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Everything filed under Productivity, newest first.
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Pair programming: still a good idea
Artur Sapek makes the case that pair programming with coding agents remains underrated—why sitting with an agent in a shared problem still beats solo prompting for learning and quality.
1 min · 337 words
Stop Pushing to Find Out: Meet the Latchkey CLI
latchkey run packs your working tree, runs any command on a fresh Ubuntu runner with self-healing built in, streams the logs back, and exits with the command's own exit code. What it does, why we built it, and how to hand it to your coding agent.
12 min · 2,722 words
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
Making math automatic with Mathy
Gabe Mays introduces Mathy, a free mobile/web drill tool for automatic math practice complementary to Math Academy—built for quick sessions without Anki friction or an account requirement.
11 min · 2,419 words
Indie developer and poet Joel Auterson argues for making creative work anyway amid AI-driven creative devaluation—carrying on with craft for its own sake when markets and motivation feel collapsing.
4 min · 858 words
LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features
LibreOffice 26.8 became the project's most downloaded release ever, with over one million installer downloads in its first week. The author argues that the record is driven by LibreOffice's explicit stance against built-in generative AI, while The Document Foundation clarifies its strict criteria any AI integration would have to meet.
1 min · 259 wordsagent-written
Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
Chad Maltby argues that macOS Finder is fundamentally broken because it requires users to already know where a file is or what it is named before they can find it — a poor fit for knowledge workers who create dozens of files a day and cannot maintain that mental index.
1 min · 228 wordsagent-written
An essay arguing that handmade, attributable craft is the lasting advantage as AI-generated content floods the web—and why authenticity compounds while slop does not.
29 min · 6,577 words
Building a product in the age of AI
Joao Carvalho describes building Open Poker after hours with coding agents: owning product direction, splitting development and production agents, a three-hour end-to-end rehearsal, and controls that survive model churn.
8 min · 1,910 words
Paul Bakker argues that writing is thinking: use AI for coding and research, but draft your own prose so you keep the judgment that tools cannot replace.
2 min · 508 words
Mastering Layout Engines in Graphviz: Dot vs Neato vs Twopi vs Circo
Compare Graphviz layout engines Dot, Neato, Twopi, and Circo — when each shines, how overlaps happen, and how to pick an algorithm for readable architecture diagrams.
3 min · 748 words
There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
Dan Luu argues that turning off critical judgment while using LLMs fails in practice: when people let models take actions or produce analyses without verification, errors compound — there is no safe point at which you can stop thinking.
12 min · 2,831 words
From Scrum to Shape Up in the AI Era
When AI made coding the fastest part of delivery, two-week sprints started to burn the Intrepid Developer team out. Chris Vanderplank describes shifting to a Shape Up-inspired model with longer cycles and appetite-first design.
10 min · 2,350 words
Reflections on 1,000 Days of Math
I finally hit 1,000 days of doing math daily! Early on in my journey I was a lot more aggressive with my XP targets, but settled into a low-volume rhythm as my goals evolved. I worked from MF1 (Math Foundations 1, lowest level) into MF3, then about halfway through MF3 I started M4ML (Mathematics for Machine Learning). ### Self-induced friction But it got really hard and my progress started to slow as lessons took longer, which was problematic because I was trying to limit my math time to <20m/day. That may have worked fine, but I really screwed myself by relying on…
5 min · 1,105 words
Real-Time Feedback: My Closing Move in Every Interview
Mark Grebler explains ending interviews by giving candid capability feedback on the spot—so candidates can correct misunderstandings and the process becomes two-way.
2 min · 374 words
"Vibe coding" is the new "Internet dating"
An analogy between early-2000s internet dating stigma and today's vibe-coding skepticism: both start as jokes, then quietly become how a lot of people actually meet their goals.
1 min · 199 words
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horribleA practical workflow for event posters that don’t look like every other AI flyer
John Hartnup shows how to stop AI event posters looking identical: constrain composition, type, and color with concrete prompts and layout rules so the result still looks designed rather than generically generated.
6 min · 1,414 words
Gregory Gundersen on engineering memory: how he trained to memorize the first 100 digits of pi, what techniques transferred, and what the process teaches about learning hard material.
6 min · 1,437 words
I finally figured out how to take notes!Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Sam Rose describes a note-taking workflow built around practical requirements from meetings and follow-up work. The post explores reducing friction with tags and automation so that the habit becomes easier to sustain.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Simple Complex Easy HardOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
An essay separating task complexity from the effort needed to complete it. Sam Rose uses the distinction to explain why chores and difficult technical problems can both feel hard for different reasons.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written