Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, explains why he has stopped giving coding interviews and argues that with AI, engineers without years of tenure or social capital can outpace more experienced peers; he offers practical advice on ownership, taste, empathy and principled thinking for junior engineers.
5 min · 1,233 words
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
Here Be Monsters: What Do You Still Need to Know When Agents Do the Work?
Starting from a CI failure caused by Codex cramming whole React components onto single lines, Adrian Quiroga argues that as AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it, engineers still need three things: solid fundamentals, breadth across the stack, and the willingness to dive in for just-in-time depth when something breaks.
13 min · 2,875 words
AI Promised Less Work. I Have Never Worked More.
Orestis Ioannou, VP of Technology at Bold.org, charts his GitHub contributions since 2019 to show that coding agents made implementation cheap enough that he now runs far more work in parallel: he is back at his full-stack engineer pace, with bursts followed by burnout and a low season that is no longer low.
8 min · 1,727 words
“AI Skills” are worthless in 2026
Charles Miller argues that today's hard-won tricks for working with AI tools are like old C optimisation folklore: quickly made obsolete as the tools improve. Instead of rushing to master prompts and agent workflows now for fear of being left behind, he is content to keep pace with the pack.
2 min · 373 words
David Pertiller describes having Claude Code build a 15-second promo video for his fuel-price app Petroly as a JavaScript renderer instead of using a video editor: every frame comes from a frame(t) function that reuses the app's design, so the video can be diffed, translated, rendered frame by frame and even covered by unit tests on its timing.
8 min · 1,730 words
Thorsten Ball's weekly link roundup, written after two weeks in New York and San Francisco: a new Raising An Agent episode on how Amp operates, notes from a talk to an investment bank on using coding agents, and commentary on AI, software and writing links including Dan Luu on ambitious software.
8 min · 1,937 words
GOTO Considered Totally Sick (for error handling in C)
Returning to C after years of Go and Zig, the author misses defer and errdefer, and after reading John Carmack's emails on inlined code shows how a single goto cleanup label makes C error handling simpler: resource cleanup lives in one place at the end of the function instead of being duplicated at every failure point, the same centralized-exit pattern the Linux kernel coding style recommends.
5 min · 1,204 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
The State of Context Engineering
Drew Breunig shares the slides and lightly edited transcript of his AGNTCon talk “Context Fails & Fixes”, tracing how context engineering emerged, the failures new model capabilities create for harness builders, and his argument that the job is choosing where to be deterministic and where to be probabilistic.
22 min · 5,114 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
Be Aware of What's in Your Logs
Prompted by a bug report that came with a log full of things the developer never wanted to see, fireborn explains how log files can contain screen text, messages, account identifiers, file paths and more, and urges users to check what they share and developers to provide clear warnings, safe defaults and privacy-respecting ways to report problems.
14 min · 3,114 words
Emacs finally folds to my liking
Josep Bigorra describes unifying code folding across every Emacs mode on Emacs 32 master using kirigami as a dispatcher over treesit-fold, Hideshow, Outline and Org, with one consistent keymap, Tree-sitter fold guides, Org-specific handling and tests that verify folds and key bindings.
6 min · 1,304 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
Drew Silcock walks through a week of severe vulnerabilities and incidents, from the PHP2Shell CVEs and a compromised eMudhra intermediate CA to GitLab, musl, LiteLLM and leaked Linux kernel bugs, then asks whether AI-accelerated bug discovery makes this the new normal and what teams can do about it.
19 min · 4,290 words
Building agents: When to fold subagents into your main agent loop
Anthropic's Diane Sarkis explains when teams building on Claude Platform should replace orchestrator-plus-subagent designs with a single agent loop that loads skills and tools on demand, how to migrate in stages while measuring with task-completion evals, and how several teams can keep contributing through MCP tools, skills and knowledge bases.
12 min · 2,835 words
Agents fail like engineers, so I review them like engineers
The founder of Greenflagged argues coding agents make strikingly human mistakes and describes reviewing their work with three reviewer agents (a Skeptic, a Logician and a Steward) modelled on how engineering teams catch process failures.
7 min · 1,563 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
Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team previews research on using Claude for automated attack surface analysis and reduction: mapping reachable code in large open-source projects, then removing or gating unused paths so unknown vulnerabilities become harder to reach in real deployments.
11 min · 2,564 words