Weekly Thing 341 / Minions, MAX, ReMemory
MAX, AI adoption journeys, space to think with Claude, secret sharing, Omni Roadmap 2026, menu bar calendars, coding agents, programming reflections, OpenClaw, and AI fatigue.
Good afternoon!?
Yeah, afternoon. There is late, and then there is really late. Oh well, I'll blame the fact that the weather is ridiculously nice today. Or that yesterday was Valentine's Day. Or that Tyler had a birthday this week. Or that things were super busy at SPS.
Or I'll just say "wow, I got the email out to y'all!"
👏👏👏
Now onto the links and have a great rest of your Sunday!
A rare for Minnesota February day with a powerful and direct sun bringing warmth to the day.
February 14, 2026
Minneapolis, MN
Notable
You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 341 tag in r/WeeklyThing.
My AI Adoption Journey – Mitchell Hashimoto
Hashimoto shares his journey from chatting with AI to adopting fully agentic processes.
My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering discovery.
When folks are describing stuff as "life-altering" it is worth taking note.
How AI Goes to Work – On my Om
Om observing how AI is changing how people engage with software.
There was no need to remake the platform (Excel) or write any custom code. I didn’t have to learn yet another tool. I didn’t need to change Excel. I didn’t learn a new interface. AI showed up inside the tool I was already using. It allowed me to just adopt it. And adapt to it. Without much friction.
Agents that are expert in the software and bridge the gap of what you want to do, your understanding of the softwares abilities, and the data you have are going to transform a lot of things.
Claude is a space to think | Anthropic Anthropic
I’m not a fan of advertising in AI solutions and think that is a mistake for ChatGPT. They also have now given Anthropic something to really tout as a differentiator, which is yet another mistake. Related, Anthropics ads here, here, here, and here are brilliant.
ReMemory - Split a secret among people you trust
This looks great and is an example of a small utility that deserves more attention.
ReMemory encrypts your files and splits the key among people you trust using Shamir's Secret Sharing. You decide how many must come together to unlock them — three of five friends, two of two partners, whatever fits. No single person can access anything alone.
Why do I like this? We all have a number of digital secrets and we need much better ways to manage them. This is a good social example. Two things I could see this for right away.
- Crypto passphrase to one of my accounts for digital assets.
- Master password for 1Password to gain access to all of my secrets.
You could imagine taking one of these and splitting it into 5 chunks and requiring any 3 to be present to reconstitute it. Then distributing this to your family so that if something happens to you they can access these critical secrets, but only if 3 of them agree to come together on it. No 1 person has all that info.
Omni Roadmap 2026 - The Omni Group
Omni is a thought leading Mac developer, and I’m a constant user of OmniFocus, so I’m always interested in their annual roadmap updates. I love the addition of Omni Links. I don't think that they are pushing hard enough with AI thought. OmniFocus is an app that would benefit from AI agentic capabilities in so many ways. I get the strong sense that Case (CEO) is pretty standoffish with AI. He's also a huge privacy advocate which was something I appreciated. OmniFocus is a rare app of its kind that encrypts all data. But I think they need to push harder with more AI capabilities and not take a backseat with Apple Intelligence. Minimally there should be built-in MCP capabilities to allow users to bring their own AI.
Dot: The Menu Bar Calendar That's Become My Main Calendar - MacStories
I wish there was more innovation in calendar apps. The unique thing about these apps is they literally know the future — they know what you are planning. Yet there is little put into bringing intelligence from these. This app has interesting innovation in display and is always ready via the menu bar.
Minions: Stripe’s one-shot, end-to-end coding agents | Stripe Dot Dev Blog
Super interesting read about how Stripe is building agentic capabilities for their development teams.
There was no need to remake the platform (Excel) or write any custom code. I didn’t have to learn yet another tool. I didn’t need to change Excel. I didn’t learn a new interface. AI showed up inside the tool I was already using. It allowed me to just adopt it. And adapt to it. Without much friction.
Doing this, and creating it specifically for your environment, is how you unlock agentic advantage.
I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed
As agentic development techniques improve we are seeing a rapid, actually blisteringly fast, adaptation of a super critical craft — creating software.
I'm not typing the code anymore. I'm reviewing it, directing it, correcting it. And I'm good at that -- 42 years of accumulated judgment about what works and what doesn't, what's elegant versus what's expedient, how systems compose and where they fracture. That's valuable. I know it's valuable. But it's a different kind of work, and it doesn't feel the same.
This post describes what many, particularly those that are most focused on the beauty of this craft, feel. It has changed radically in just a year.
I saw someone on LinkedIn recently -- early twenties, a few years into their career -- lamenting that with AI they "didn't really know what was going on anymore." And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn't even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.
I loved this line about "abstraction chain". I comment on this routinely. Every person that builds anything in technology is working on many, many layers of abstraction. We haven't worked "close to the machine" for decades. This is vastly superior. However it is also worth noting that with every layer of abstraction the craft fundamentally changes, the skills needed evolve, and the part we don't tend to consider enough is the risks and challenges are way different. Frankly, most developers today wouldn't even know how to code a linked list or manage their own memory as a language like C requires. Mostly that is a good thing, but it also causes software to be less performant and the failure cases to be entirely mystical.
