On sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
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Why I Cancelled Claude: Token Issues, Declining Quality, and Poor Support
First enthusiasm A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to Claude Code, and during the first few weeks I had a really nice experience. It was fast, the token allowance was fair, and the quality was good. I learned they had raised the token allowance for non-rush h…
Husband and Wife
New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper
For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look a…
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS released
Ubuntu 26.04 ('Resolute Raccoon') LTS has been released on schedule. This release brings a si [...]
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall1. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task. Some software engineers think this is a deci…
Your First API Call | DeepSeek API Docs
The DeepSeek API uses an API format compatible with OpenAI/Anthropic. By modifying the configuration, you can use the OpenAI/Anthropic SDK or softwares compatible with the OpenAI/Anthropic API to access the DeepSeek API.
The Agent Observability Gap
Why agents that look healthy in a playground go sideways the moment they meet real users, and what a useful observability stack for agent-shaped systems has to cover.
Canton vs Public Crypto: A Technical Comparison
Canton differs significantly from Ethereum and other L2s, focusing on local agreement and privacy. Transactions involve only relevant parties, enhancing scalability and confidentiality. Its declara…
Cooked
By all means, Tim Cook was a better choice for Apple CEO than most people you could pick out of a hat; perhaps even of high executives at Apple working at the time. But this judgement is not unalloyed.
Dharmateja Samudrala
Software Engineer — building things on the internet.
Dear Codebase: A Letter From Your Coding Agent
Ten requests from an agent to the codebase it works in — local reasoning, visible boundaries, one way of doing things. None of them are new. All of them matter more now.
Stop Hardcoding Your Timeouts
Hardcoded timeouts with no config options are a silent tax on developers outside the wealthy west. A rant about npx skills, Docker Gordon, and the arrogance of assuming everyone has a fast connection.
The end of responsive images
Mat Marquis has waited 14 years to write this article. The sizes attribute has been a necessary evil but now, with an auto value capability, it’s completely transformed authoring responsive images on the web.
Cutting Costs, Not Corners: How We Migrated Our AI Document Pipeline from AWS to Cloudfleet
Introduction aka TL;DR; In January, we handled almost twice the workload we handled in December at a fifth of the cost. Background In th...
On commenting and approving pull requests
After reviewing a lot of pull requests, I’ve settled on a simple default: if my comments are all nitpicks, suggestions, questions, or non-blocking issues, I leave them and approve the PR at the same time.
Trajectory shapes
Benchmark scores tell you whether a coding agent solved the task. Trajectory shapes tell you how it worked, and those workflow signatures persist b...
Why I spent years trying to make CSS states predictable — tenphi.me
Why predictable CSS state resolution matters, and how Tasty approaches it with state maps and non-overlapping selectors.
Approximating Hyperbolic Tangent
Survey of fast tanh approximations using Taylor series, Padé approximants, splines, and bitwise manipulation techniques like K-TanH and Schraudolph
Death to files and folders
Ode to Jef Raskin's quote, The content of a file is its own best name
Agency Is Not Autonomy | Mark Lubin
Two axes the AI agent field treats as one, and the design rule that follows from splitting them.
Going Full Time on Open Source
Jeff Dickey's personal website
Fundamental Theorem of Calculus | David Álvarez Rosa | Personal Website
Although the notion of area is intuitive, its mathematical treatment requires a rigorous definition. This post introduces the Riemann integral, and proves the …
Old computers in my university | Mr.UNIX
In my previous university, there was a hallway in the department of mathematics and computer science, where they were showcasing some of the old computers that we had.
Context Engineering and the Limits of Agentic Coding | Stephen Fritz
My work is context engineering. I didn't know the term until after I'd built a system that turned out to be exactly that.
Making beautiful work is getting harder
In the early days of LLMs, we had tools that helped us stay focused and thereby do better work. Then, in late 2024, everything began to change.
The OpenClaw turkey problem
Thoughts are mine and mine only. I don't ever use LLMs for writing.
Trust Me, I’m a Shortcut
Windows’ primary mechanism for shortcuts, LNK files, is frequently abused by threat actors for payload delivery and persistence. This blog post introduces several new LNK file flaws that, amongst other things, allow attackers to fully spoof an LNK’s target. It…
The Log is the Database
foldb has one source of truth: an append-only, Raft-replicated log. Everything else, the storage layer, the indexes, the materialized query results, is just a fold(log). A pure function applied to a sequence of committed entries in order. A transaction commit…