Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Jake Voytko grants that AI-accelerated code output is making software buggier, but pushes back on nostalgia: drawing on using computers since 1990, he recalls blue screens, lost work before autosave, no security, disk fragmentation, tiny memory, unreliable install media and the turbo button to argue that software in the Windows era was far worse.
11 min · 2,593 words
The Mythical Man-Month in the age of AI
Jan van den Berg asks whether Brooks's Law still holds when you can add AI agents instead of people, and concludes it has mutated rather than vanished: sequential work stays sequential, coordination overhead shifts to whoever defines done and reviews agent output, and unclear requirements just get you the wrong answer faster.
1 min · 284 words
With critical CVEs surging as LLMs get better at finding vulnerabilities, Gavin Anderegg argues that most content sites never needed a CMS or a server-rendered Node stack: clients rarely edit them, nobody patches them, and statically generated HTML is faster, nearly free to host and has a far smaller attack surface.
5 min · 1,136 words
OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?
Max Woolf walks through a timeline of OpenAI and Anthropic model launches since June 2026, showing input, output and cache prices falling by up to 80%, and weighs possible reasons including competition from open-weight models, compute capacity and upcoming IPOs, concluding that cheaper LLMs are good for users.
11 min · 2,568 words
We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Dan Luu argues that AI coding tools let skilled engineers attempt far more ambitious software, using Michael Malis's pgrust (a Postgres rewrite with JIT-style optimizations whose testing has surfaced real Postgres bugs) as the running example, and explains why programming expertise still matters for judging model output.
27 min · 6,109 words
Matt Webb explains why he shut down the web servers he had self-hosted for 27 years, archiving old sites and moving his blog to GitHub Pages, because a wave of new vulnerabilities (PHP, HTTPS certificates, Linux root exploits) has tipped the calculus against securing his own internet-facing boxes, with musings on AI agents in a future of pervasive exploits.
5 min · 1,226 words
Alex Gusev, CTO of Uploadcare, reflects on turning 40 and realizing that AI coding agents have removed the engineering challenges that drove a lifetime of side projects and startups, and on what it means to look for a new kind of challenge in a second professional life.
3 min · 804 words
Ben Hardill describes his Lenovo X1 Carbon developing crashing tabs and BTRFS checksum errors, confirming faulty soldered RAM with memtest86+, and working around the bad addresses with the Linux memmap kernel parameter instead of replacing a module, arguing soldered RAM is especially painful amid today's shortage-driven memory prices.
5 min · 1,068 words
OpenAI and Anthropic Wanted to Replace Engineers. Instead, They Shot Their Own Customers.
Techbro Nerd argues that by selling AI coding agents, OpenAI and Anthropic let anyone clone established software, using Adobe versus the vibe-coded ArtCraft as the example, which erodes the enterprise software customers the labs depend on and drives the price of their own product toward zero.
6 min · 1,409 words
Freelance security consultant Lucas Luitjes digs into the public php2shell proof of concept and argues mass exploitation is far harder than vendors claimed: it needs four requests to the same PHP worker and the exact build, which means days of DoS-like brute forcing against real sites behind load balancers and WAFs. Patch fast, but the '15 minutes or die' hype was overblown.
3 min · 608 words
Friday essay: AI is devastating higher education, but the system was already broken
Jeff Sparrow argues that generative AI is ravaging universities, from AI-written essays to scraped scholarship, but that marketised, efficiency-driven higher education was already broken, and calls for a struggle over what knowledge and the university are for.
28 min · 6,529 words
No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
Jim Nielsen compares Daniel Ellsberg's account of RAND's missile-gap years, where staff felt a quasi-religious mission and doubted they'd live to collect retirement, with today's rhetoric from AI labs like Anthropic.
2 min · 425 words
I can't believe PowerShell is actually good
Corbin Davenport of The Spacebar admits he underestimated PowerShell after Bash scripting frustrations, showing how its native data types, easy web API parsing, and .NET objects made a real scripting job, migrating old Tumblr posts with their metadata, far easier.
10 min · 2,286 words
There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability
Elias Taylor argues that the much-hyped PHP vulnerability behind this week's emergency security releases is a real bug but hard to exploit in practice, nowhere near Log4Shell or Heartbleed, and explains why the panic outruns the risk in the LLM era.
4 min · 808 words
The compiler was supposed to end programming too
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. An essay on what the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, how the bottleneck moves when code gets cheap, and a guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
14 min · 3,332 words
What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose
A recent finance graduate reflects on six months of deliberately putting themselves in situations where they knew the least, teaching themselves software from scratch, and how getting comfortable with feeling stupid led to faster learning and a startup incubator acceptance.
13 min · 2,965 words
Do web components have a future if nobody is writing them?
Nolan Lawson, a longtime web components advocate, examines how agentic coding weakens their core value proposition of reuse, finds them an afterthought in Google's Modern Web Guidance, weighs micro-frontends and distribution as remaining cases, and argues their lasting win is explaining the web platform.
10 min · 2,327 words
Alex Ewerlöf dissects Jev's 30-day hype cycle: what the general-purpose classifier actually does, how it was marketed, how it compares with traditional LLMs and schema-validation loops, and what the episode says about the state of AI innovation.
13 min · 3,024 words
What requirements don't you have?
Sean Goedecke argues that elegant software design comes from identifying requirements you can drop, such as fresh data, concurrent writes, or low tail latency, citing Unicorn, S3, StatsD, SQLite, and Cursor's git backend, and warns that unchecked consistency demands petrify systems.
5 min · 1,096 words
Finding a home amidst the wreckage
Eskild Hustvedt describes growing apathetic as free software projects and Linux distros embrace LLMs, and how he found a new home in Chimera Linux, which takes a stand against LLM-generated contributions, along with other distros, BSDs and non-LLM forks that do the same.
3 min · 677 words