Weekly Thing

WT349 — Owning the Rails

2026-05-23T12:00:00.000Z

Here we are at Memorial Day weekend and the official Minnesota start of summer! This is when many in our state “go to the lake” and some would like to not return until the leaves are off the trees. One of the great things about having harsh winters is the delight one gets in the summer when it is so nice to be outside.

You’re reading the first Weekly Thing created start-to-finish in the new Workshop that I’ve built. I’m still getting the kinks worked out but I feel confident enough in this model that I’m charging forward. This is by far the biggest change I’ve ever made to the Weekly Thing automation, and it is working well. This new setup has allowed me to change the way I construct the issues and you may notice some slight improvements. The audio text-to-speech for the podcast version is going to see some of the biggest improvements.

Another big shout out to more new subscribers from Dense Discovery! I hope that you find the Weekly Thing a fun place to learn together.

Currently #

Building: Continuing to build out the multi-agent Workshop that is now Weekly Thing headquarters!

Listening: Brandi Carlile’s newest single “Life On The Run”. Can’t get enough of her music.

Beautiful evening with the sun coming down.

May 16, 2026
Cannon Lake, Warsaw, MN

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 349 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Create Your Own Currency With Flipcash #

Fred Wilson wrote about Flipcash and I was intrigued. I still think there is something interesting in community coins powered by crypto. I created a Weekly Thing coin just to see how it worked. It is interesting that it is hosted on Solana but enforces Bitcoins 21 million coin limit. Not sure what I’ll do with my Weekly Thing coins though.

Say Hello to the Internet of AI – On my Om #

I found this article from Om about the changes happening at the network layer as a result of AI super interesting. The foundational design of the infrastructure of the web is being challenged by the mesh-like needs of AI capabilities versus the more hierarchal structure that powered streaming media and web interfaces.

In short, all four hyperscalers are giving the fat tree’s economic logic the thumbs down when it comes to AI workloads. Each has its own proprietary response. And you can bet your last penny that none of them is going to license their answer to the others. This is the same pattern that played out with custom silicon (TPUs, Trainium, Maia, MTIA), switches, and other gear. The hyperscalers see the workloads first, at scale, and they build the infrastructure to match. And they optimize, and optimize. The rest of the industry catches up later, if at all.

This section really hit me.

The right historical analogy for what is happening with AI is not Web 2.0 or the cloud. It is the railroads of the nineteenth century. Railroad operators understood the freight cars were not where value lived. The value was in owning the rails and everything around them, including the land. Owning the rails meant controlling routes, latency, geography, redundancy, and the cost structure of every customer who depended on the network.

I read this with some historical context. I was building and running large scale public websites before the cloud existed. I spent many years building out data centers in colo facilities. I still remember with a bit of a smirk when we had truckloads of Dell computers being unloaded into AT&T data centers and our crew onsite to ‘rack & stack’ and get everything going.

When you compare that world to the data centers of the hyperscalers there is almost nothing in common. The design of these things is now largely proprietary and at a level of complexity that is only understandable by the most elite infrastructure people in the world. Om goes on to suggest that is a bigger moat that the likes of Nvidia. I think he could be right.

Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us #

This is a more interesting read on Mythos and why it is better than the average coding agent at finding security issues. I specifically like the walk through of the vulnerability discovery harness. It makes sense that a coding agent, which relies heavily on its agent harness, would not be as powerful as a specific vulnerability discovery harness.

LLMs are functions, not brains. #

When building agentic systems a big part of what you design is the guardrails, the context management, and tool environment for the LLM to operate in, to “be” the agent you are defining. This article is a good overview of the structure and how you build around the LLM capabilities. The naive view would be that you just give some input to a prompt. Not at all, the harness and capabilities are the thing that truly make it powerful.

How to deal with your kid leaving #

When I was done with high school we had a graduation party, and the next day I got in my 1982 Chevy Luv propane pickup and drove to Delano, MN to work for Westrum’s Quality Foods for the summer. My mother had no idea where I was and we had a general agreement that I would call on Sunday’s from whatever state fair, art fair, or other event that we were selling corn dogs, foot long hot dogs, or something else on a stick.

Having gone through our oldest going off to college, then going to J-term, then a semester abroad, and on this very day leaving again for ten weeks away working her summer job — I’m thankful that it has been a progressive set of events unlike mine.

Monteiro’s essay hit all the notes for me on this. This is what doing parenting right looks like. And it feels horrible while you are so proud of them.

I was wasting Claude until I learned the RCCF method #

There is an art to working with any agent and this structure for working with coding agents seems like a good approach: role, context, command, and format. I tend to be more directive when I’m doing work with Claude Code. I find that I’m more comfortable being the designer and architect and I give Claude more directive “implement an X using the Y to make Z happen” kind of thing. However you do it, approaching with some structure will give you better results.

