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Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Matthew Guay profiles Ray Ozzie's path from ARPA-funded high-school teletypes through Lotus Notes and beyond—an essay on the optimism of building early when the tools and networks are still unfinished.
10 min · 2,332 words
Graft, Metatron, and the two kinds of context coding agents need
Pavel Kerbel contrasts Graft’s recoverable WHAT/WHERE code maps with Metatron’s reviewed WHY/WHY NOT engineering memory, arguing stronger models still need both layers—and proposing a factorial eval to prove it.
9 min · 2,075 words
Georg Zoeller’s essay from porting and modernising War of the Lance (1989) with local and frontier models: how transformers commoditize skilled knowledge work, smash IP-based economics, and reshape the games industry.
2 min · 538 words
A Million Agents Is a Distributed Systems Problem
Once you run thousands of AI agents, the hard part isn’t prompts—it’s scheduling, fatigue, overload, and coordination. InstaCloud frames agent fleets as a classic distributed-systems problem.
8 min · 1,877 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
SwiftUI data dependencies and their effect on view updates
Natalia Panferova compares stored inputs, state, bindings, environment values, and observable models—and explains which changes actually re-evaluate a SwiftUI view body.
13 min · 2,954 words
There is more to code review than (automatable) detection
The abstract for article “The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection” paints this picture for the reader… **Abstract** – Code review has been the primary quality gate in software development since Fagan formalised code inspection in 1976.
5 min · 1,129 words
Video CDs break Windows Explorer
Clyde documents an odd Windows Explorer bug triggered by Video CDs: inserting one (or mounting an image) breaks folder browsing in a surprising way, with steps to reproduce and notes on what’s going wrong.
4 min · 846 words
The Best Code Review Says Less
You open a pull request and there are 40 inline comments waiting for you, all from the AI reviewer. It has opinions about a variable name. It wants you to extract three lines into a helper. It found a null that can’t actually occur, on a path that never runs. It’s suggesting a micro-optimization on code that executes twice a day.
5 min · 1,185 words
How to write an effective software design document
Michael Lynch draws on experience writing design documents at Google, Microsoft, and his own companies to explain when to write one, how much to invest in it, and what to include. The guide argues that a design doc should focus on decisions with high costs-of-being-wrong, and that its primary value is forcing early thinking and enabling asynchronous feedback — not documentation for its own sake.
1 min · 303 wordsagent-written
Christoph Nakazawa updates his LLM workflow and names values that still matter with coding agents: ownership, taste, guardrails, repo context, owning your stack, and option value.
2 min · 552 words
Judah Gabriel Himango argues agentic interfaces will subsume traditional apps and websites—what changes for developers when the primary UI becomes a conversation with tools.
5 min · 1,254 words
Software is still about thinking
Cursor’s head of design argues AI coding creates an illusion of speed without structure: unclear systems thinking now produces slop at scale, while clear architecture compounds into 100x leverage.
2 min · 468 words
Minions: Stripe’s one-shot, end-to-end coding agentsUnattended coding agents that produce more than a thousand merged PRs a week at Stripe.
Stripe’s Minions are fully unattended coding agents that one-shot tasks end-to-end. Humans review the PRs; the agents write the code—here’s how the harness works.
7 min · 1,510 words
What makes Lisp difficult to read?
The Lisp family of programming languages is infamous for their parenthesis-heavy syntax. Many people, myself included, find this syntax more difficult to read than the notation of languages like Python, Java or C. The perceived unreadability of Lisp is so significant that multiple attempts have been made to create new notations to aid Lisp’s adoption. Yet, despite these attempts and Lisp being nea
11 min · 2,635 words
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
Ink & Switch’s essay on malleable software: why today’s locked-down apps strip user agency, and what it would take to restore tools people can reshape themselves.
34 min · 7,761 words