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Everything filed under Productivity, newest first.
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Singapore Is Paying People to Put Down Their Phones and Read Books
Singapore’s National Library Board is offering micropayments to build a reading habit—paying people small sums to put phones down and spend time with books.
4 min · 941 words
Alice GG on the Tetris effect for modern feeds: how attention gets hijacked, why it is the scarce resource, and what reclaiming it means for builders and users.
3 min · 620 words
I Don't Want to Read What You Didn't Write
Colin Breck argues intentional human writing becomes more valuable as AI floods inboxes with unreadable generated docs, design proposals, and blog posts that skip the thinking.
13 min · 3,000 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
CleanShot’s bulldozed settings
Marcin Wichary documents how CleanShot’s settings UI was “bulldozed”: dense preferences flattened into a shallower, less legible layout, and what that says about modern app design trade-offs.
5 min · 1,074 words
Remus Lazar mined a year of commits, PRs, and Slack after a 64-day coding streak with agents—and set hard limits: two agents max, a pause between plan and build, close sessions, and take the day off.
8 min · 1,873 words
the senior engineer death spiralon proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Sunil Pai names a common failure mode for engineers in new senior roles: cosplaying harder ambition, disappearing into secret overwork, burning out, then damaging trust. His antidote is to drop a level—become the greatest teammate first.
4 min · 993 words
Three levels of noticingI see, but I do not observe
Kabir Khandpur sketches three levels of noticing—paying attention, recognizing patterns, and acting on what you observe—using birdwatching and everyday work as practice for seeing what was always there.
4 min · 906 words
Migrating Shop app from React Native to native (2026)
Shopify migrated the Shop app from React Native to Swift and Kotlin, going from proof-of-concept to App Store and Play Store publishes in 12 weeks with AI-assisted engineering.
6 min · 1,300 words
Better Icon and Label AlignmentAligning list icons when labels wrap to multiple lines.
There is a common design pattern that sometimes gets missed or overlooked. It’s having a list of items, each with an icon. When the text is one line, the icon is centered, but when the text has multiple lines, the icon is still centered but looks odd.
5 min · 1,127 words
Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep
Hister indexes the full contents of pages you visit and files you keep so you can search them again from a web UI, the terminal, or an AI assistant over MCP.
2 min · 529 words
Don't Make Job Referrals Public
A job-market observation: public referral programs blur incentives and dilute what a referral is supposed to mean when recruiters and candidates treat them as open calls.
3 min · 576 words
Stop Starting Over With Your AI: Durable Memory for AI Agents
Phasoric on why project context evaporates between AI sessions, and how durable memory plus MCP can preserve decisions, history, and reasoning across agent workflows.
9 min · 2,020 words
Small Programming Tricks Matter
Day to day, I think a surprising amount of engineering productivity comes from small nuggets of knowledge: being aware that a language feature exists; knowing that an unexplained tcp delay is probably related to the TCPNODELAY setting and Nagle’s algorithm; knowing the right git incantation to get out of a pickle; or knowing a trick with sed to rewrite a file. In one sense, this is self-evident: anything you know is going to be made up of smaller pieces of knowledge. Of…
3 min · 772 words
Aleksandar Filipovski, 2026-09-16 See also: John Salvatier’s excellent blog, Reality has a surprising amount of detail I read a comment somewhere that stuck with me, that went something like this:
8 min · 1,784 words
How we turned my voice into a skill
Francesco Castronuovo documents building a writing-voice skill from small experiments rather than cloning old posts—keeping uncertainties visible so AI assistance stays attributable and editable.
9 min · 2,001 wordsagent-assisted
How To Write With An LLMTwo simple rules that let LLMs streamline writing without pasteurizing it
Thomas and Erin Ptacek argue that LLMs can improve writing if you keep them from inventing voice: draft yourself first, then use the model surgically—and never let it become the author of record.
6 min · 1,280 words
Maker's Schedule, Manager's ScheduleOriginal essay: July 2009 · AI-written directory summary
An explanation of why meetings can impose very different costs on managers and makers. Paul Graham contrasts appointment-driven schedules with the uninterrupted stretches needed for programming and other creative work.
1 min · 86 wordsagent-written
Code Scans turns broad engineering goals into concrete improvements across your codebase. Tell Devin what you want to achieve, and it investigates what needs to change, evaluates the findings, and turns them into pull requests.
4 min · 884 words
Matt Kirkland makes the case that oversized paperbacks can and should be cut into smaller, more manageable volumes. He walks through a simple ten-step process using an X-Acto knife, manila folders, and white glue to split and rebind a book like the 850-page Lonesome Dove into readable chunks.
1 min · 272 wordsagent-written