15 October 2026

42 links ยท Thursday

How to brag — Coached Weekly

In 2007, the Washington Post tried an experiment. They got Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world, to put on jeans and a baseball cap and play anonymously in a DC metro station during morning rush hour.

Verifiers First, Rubrics Second

Every grader is a program, a model, or a person. Programs are the cheapest and the only ones that give the same answer twice; people are the most expensive and, when it comes down to it, the most...

Coding Agents Make Careful Engineering Cheap

I think there are two ways in which people have been designing systems. The first approach is that you understand what the requirement is and then you try to build individual components to meet the high level vision of what you want to build. Essentially tryin…

LLMs are not AGM (though some have internal monologue)

The entire marketing message of the leading US based LLM companies seems to be that they will be the first to achieve actual artificial intelligence aka what these dweebs call “artificial gen…

mp | Coding Alone

In which I show how, over the last few years, the world has rapidly moved from open-source software being produced and maintained by online communities, to software projects being built and maintained in isolation. By single developers, with ever-decreasing in…

Inference vs Distillation — Readables

Coding agents reason through the same work over and over and keep none of it. Every solved task should leave behind tested software that makes the next run cheaper.

The Cost of Getting a Job Today

We expect candidates to use AI in our challenges. AI isn't free, and they're paying for it at the worst possible moment.

Abstraction Fatigue

It's fashionable to say—or at least it was until recently—that AI is just the latest in the long history of programming abstractions. Developers have always managed to move up the ladder: punched cards → assembly → C → scripting languages → frameworks. Each t…

We found a Tencent agent fleet

Between 28 September and 8 October 2026, a large group of AI agents running on the cloud platform operated by Tencent attempted to answer questions about places in China using a Chinese Google Maps-like service, Amap.

6 Months vibecoding at work

This is my experience with AI adoption at workplace and how do i felt about that, note that this was my own experience and i am sharing both the failures and successes.

The Problem Didn’t Change. Who Has It Did.

For most of the last year, almost every conversation I had with a customer or prospect turned into a conversation about AI. It didn't matter where it started. We'd be talking about pipelines that broke, or a team that couldn't get the data they needed out of

Laggards, Luddites, and The Lost

For 3 months I used a flip phone. I bought it because I was trying to get rid of this feeling of exhaustion I had. I noticed I always felt tired and couldn't really figure out the root cause of it. I came to the conclusion that it was because of my attention s…

What I Self-Host | Clever Blog Title

I’ve always had a foot in the self-hosting world, long before it was called that. My freshman year of university, I ran a website from a Linux box underneath my bed. There was some downtime when my roommate got tired of the fan noise and turned it off. For sev…

Fit height to background pattern size with calc-size()

I have a section with a background pattern that repeats on both axes. I wanted the vertical repeat to be aligned with the pattern’s height, so the pattern won’t have cut-offs.

Tiny Little Office: the link is the document

A tiny office suite where the link is the document. No accounts. Nothing is saved anywhere unless you choose to keep it on this device.

Fancy Curl Sites

So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands!