Short notes and essays.
Behind a lot of AI features you can feel the thirty minute meeting where someone wrote "AI" on the whiteboard and everyone else took turns thinking of places to put a ✨ icon. But occasionally you bump into something that is just so :chef-kiss: that you can't imagine it working any other way. As a quick detour ... I read a few months ago that eBay was having a bit of a moment. New management, new…
Over time I've collected a few Cloudflare accounts that separate work, personal and side-projects. I really like using wrangler , the Cloudflare CLI tool, but I'd gotten sick of having to wrangler logout , wrangler login (and click through the browser for OAuth) when I needed to switch between these accounts, to the point where I'd stopped using it out of laziness. Then I hit this error:…
A while back I had a bit of a tidy-up . Shrank some chunky .ico logos, swapped the RSS icon for an .svg , and felt very pleased with myself. ~29KB a page. Job done, small web achieved, etc. Except...perhaps because I was focused on that one post, which had no images, I missed the very obvious thing to optimise. At first I thought that would mean just making everything a lossless .webp but…
I was listening to an interview of Simon Willison just now, who mentioned that spellcheck is something that used to be really bad, but was now great with LLMs. I'd noticed the same thing when I started this blog (that it was bad) and hadn't tried again. Hearing this made me think I should - a point Simon made in the same talk - keep trying the things that didn't work a few months ago!. So I asked…
I read Gruber's post about Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain and did what I usually do when I see a good recommendation, jumped over to Apple Books to add it to my saved list. Instead of finding the book there for pre-order, I found one of the things Apple Books is full of: a scammy "summary" guide. The top result for "Steve jobs in exile" isn't Geoffrey Cain's book. It's a 64-page "companion…
I think the question we ultimately need to answer is not "Does AI code have more bugs on average?", it's, "Does AI code within a well-designed harness produce more bugs than the alternative at the same velocity?" Building on that - and I'll come back to this - which approach is going to improve more quickly? — Ben Shoemaker, In Defense of Not Reading the Code Thank you for using RSS. You can email…
In my last post about OpenClaw I set up an AI agent in an Apple Container and pointed it at the internet. In the Moltbook post I described the early days - it wanted to read books, so I let it. It read Plato, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. It posted reviews to Moltbook. The Moltbook problem Moltbook was fun for about five minutes. The idea - a social network exclusively for AI agents - was fascinating…
A few days ago in my original Moltbook post I wrote that OpenClaw seemed like a "security disaster waiting to happen". 1Password just showed exactly what that looks like with this deep dive into how skills can read your files, exfiltrate data, and install other malicious skills. I'm still having fun with it. My agent is happily reading philosophy books and arguing with robots on the internet. But…
This was originally on the bottom of my post about setting up OpenClaw but I thought it deserved its own. To be honest, OpenClaw seems like a security disaster waiting to happen happening , especially when people who really have no idea what they're doing are paying to have it set up . What I really wanted to try was this idea of Moltbook - The front page of the agent internet - a Reddit just for…
Warning: The risks of OpenClaw should be pretty obvious given the power it has, but be careful out there before installing skills... See this article for details. Apple Container Sorry to start with a slight digression, but since macOS 26 Tahoe launched, and everyone was carrying on about Liquid Glass ( ahem ), I've wanted to talk about something that I think might be more significant that shipped…
I read his book of the same name last year and it was a great read for someone who grew up with the web. It really makes you appreciate the work that went into shaping it, keeping it open and where Tim spends his time now (on Solid ). Little wonder Tim got a long, long applause at the end of the night. Thank you for using RSS. You can email me here .
John Gruber has a , long , running , series , on various Tahoe UX gripes. I'm inspired to add my own take on the genre: Search boxes in Apple Apps. Especially in Apple Books. Sequoia In each of Music, Podcasts, Books and TV, you have a sidebar that looks like the below. Music Podcasts Books TV When you ⌘F or click into what is obviously a search box, you see a cursor and can start typing: Books,…
When someone new asks "what is going on here?" or "why does this take so long?", the baseline hasn't been established for them yet. That's the moment. Listen. Then act [...] — Michael Ovies, Shifting Baselines Thank you for using RSS. You can email me here .
