call only means a request was accepted, not that the work happened, and describes the read-back check he uses to verify each write against the real system (email, CRM, messages).
2 min · 562 words
I'm sorry, but you still have to think
Piotr Sarnacki examines DHH's AI-agent rewrites of Campfire Once from Rails into Rust, Elixir and Go, showing how unspecified prompts turn design trade-offs like backwards compatibility, latency versus throughput and crash behaviour into coin flips, and why benchmarks and reliability still require human critical thinking.
8 min · 1,742 words
Type-safe HTML templating in Zig
Lukáš Lalinský describes a type-safe HTML templating approach in Zig, drawing on decades of server-side templating experience and showing how Zig's type system can catch markup mistakes at compile time.
5 min · 1,168 words
Dave Gauer runs small experiments to measure how much space Git loose objects take per commit, from an empty repo and tiny one-line changes to a 580 KB binary and a 16 MB source file, and explains which commit, tree and blob objects each change adds.
4 min · 1,034 words
nobloat/poll – designing a minimal poll tool
After a frustrating Doodle experience, the author builds nobloat/poll: a self-hostable, single-binary Doodle alternative in plain Go with no external dependencies, and walks through link-based ownership without signup, calendar invites, proof-of-work spam protection, JSON-file storage instead of a database, reliable mail sending, and shrinking the binary.
13 min · 2,884 words
I paid people to try and follow my README
Terence Eden describes paying people about €25 each to follow his ActivityBot README aloud over video calls, the many confusing steps, jargon and assumptions they uncovered, and why testing documentation with real people beats relying on your own judgement or an LLM.
3 min · 668 words
the problem (communication between the compiler, the build system, and beyond)
An essay arguing that operating systems miss optimization opportunities because compilers, build systems, package managers, filesystems and schedulers do not share dependency and resource information, with C examples of whole-program optimization and ideas for deduplication, easier development and better scheduling if they communicated.
13 min · 2,988 words
Will Lachance refines his Implementation Decision Records (IDRs), short documents meant both to get better output from LLM coding agents and to leave a durable record of implementation decisions, arguing they should capture the problem, goals, non-goals and intended result rather than a step-by-step plan.
3 min · 609 words
Kyle Kukshtel writes up his Indie Rodeo talk on making games more legible to AI coding agents: practical ways to structure a game project, tooling and feedback loops so agents like Claude Code can iterate faster and more reliably on game development.
27 min · 6,159 words
What I've been seeing lately (in software)
A personal survey of software culture amid generative AI: normalizing pro-human discussion, exacting design and organizing, the job question, beautiful work, and a growing European push toward self-hosted and public-sector open source.
4 min · 848 words
Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team
Cockroach Labs' Adam Storm describes the "hospital", an agent system that triages GitHub issues and assigns specialist coding agents. It added IBM Db2 support to the MOLT migration tool in under two days for a $4,172 token bill, versus nine months for Oracle in 2024, and the post covers what broke, human review and training junior engineers.
19 min · 4,382 words
Prime Intellect describes how Prime Agent orchestrated a swarm of over 2,000 agents across 10,000+ Prime Sandboxes and 200 billion tokens to rewrite itself from TypeScript to Rust in two weeks, covering why Rust, finite-state-machine orchestration, architecture redesign, and cold start, memory and install-size gains.
9 min · 2,133 words
Fernando Borretti argues that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained inside a community of other humans, and that AI is dissolving those communities in software engineering and beyond, making private intellectual work, from reading papers to writing essays and open source, feel superfluous.
6 min · 1,414 words
Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?
Michael Lynch argues that while LLMs keep getting better, the coding agents that drive them have barely improved since early 2025: he separates the model from the agent, catalogs the workflow gaps and bugs he still hits in Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cline and Pi, and sketches what a better agent would do.
10 min · 2,316 words
A green exit code is not evidence that the work happened
Why agent-run jobs that exit 0 can still have done nothing—and how to assert on real work products and alert on silent zero-effect “success.”
10 min · 2,257 words
Production-grade LLMs and agents: a field guide
Stack Overflow’s maturity map for taking LLM agents from demos to production: determinism, evaluation, confidence, safety, operability, and disciplined coding-agent builds.
3 min · 704 words