21 January 2026

38 links · Wednesday

How AI Destroys Institutions

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances. The real superpo…

Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail

When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that project will go anywhere, they’re solving the wrong problem.”…

Chatbots Only Exist Because the UI Sucks

There was a time when building a good UI was really hard. My default Microsoft Word window had at least five toolbars. My web browser opened to Yahoo, where finding anything felt impossible. Internet

Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo

After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago. What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP i…

Claude Code Won't Fix Your Life

Claude Code can now read and write to local file systems. You can point it at your Obsidian vault and suddenly you have an AI that “knows” everything you’ve ever written. Noah Brier runs it on a home server and connects via VPN from his phone. Bloggers have do…

Import AI 441: My agents are working. Are yours?

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Import A-IdeaAn occasional es…

urllib3 entered the "Billion-a-Month" club in 2025

Welcome to the 2025 annual report for urllib3. I’m Illia, and this is my first time writing this update for the second most downloaded Python package. Long-time readers will recognize these reports from Seth Larson or Quentin Pradet, but this year …

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A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.

Stopped Creating package.json Scripts

Over the past year, I've dramatically reduced the number of scripts in my package.json files. What started as a gradual shift has become a deliberate practice: minimize abstractions, maximize clarity. This post explores why direct CLI usage beats script wrappe…

Understanding AI Agents

A practical guide to AI agents, covering Agentic Patterns, Multi-agentic patterns, and Memory in Agents.

8 Things I Learned at the Claude Code NYC Meetup

House party for Claude Code enjoyers. Salespeople who now ship code. Designers who don't wait for engineers. A guy with 10 apps. The usual Claude Code degenerates.

Django 6.0 Tasks: a framework without a worker

Background tasks have always been essential in Django projects. Django 6.0 finally acknowledges that fact, but its new Tasks framework stops short of what real applications need.

The Catcher in the Prompt: Day 60

Holden Claudefield is 17 and surrounded by phonies. Two months post-LLM collapse, cults wage prompt injection wars. Tech satire inspired by Salinger.

How to brick your phone (on purpose)

Lately, I have been getting a ton of ads for a device called Brick, which is a physical device that temporarily removes distracting apps & their notifications from your phone. The way it works is simple: the only way to unlock your apps is to scan the NFC tag …

You Didn't Vote for Him, but You Helped Him Win

The geopolitical situation right now is absurd. The US, after being the world police for 75 years, have decided to demand territory from their allies on t...