Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is inclusive,…
I feel that some vibecoded software changes somewhat randomly and unexpectedly. That made me think about Bruegel s The Tower of Babel which shows an already quite chaotic depiction of the Tower of Babel. The story is usually told as one about pride and ambition and ultimately why people no longer speak the same language. But it is also a story about the unity that makes technological progress…
A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call…
I don t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different from just using a coding agent. Some of this happens on top of Pi which is cool to see for sure! The pattern is the same…
There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos . Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and…
I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including experiments in funding it . I m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI slop, shifting contributor dynamics, the falling cost of producing code, and large companies learning to close doors behind them. A lot of that…
There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these communities are not just negative: childfree spaces can be about autonomy, choice and acceptance, anti-car spaces about safer streets and transit, and LLM-skeptical developer spaces about the future of labor, code quality and slop 1 . But the thing being…
In my last post I used the word clanker 1 as an alternative to agent quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong reaction: to them it sounded like a slur, in one case even something adjacent to the n-word. That reaction surprised me somewhat,…
Pi is now part of Earendil, but in the important sense it is still Mario s project. He has been living with its issue tracker longer than I have, and he has been exposed to the weirdness of the new form of agent traffic in Open Source projects for longer too. This post is mostly a reflection of my own experience after spending more time in the tracker, using Pi to work on Pi, and watching what I…
I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, but the biggest quite frankly is that we re so early with this stuff, and the thought of…