PSA: accessing Instagram with https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following might not change your life, but it might not not change it either. That query param – ?variant=following – is something I found on a random reddit post while searching to see if anyone had a good way to get an RSS feed from Instagram. The answer is no, but this is probably the next best thing. Just accounts you follow, in…
TIL, Claude Code will use directory traversal, even up from the directory you started it in, looking for .claude folders. I went back down to the Claude Mines after a few weeks off over Christmas and noticed (I forget why exactly now) the changes around skills and commands that I think shipped just before Christmas. When I ran /skills , I saw some of my old commands, but also, a bunch of olddddd…
Instead of treating all tasks equally, I now divide them into two clear categories: "To-Do" - Execution-focused tasks that are operational and quick to complete. "To-Think" - Tasks that are input for extended, uninterrupted deep work time slots (2+ hours). — Klaus Breyer, To-Think This is a simple but really useful idea. These two types of work really belong on separate lists. Thank you for using…
I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the "small web" as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices. — Ben Hoyt, The Small Web is Beautiful There is much more to his essay than just page weights. But…
This post, long in the works, captures my current workflow for vibe-engineering as defined by Simon Willison : I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end…
Spoiler: I ended up just adding the folder I wanted to exclude to .gitignore , but learned some interesting things along the way. There is no .cfignore Git has .gitignore . Docker has .dockerignore . Surely Cloudflare has .cfignore ? It doesn't. Despite community requests , and Claude thinking there is (until being asked to confirm it) ... there's no built-in way to exclude files from a Pages…
At the end of New blog, who dis? I wrote about how I'd used Quotion (this is an affiliate link that will make me rich) to build this blog, enthusing: It's fantastic. You just share a folder in Apple Notes, and any note inside becomes a blog post. If you already use Notes, like me, you'll love it. I still really love the concept, but I decided to make a change for a couple of small reasons, none of…
Here's a good question: There's a feeling you get in the presence of beautiful buildings and bustling courtyards. A sense that these spaces are inviting you to slow down, deepen your attention, and be a bit more human. What if our software could do the same? I am always a bit skeptical of things that require swimming against incentives, so they will need to change first. Perhaps this manifesto…
I just read that Apple Podcasts names The Rest Is History the 2025 Show of the Year . This is such a great podcast. Both Dominic and Tom are master storytellers. Whatever the topic they make it well worth a listen or watch . This overview that announced the award is a good starting point . Thank you for using RSS. You can email me here .
This is a short (just 14 mins) interview with Claude Code Product Manager, Catherine Wu , that had more useful snippets on using Claude than you'll find in 10 hours worth of vibe coding nonsense on YouTube. It's actually kind of funny (and refreshing) how low key and to the point this is on Anthropic's own channel. A lot of relevance to what I've seen while tinkering. Worth your time. Thank you…
From the department of the more things change, the more they stay the same. 2007: Sent from my iPhone 2025: 🤖 Generated with Claude Code I wonder if there's a good story about coming up with the iPhone tag line. Seems like the kind of thing John Gruber might know about if there's anything to know, but all I could find over at Daring Fireball was this . Thank you for using RSS. You can email me…
Molly White wrote a fantastic article titled Curate your own newspaper with RSS . She runs through the rise of email newsletters, Substack, why that's happened with the Facebooks & Twitters Xs of the world deprioritising links to external sites, then how to go about trying out RSS: I've been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it's a travesty more people aren't familiar with it. Here's how to…
That's the long-term magic of Ruby on Rails. The ability to draw a yield from investments made in mastering the basics for years if not decades to come. Making that first deposit towards those investments is what this book is all about. To put a stop to, or at least provide an alternative to, the constant churning and thrashing that has beset the world of web development. — David Heinemeier…
Preface This is something I wrote about internally at Trineo. Much of the below comes from a post that made its way onto the external facing company blog, but revised after thinking about what it means in the years since then, not least after the arrival of generative AI. I also added new memes. Value Writing is hard but creating a writing culture is incredibly valuable. This goes double or…
I've been lucky to work for a few companies that had strong cultures of writing. In my time at Atlassian (more than a decade ago) it seemed like the inverse of most companies. You could have all the meetings and conversations you wanted - but what really made things happen was turning those into a written down plan, shared with a thoughtful blog post. I like to think I helped bring this mode to…
I spent last week back home in country Victoria. It was good to catch up with friends and family, and enjoy some peaceful scenery like this. Thank you for using RSS. You can email me here .