The most persistent function of this site is a platform to talk about software and technology, and the various ways it can transform the lives of everyday people.
On July 19, 2026, Levent Alpöge posted a tweet with a few lines of polynomial that closed an 87-year-old question in mathematics. The coverage that followed put the LLM at the center. That is putting the cart before the horse. Alpöge was a Harvard undergrad, top of his class, Fay Prize for best senior thesis. Cambridge on a Churchill Scholarship . PhD at Princeton in 2020 under Manjul Bhargava ,…
Reverse Information Paradox by Satya Nadella: … In the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge, just in order to use what they bought. You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have…
Some time ago I wrote A Kind of Blue to explain why the Blue theme did not survive the Fluent refresh in Visual Studio. The short version was that Blue did not meet our accessibility standards, and the new tinted themes were designed around three pillars: cohesiveness, productivity, and accessibility. The fuller answer arrived in the June update to Visual Studio 2026. The team shipped a new Theme…
Most predictions about the AI era assume one outcome across the whole software industry. Startups will eat incumbents. Greenfield will replace brownfield. Faster building means faster disruption. I don't think any of that is true uniformly. The same technology cuts in opposite directions depending on which market it lands in. A recent NBER working paper by Mert Demirer, Leon Musolff, and Liyuan…
GitHub moved Copilot from Premium Request Units to AI Credits this week, and developers on Reddit were reporting within hours that a single Claude Sonnet prompt had burned half a month of credits, and that a $100 Max plan could be exhausted inside a day. The clearest framing of why came from Mario Rodriguez, GitHub's Chief Product Officer, writing on the GitHub blog : Today, a quick chat question…
I worked at a startup in Toledo called Heartland Information Services. We provided transcription services to some of the biggest hospitals in the United States, and we weren't small. Heartland was one of the larger medical transcription organizations in the country, one of the companies at the center of offshore transcription in that era. While that sounds simple enough, we were the kind of…
Software brain, AI backlash, databases, and automation by Nilay Patel on Decoder: I've been calling it software brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops — software. Software brain is powerful stuff. It's a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Nilay's framing here is uncomfortably precise. I build developer…
A developer told me recently that Visual Studio 2022 just works for him. Four years of monthly servicing, no major breaking changes, the kind of stability that earns trust by being invisible. He was not resisting VS 2026, he simply had no reason to move. What he wanted to know was what he was missing. It is a fair question, and one I hear more often than you might expect. So here is my answer,…
I built an MCP server this week. Not a toy exactly, not even a proof of concept; I wanted a working tool that lets a Copilot agent publish blog posts to a twenty-year-old blogging engine: thirteen tools, an XML-RPC client, multi-blog profile support, credential persistence, and auto-discovery of blog APIs. I built the whole thing in a single session with GitHub Copilot, describing what I wanted…
Microsoft announced three new first‑party MAI models this week, all available through Foundry. The releases cover transcription, voice generation, and image creation through Microsoft Foundry and the MAI Playground . The transcription model ( MAI‑Transcribe‑1 ) focuses on accuracy across a broad set of languages while running faster and cheaper than the usual options. The voice model ( MAI‑Voice‑1…
Steve Sanderson from the GitHub Copilot coding agent team walks through the techniques and mental models that make the Copilot tools feel like a genuine part of a new engineering process. He shows the newest Copilot CLI features, but for me, the real value is in the principles that still matter when everything around us is accelerating. After sharing tools and techniques Steve talks about one of…
I finally did it! DasBlog Core has been officially upgraded to .NET 10! This is probably the single biggest release I've shipped, and it warranted a proper version bump. The truth is that I do all this work out of a deep, stubborn love for neglected software, but if I am honest I would not have had the time or energy to take this on without Copilot . Prior to these LLMs and Agents code was…
A colleague shared a newsletter with me titled The Shape of Leadership by Mike Fisher, here is an excerpt: The V-formation is the one most of us are familiar with in organizations. It maps cleanly to how we think about leadership: someone sets direction, others align behind them, and progress is made through coordination and efficiency. Everyone knows where they’re going. Roles are clear.…
Color has become one of the most important tools in my daily development workflow. When I am moving across dozens of solutions, projects, and file types, a consistent color system gives me instant orientation. Visual Studio has made this easier than ever with a combination of tab coloring by project rules, file extension patterns, regular expressions, and both solution level and user level themes.…
I found this excerpt from Did Skills Kill MCP? really helpful: Saying skills killed MCP is about as accurate as saying GitHub Actions killed Bash… MCP is where capability lives . It’s what allows an AI agent to actually do things instead of just talking about them. When an agent can run shell commands, edit files, call APIs, query databases, read from drives, store or retrieve memory, or pull live…
My brother gifted me a Diamond Back Ascent in the early 90s, I remember it was snowing when he dropped it off, but literally overnight the world opened up to me. My range expanded from the adjacent cul‑de‑sacs and estates to neighboring woods, forests, quarries, towns and cities. The roads were always narrow and never particularly safe, so I usually stuck to the pavements, which wasn’t technically…
The Verge has delivered some of the year’s best interviews with a variety of tech CEOs, and this end‑of‑year conversation between IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Nilay Patel may actually be my favorite. This quote on AGI in particular has me reflecting even more deeply on the scale of private AI investment : So, let’s ground this in today’s costs because anything in the future is speculative. It takes…
Fascinating (frightening?) report from Anthropic describing how they eventually disrupted the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign . In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree—using AI not just as an advisor,…
Like you, I’ve been blown away by the projected capital investments in AI. The only way I can wrap my head around the numbers is to anchor them to something more tangible in recent history. I keep coming back to the Interstate Highway System, which, adjusted for inflation, cost over $600 billion . Spread over multiple decades (since 1956), its annualized impact was roughly 0.10% of U.S. GDP. By…
Earlier this year we introduced SLNX , an XML-based solution file format that replaces the old, proprietary .sln layout with a much more concise, readable XML representation. It preserves the same solution data by folding common defaults into the format so files are smaller and easier to inspect and merge while retaining full build behavior. Tooling support is already available in Visual Studio…
