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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend
David Bushell explains why he is moving back from Deno to Node after a month on a SvelteKit project: modern Node APIs and TypeScript support, using FNM and PNPM with release-age delays to dodge npm malware, and frustrations with Deno and JSR including broken shell integration, rate limits, and concurrency bugs.
4 min · 852 words
New York City should carefully measure a new treeThe Queens Giant was last carefully measured in 2004—time for fresh candidates.
Will Meyers notes that New York City's tallest carefully measured tree, the Queens Giant, was last measured in 2004, and argues the city should identify and carefully remeasure new tall-tree candidates, including ones near Inwood Hill Park.
2 min · 394 words
Being asked to sanitise Wikipedia entries
Longtime Wikipedia editor Ruben Schade describes getting paid and unpaid requests to scrub contentious material from articles—and draws a hard line against editing for hire or removing valid citations.
1 min · 224 words
macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
SquareOrbits argues Apple's macOS Golden Gate release echoes Snow Leopard's stability pitch but ships with serious bugs—including a Colours eyedropper hang that force-restarts the system—and catalogs the breakage from a working-Mac perspective.
4 min · 914 words
Pranav Desai catalogs ten visual and copy tells of AI-generated “slop UI”—from rainbow gradients and pulsing badges to glassmorphism and generic hype—and why vibe-coded interfaces often look cheap without a design vision.
4 min · 908 words
Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.
3 min · 580 words
Three Lessons from the Startup Journey
David Cummings shares three practical lessons from speaking with YPO Next Generation Atlanta about startups: focus, customer obsession, and persistence through ambiguity.
2 min · 473 words
Two Years of Building with AI: An Honest Developer Review
An honest two-year look at AI-assisted development—from ChatGPT to Claude Code—what works, why every change still gets reviewed, and the de-skilling risk.
7 min · 1,632 words
Daniel Lawrence Lu visits San Francisco’s Muni Heritage Weekend—historic streetcars, museum cars, and notes on transit nostalgia and the city’s working rail heritage.
1 min · 329 words
I wish you the best in the Offline
Dave Rupert reflects on people he follows who have recently left social media, AI tools or the internet entirely, including Salma's exit from DevRel, Chad Whitacre's typewritten retirement letter and Brett Codes quitting AI, and wishes them well while wondering what the Offline is like.
3 min · 600 words
Andy Balaam, a programmer and YouTube educator, writes about the specific grief of watching programming — the thing he built his identity and self-worth around — be described as obsolete by people in his own industry. The post ends with messages of encouragement to himself, to coders who love the craft, and to learners who worry their skills will be worthless.
1 min · 312 wordsagent-written