7 October 2026

39 links · Wednesday

What It Costs to Vibe-Code an Email Marketing App

I used Broadcast's full git history to estimate what it costs to rebuild it with Claude Opus 5.5, on the API and on a Claude Max plan. The numbers, the method, and when building your own is the right call.

Everyone is an engineer now

Software engineering is supposedly going extinct. Yet I know more people writing code and building products today than I've ever known before—often for the first time in their lives.

Stop telling people to delete their social media

In 2017, I deleted my Facebook account. It was triggered by an HN comment that I cannot for the life of me find, but at the time it felt like the right thing to do. Everybody smart on the internet was saying social media was rotting our brains and the only way…

Slop on Sale

Continued attempts to understand and mitigate slop, this time with Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5 Mini

You have to be able to reason about the verification

Lots of people are no longer reading code. Agents are at a point where you can make software, as a black box, that might do what you wanted it to do. Maybe then you poke at it, and it doesn't do one of the things you wanted it to do, and then you tell your age…

The Best of Om Malik

Although they appear to merely be words on a page, I often feel that Om's work almost always carries a rare introspective insight. Perhaps it's truth. Perhaps it's something else.

GPT-6 and Intelligent UI for everyone

GPT‑6 is rolling out globally in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI, delivering faster responses with visuals and interactive experiences you can explore and use directly.

BIGWORDS.PAGE: Turn any screen into a sign

Turn a phone, tablet or TV into a sign. Type a message and it fills the screen: welcome signs, timers, Wi-Fi passwords and more. No app, no account, free.

Intelligence Is Not Expertise

Supposing you were imbued with the sum total of all human knowledge, would you find it hard to make a decision? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but one thing is for certain: our large language model (LLM) friends do find it difficult. I’ve had an experience with this…

Designing for voice first – Anton Sten

Five principles for designing voice-first interfaces, from making context count to helping people trust what happens when they stop looking at the screen.

Claude Haiku 5.5

As previously promised, here’s Anthropic’s new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5. The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year …

Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging

Some excellent writing advice from Michael Lynch. Michael warns against "meandering intros", misjudging your reader's existing knowledge, assuming they'll read your previous posts, and excessive formality. He also warns against …

A quote from Jake Boggan

I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture …

How to read code

Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word…

Sharing AI progress in mathematics

OpenAI publishes new results on open problems in mathematics from an internal frontier model and shares Lean proof formalizations and research details on GitHub.