I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I'm fifty now, and the magic is different, and I'm learning to sit with that.
This whole post is about agentic development and everyone (literally everyone) is talking about this. But I will be plain, this type of reinvention will happen to any profession that involves managing, moving, and manipulating information. That isn't to be scary, but to make sure that folks don't look at this transformation and assume that is just something because it is close to technology. Not at all.
picoclaw
Inspired by OpenClaw but made to run on incredibly tiny hardware.
PicoClaw is an ultra-lightweight personal AI Assistant inspired by nanobot, refactored from the ground up in Go through a self-bootstrapping process, where the AI agent itself drove the entire architectural migration and code optimization.
Runs on $10 hardware with <10MB RAM: That's 99% less memory than OpenClaw and 98% cheaper than a Mac mini!
And it seems built by an Agent itself.
What They Copied - PRNDL by Jordan Golson
If you appreciate design this whole article, and the 18 min video, are just amazing. This is a overview of the new Ferrari Luce which was designed by none other than Jony Ive and LoveFrom. Jony Ive of Apple "lore" and designer of the iPhone and the inspiration for so many of the products you use today.
This article highlights how tactile and specific these interfaces are. Specifically how the creator of the touch interface specifically did not make this car a touch interface.
Ive knows this. "The reason we developed touch -- the big idea was to develop a general-purpose interface that could be a calculator, that could be a typewriter, could be a camera, rather than having physical buttons," he told me. "To use touch in a car is something I would never dream of doing, because it requires that you look at what you're doing."
As a Tesla driver for years this stands out as Tesla's design principle has been the exact opposite of this. Tesla has been working for years to remove nearly every button, knob, and stalk they possibly can from cars and move everything to the touch screen where you can innovate and change much faster. Oh, and it is way cheaper to make with fewer buttons and knobs. Every one of those costs money.
This new Ferrari is an absolute thing of beauty.
OpenClaw Is Changing My Life | Reorx’s Forge
These folks going deep with OpenClaw are showing possible paths that sound pretty wild.
This is the biggest shift OpenClaw has brought—it completely transformed my workflow. Whether it’s personal or commercial projects, I can step back and look at things from a management perspective. It’s like having a programmer who’s always on standby, ready to hop into meetings, discuss ideas, take on tasks, report back, and adjust course at any time. It can even juggle multiple roles, like having several programmers working on different projects simultaneously. Meanwhile, I can be the tech lead keeping tabs on specific project progress, or the project manager steering the overall schedule and direction.
I’m about ready to buy a dedicated Mac mini to run one of these.
AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare
I for sure feel what Khare is writing about in this post. AI is a ridiculous unlock to do things that would otherwise not have been possible. With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five projects going on with different agents is neat, but you still are coordinating them!
The "just one more prompt" trap is real.
Journal
Mason Jennings show at The Dakota tonight. Lovely. 🎶
Bought Revenue Architecture by Jacco van der Kooij on a strong recommendation and it looks really great. It has formulas! 🤔
POAP 7563511 at SPS MAX Introduction.
I hit 10k in Clash Royale! Go POAP KINGS!
Tyler wanted to do an escape room on his birthday so we went to Lock & Key Escape and completed the Quest for Excalibur! It was a fun room, not too challenging, with some delightful surprises along the way! Room 87!
Enjoying the Weekly Thing?
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This makes me happy on two counts — that Ethereum is scaling well and that ENS, one of the most meaningful apps on it, will stay on Layer 1. → ENS is staying on Ethereum | ENS Blog
Marketing collab with Clash Royale. Gaming culture continues merging more into other areas. → Lil Wayne X Clash Royal Music Video - YouTube
This performance of Nessun dorma was incredible and nearly brought me to tears. I listen to this performed by Pavarotti when I make my lasagna. Bocelli's version here is next level. 🥲 → Andrea Bocelli's sweeping vocals overtake Opening Ceremony | Winter Olympics 2026 | NBC Sports - YouTube
Just some of the ways that Agents are going to change shopping experiences, marketing, and payment handling. → The Agentic Commerce Revolution – O’Reilly
Wonderful local musician. 🎶 → Humbird - February (Official Video) - YouTube
I’m so excited to see MAX now getting introduced to customers. This has been one of the most exciting new products I've been lucky to be part of. → SPS Commerce Introduces MAX - SPS Commerce
Snowflake on how they see agentic impacting retail. → AI In Shopping: Implications and a Roadmap for Consumer Goods Leaders
I’m no fan of Ring cameras. I use UniFi devices that record video in our home for this same purpose. Deploying Ring devices is literally building a surveillance network for anyone that is willing to pay Ring a few bucks. → With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
A haiku to leave you with…
Tiny claws extend,
Picoclaw grips dreams of code —
Future clicks hello.
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