The quiet grief of adult friendship #

I enjoyed this article. Adult friendships are challenging to prioritize. Or at least that is how it seems to be.

And perhaps this is why adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.

I read this with the constant reminder in my mind that so many men report having no close friends. None. And the parasocial friendships of social media and podcasts don’t fill this hole. I find myself routinely thinking “wow, you are failing as a friend” because I haven’t replied to an email or sent a message. It at least feels in part that there is so much you have to do, and then you want to do, that by the time you get to the stuff you could do the energy is gone.

Then you start to look at the other end of parenthood. That is where that grief of lost friendships lands. The good news is that it is never too late, and this specifically is something that helps prod me to get better, make time, and reach out.

Journal #

Saturday, May 16 #

10:54 AM — Mazie and I taking the boat out for the season. Beautiful day!

5:25 PM — First visit to Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm for 2026! Delicious pizza. 🍕

6:26 PM — Evening bike ride to Dairy Queen for ice cream!

8:35 PM — Time for s’mores.

Sunday, May 17 #

10:15 PM — Fabulous show by The New Standards at The Dakota tonight. 🎶

10:19 PM — It took all four of us about an hour to get the canopy in the boat cover. The wind was borderline and three different times we got it on just to have it blown off. After finally getting it on we gave the boat the best cleaning ever and it is looking really good!

Monday, May 18 #

Minnesota Technology Council #

9:00 PM

I had my first official meeting of the Technology Advisory Council a week ago. I was honored to be accepted into this group with an official appointment from Governor Walz. The role of the council is to advise Minnesota IT Services (MNIT). The group is preparing for transition with a new CIO for the State of Minnesota, and a Governor transition as well. This meeting was my first chance to see the breadth of the portfolio MNIT manages.

I’m looking forward to helping in established areas like cloud and data transformation, as well as new areas with AI deployment. I think there could also be some good opportunities to connect the State of Minnesota with the Minnesota Technology Association (MnTech) where I’m currently chair.

Tuesday, May 19 #

7:15 PM — Mazie and I had a great dinner at Khâluna. She had the Mango Fish and I had Laksa. We started with the Basil Wings (wow!). Great food and an amazing dining room to boot. Recommended!

10:30 PM — Mazie and I went to Project Hail Mary. It was a second watching for me and her first. She isn’t the biggest movie person but loved this one and thought that Rocky was very cute.

Briefly #

Interesting project if you want to try running your own models. I haven’t focused on self-hosted models yet. Better runtimes are what would make self-hosting actually accessible. → forge: A Python framework for self-hosted LLM tool-calling and multi-step agentic workflows

It is surprising to me how quickly I’ve gone from being amazed that Claude Code can do what it does to wishing it didn’t take 15 minutes to do a complete refactor of a feature. This site does a good job of showing what token speed feels like. → tokenspeed — feel LLM tokens-per-second

This is spot on. I’m looking at you OmniFocus! I also notice that apps are creating MCP bridges using AppleScript interfaces. Drafts recently did this. Unfortunately these are often not reliable and performant enough. I suspect the AppleScript in the middle is the problem. Agentic support needs to be direct. → The Productivity Apps That Don’t Speak Agent Will Lose

This should be a built-in feature in Shortcuts right now. → Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex

We’ve seen plenty of tools and software made for agents. How about a whole programming language designed for agents! → zerolang: The programming language for agents

You can create as much bespoke software as you like these days. That is both amazing, and challenging at the same time. What a wonderful time to be a builder. → The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome

I’m a sucker for diving into rabbit holes filled with regular expressions. 🕳️🐇 → what 262,715 regex questions on stack overflow haven’t answered | ian erik varatalu

I’m using Claude in a monorepo (my first monorepo actually) and the multiple CLAUDE.md thing is an obvious but important thing to do. → How Claude Code works in large codebases: Best practices and where to start | Claude

Five step approach to learn any topic. → A Field Guide to Learning - Bite of an Apple

Seeing a terminal UI for RSS brought me back to the old days of use rn to read Usenet. If it supported syncing with Feedbin I might give it a try, but alas no. → feedr: A feature-rich terminal-based RSS/Atom feed reader written in Rust.

Learning the hard way. → Review: ‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ recounts Apple founder’s tough mid-career lessons – Six Colors

Time to head outside and enjoy this Memorial Day weekend. I hope you get to do the same.

Maybe some time with some of those friends too!

A haiku to leave you with…

Hyperscalers lay rail —
my daughter boards a different train
some routes can’t be owned

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

👨‍💻

WT348 — Agents as Collaborators

2026-05-17T11:00:00.000Z

Welcome to the year nine of the Weekly Thing! Thank you all for joining this journey with me. Also, a big shout out to the bunch of new readers from Dense Discovery! I’m a reader and supporter of that great newsletter and it has become a tradition of mine to place a classified ad for the Weekly Thing on the anniversary.

