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Out of Distribution
In infinitely dimensional space, everything is close. AI is infinitely dimensional. All roads lead here.
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No Recipe
I don't have a default because the landscape is morphing. Each time I start a project, the situation is different.
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Three Fingers
There's a gap growing between what an hour of work should produce and what managers expect.
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Workflows Without Names
The bottleneck used to be execution. Now it's knowing what's worth building.
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Along for the Ride
LLMs let engineers climb the abstraction stack. But who's actually doing the climbing?
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Useful, Not True
We need metaphors to understand LLMs. But if something is categorically new, all metaphors will fail somewhere.
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Orchestrator
A friend asked how I work with agents. I procrastinated for days, then automated the explanation.
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What I Don't Touch Anymore
The list of things I've stopped doing is more interesting than the tools I'm using.
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Clock Town
Everyone can see the moon coming. Almost nobody changes their plans.
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Old Habits
Comfortable and laziest aren't the same thing.
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Writing Style
We imitate our interlocutors unconsciously. LLMs are now interlocutors.
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Concierge Software
It was easier to conjure bespoke software than to find something that fit.
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Too Early?
Maybe the skills we built up were band-aids on a bigger issue.
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The Upside Down
Scale to 50 agents and the new best practices look sacrilegious.
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Rule of 72
A colleague and I did some back-of-envelope math. It was more interesting than I expected.
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Roving Bridges
We built bridges for tethered horses. What if they could hop across?
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Pop
I pushed a repo to GitHub out of habit. Then I wondered why.
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Zugzwang
Once someone asks 'isn't that expensive?', you've already lost.
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Corsair
I built a tool. It's already obsolete. That's the whole story.
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No Hesitation
I volunteer with the Samaritans. When I needed to talk, I didn't pick up the phone.
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Who You Call
Code is a special case. These are general-purpose models.
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"Stuck"
Models get stuck on things humans find obvious. The reverse is also true.
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Ad Machinum
Rejecting an argument because of who made it is supposedly a fallacy. What about rejecting it because of what made it?
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Competency Gap
The difference between doing the work and showing up to the right meetings. AI will widen it.
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The Huddle
You go to correct the model. Then you check. They were right.
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Today's Bite Point
Chase whatever feels like YOLO right now. That's probably where to build.
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Vibe Orchestration
Justin Bieber conducting an orchestra by humming. That might be closer to where we're heading.
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The Quiet Ratchet
Standards aren't things you consciously form. They're things that happen to you.
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Trial by Foom
Slow feedback loops kept the debates alive, but that's changing.
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Local Maximum
The AI industry is split between 'foom' and 'it's so over'. Both camps have serious people in them.
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Artifice
Horses didn't evolve for transport. Petroleum wasn't meant to be fuel. Next-token prediction wasn't designed to write code.
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Gateway Drug
Copilot led to scaling laws led to Dwarkesh led to the hippocampus. AI is a gateway drug to questions about the brain.
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Tunnel Vision
A cardioid microphone keeps you ten centimetres from the same spot. You stop noticing the room around you.
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The Great Attractor
Certain general-purpose devices attract all functionality. The phone ate my flashlight. Now the terminal is eating everything else.
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Innovation Tokens
Addy Osmani's advice about boring technology choices applies doubly when you're working with AI agents.
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Aiming Off
When everything's moving, you have to aim where the target will be. The early hackers knew this.
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Parachute
Junior developers are moving ridiculously fast. The real variable might not be experience.
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Field Recording
Left hemisphere bait, right hemisphere activity. A pattern that keeps appearing.
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Invisible Capability Line
Simon Willison on the November step change.
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Fresh and Stale
Ideas captured immediately feel effortless. Ideas saved for later feel like work. The difference is infrastructure.
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Blank Page
The 2am essay paralysis. The physical excruciation of getting started. For certain personality types, LLMs have made it disappear.
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Expanding Universe
The spectrum of viable workflows is widening. Some domains will be fully automated. Others might never accommodate AI at all.
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The Raft and the Ladder
The skills that got you here may slow you down now. But you needed them to get here. Didn't you?
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The Next Rung
The most eager people I knew were using Aider this time last year. Now everyone's on Claude Code. The pattern repeats.
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You Just Get Used to It
Most of what we know, we take on trust. AI is asking us to extend that trust in ways we haven't figured out yet.
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Brooks' Law Redux
The optimal number of engineers on a project is falling fast. It might be approaching zero.
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Interview Question
An interview question that felt revolutionary a year ago and is now fully redundant. What it taught us about what we're actually looking for.
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Position Before Submission
What ten years of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu taught me about working with AI agents. It's all about where you expect things to be.
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Is It Cheating?
Technology arrives and changes the game. There's usually a period where the new approach is considered dishonorable. Then the rules shift.
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Pliers
Software engineers fantasise about blue-collar work. I've been thinking about why, and what my collection of pliers has to do with it.
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First Contact
Three ideas from military doctrine that apply surprisingly well to working with AI agents: mission command, the orders process, and inkblot strategy.
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Witnesses
A running list of respected programmers - people with Wikipedia pages for actually building things - expressing genuine surprise at AI coding tools.
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Too Comfortable
Terminal agents have been the stable pattern for a year now. If scaling laws hold, that stability should feel suspicious.
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YOLO Mode
There’s a pattern in the history of programming: every ascent up the abstraction ladder has a liminal period where the new thing exists but isn’t yet respectable.
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Show, Don't Tell
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Last Bastion
If you were looking for work that's fundamentally about human connection, the Samaritans would be it. Surely AI has to flow around this, not through it. And yet.
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To-Do Lists as Prompts
I keep writing to-do items that are actually prompts. Detailed enough that I could hand them to an agent and walk away.
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Golden Retriever Problem
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How I Keep Up
X.com is unreasonably good - if you follow the right people and resist the dopaminergic pull.
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Intermediary Times
The Industrial Revolution was net positive. It was also expensive in the intermediary times. We might be there again.
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The Music Stopped
There’s a debate that flares up periodically: terminal versus IDE. Vim versus VS Code. Text-based interfaces versus graphical ones.
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Crossing the Horizon
Something happened in the last few weeks. A step change that went unrecognised for a while. I think we've crossed a threshold.
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Books as Compressed Prompts
Book titles are pointers to compressed mental models that LLMs already know. Say 'The Goal' and you invoke an entire framework.
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Respecting the Fence
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The GUI Was a Detour
I installed Audacity yesterday. I've barely opened it. Not because I lost interest, but because LLMs write ffmpeg commands for me instead.
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How This Blog Exists
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Voice First
Last night I became an audio engineer.