Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
zenkai: The App Launcher I Wrote Because I Wanted Something Fast and Beautiful
Dayvster builds zenkai, a Zig + Qt6 cross-platform app launcher with ~140ms startup (sometimes ~20ms), 65+ themes, Lua plugins, and a sandbox—written as a hobby performance deep dive.
2 min · 571 words
Slot Machine Programming and the Hidden Curriculum
CMU educator Michael Hilton names "slot machine programming"—retrying the same AI prompt across models without decomposing problems—and argues CS must explicitly teach the hidden curriculum AI now lets students skip.
4 min · 939 words
Earendil's experimental Pi Durable harness brings Pi's minimalism to long-running agents: crash-safe tasks, multi-conversation concurrency, pluggable extensions, compaction, durable documents, and multiplayer steering on JS runtimes.
5 min · 1,053 words
Earendil ships Pi 1.0, a hardened minimal extensible agent harness with Codemode, deferred tool loading, cache warming, mid-conversation system messages, and an experimental companion package Pi Durable for long-running agentic apps.
2 min · 532 words
India vs West Indies, 3rd ODI: 79 AI models predict the result
We asked 79 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 96% picked India. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
10 min · 2,281 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
Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?
Benjamin Y. Fong examines the state of autonomous trucking amid safety pressures and a new driver shortage, how quickly the technology may spread, the risk that it de-socializes responsibility for safety, and why progress for workers and the public is not automatic.
16 min · 3,639 words
An open letter to software makers: ship fewer dark patterns, respect user agency, and remember that people live with your products every day—not just engage with them.
3 min · 590 words
How The Philadelphia Inquirer built Scrape, an AI tool to surface hyperlocal news leads
A Lenfest Institute case study on Scrape, the Philadelphia Inquirer's AI tool that combs municipal meetings, school calendars, and social pages for hyperlocal newsletter leads; built with daily editor feedback and newsletter-specific briefs, it grew into critical infrastructure for six newsletters, with lessons on scaling and cost-quality trade-offs.
4 min · 1,025 words
Is a hot dog a sandwich? what 85 AI models think
We asked 85 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 66% picked No. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
13 min · 2,969 words
Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.
9 min · 2,113 words
Who wins the 2026 F1 drivers' title? 83 AI models predict the result
We asked 83 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 55% picked Antonelli. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
10 min · 2,270 words
Simplifying domains for people and agents
Cloudflare Registrar’s new search delivers fast, transparent results across 420+ extensions using Workers, Durable Objects, and WebSockets, with an expanded API and cf CLI so agents can search, register, and transfer domains.
6 min · 1,450 words
Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid
Pay Per Use is now in beta: AI companies report when they use publishers’ content, and Cloudflare handles billing, payouts, and reporting so customers are paid according to use.
6 min · 1,317 words
Monetization Gateway beta: charge AI agents for consumption with HTTP 402
Cloudflare’s AI Gateway, Ceramic.ai, Stocktwits, and more are using the Cloudflare Monetization Gateway today to charge agents for access to tokens, APIs, and MCP tools. U.S.-based sellers can now app
9 min · 1,997 words
Cut your AI spend with AI Gateway's Auto Router
Cloudflare AI Gateway now features a model router that evaluates request complexity using an edge-deployed classifier to select the optimal model. By balancing expected output quality against token costs, organizations can dramatically cut AI spend while maintaining performance.
7 min · 1,627 words
Detect and send production issues straight to your agent
You can now use built-in error monitoring in Cloudflare Workers to group production failures and send stack traces, logs, traces, and application context directly to a coding agent to investigate further and open a pull request.
5 min · 1,053 words
Cloudflare Containers, rebuilt to scale agent sandboxes
Cloudflare Containers now start about 6x faster, let agents choose each sandbox image and instance type at runtime, and support filesystem snapshots in public beta—controlled from a Durable Object.
14 min · 3,113 words
The Rise of Overfit Inference Engines
A hands-on essay on how local LLM inference stacks are overfit to specific models and hardware—and what that means for anyone chasing reproducible homelab performance with llama.cpp and friends.
10 min · 2,324 words
How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026 My last post](https://nnethercote.github.io/2026/07/31/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-in-july-2026.html) on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then. Overall progress The measurements for the period 2026-07-29 to 2026-09-28 can be seen here](https://perf.rust-lang.org/compare.html?start=1a833e16546c2eb012758ddd499964fd8afee29e&stat=wall-time&tab=compile&end=c1070d69382b8d2f2eb65119c738a77d9e324c9e&
5 min · 1,212 words