Since this is the first issue for year nine we also have a new non-profit for the Supporting Membership program. The inaugural year we supported Creative Commons. Last year was the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This year we are supporting the Signal Foundation. I’m a Signal user, and I am really happy that we have a service like Signal. Privacy is so important to me and Signal is at the forefront creating software to make that a reality. I also love that it is backed by a 501c3 non-profit at the same time. Thank you to all the supporting members now and in the future for joining me in support of the Signal Foundation.

Now let’s get to the links from the last week!

Currently #

Listening: The new Noah Kahan album, The Great Divide. I’m really enjoying it. I don’t have all the words memorized yet like the kids do. But I’ll know it well enough for when we see him in concert soon.

Watching: Finished watching Season 3 of Shrinking on Apple TV. Tammy and I have really gotten into this show. The characters are great and the story is well done. Looking forward to next season!

Minnehaha Creek rushing towards the Mississippi River just after the Falls.

May 10, 2026 Minneapolis, MN

The Weekly Thing Team #

I’ve been publishing the Weekly Thing for nine years and automation is one of the things that has made that possible. I shared a while back how I find content, assemble the issues, and my project structure. Without these well defined workflows there is no way I could continue this project.

The structure I have has worked well but it isn’t autonomous. It only runs when I engage with it. It is also brittle and “one way”. I can only easily run it one time. Additionally I think I could use some help getting things collected and reviewing the in process writing.

To this end I decided to create my support team for the Weekly Thing!

My starting points were:

Based on Elixir I know that Discord is a reasonable place for an agent to run.
Based on building Thingy I know that my Weekly Thing archive is a robust knowledge base to build off of.
Based on sending issues that meander and are just too long sometimes I know an editor would be helpful.
Based on my own time crunch that I get into when I’m trying to make a whole issue happen in one Saturday morning I know I could use some help making it more iterative.

This is the genesis of my Workshop and the four agent team that I have now created to assist me.

One thing worth being clear about: I have stated many times that “My words are mine!” and not AI’s and that is still the case. I don’t have any of these agents working to write content for me. They are my support team. The words are still mine. The only case where an LLM is “writing” or engaging with anyone is Thingy, the librarian for the Weekly Thing, and the Supporting Membership program where I have an explicit preference that that be a different voice than mine.

Here is the broad outline of the multi-agent solution that allows me to have dedicated agents that focus on different aspects of publishing the newsletter each week. This allows me to focus more on writing and commentary!

Each of these agents are operating with a full set of tools that include the entire archive of the Weekly Thing. As a result they are much more tuned to the job at hand than a generic LLM.

Eddy is my editor who reviews everything that goes in the newsletter. Eddy assembles a working draft of the current issue of the newsletter every day and then does an editorial review of the content. Eddy shares a status and progress indicator with me in Discord.
Linky is my researcher who assists with assessing the links I flag to go into the issue. Linky does recon to allow me to filter faster. Linky doesn’t ever look at the current issue and is just assisting with curation. Linky shares these in Discord. I’ve made it so I can reply to Linky with my commentary and it sync’s it back to Pinboard. This has allowed me to turn my commentary into a conversation.
Marky focuses on the most recent issue of the Weekly Thing that has been published and raising awareness. I’ve done the least with Marky so far, but the goal is to get the Weekly Thing to new readers.
Patty is the supporting membership manager who helps create call to action to bring new members in and raise money for the nonprofit we have selected. Patty operates on the annual cycle of the membership program and is the only agent that will draft content that does appear (properly sectioned) in the Weekly Thing. Patty understands the goal of the program, the organization that we are focused on this year, and what I have been writing about.

I’m focused mostly on Eddy and Linky right now as they are core to my authoring cycle. I can already see that this is going to allow me to focus on the content more, will be a quality of life improvement to get more incremental content and less scrambling at the end of the publishing cycle, as well as a more readable final email to subscribers.

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 348 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs #

Most folks just think about the cost of turning ideas into software, but the reality is that software lives forever and has a cost to keep it running. I’ve commented many times that companies put software as an “asset” on their balance sheet. Most technologists know that the reality is sofware is a “liability” that must be maintained and your team is the “asset” that you balance against that. So now with agents making software, if we increase materially the rate of software we are making, that maintenance must be dealt with.

The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.

Provocatively I will say that I think agentic coding will result in software that is easier to maintain. Many bugs aren’t resolved because they are just too hard to find and fix. If agents can do that faster, the bugs can get resolved. Plus agents are way better at getting deployments robust. And ultimately agents can babysit software for you. I’ve been building a new Discord agent and for the entire week I’ve had Claude Code not just coding it but running it. It is seeing all the logs, errors, anything on stderr and taking action. This is resulting in more maintainable software.

First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5 #

First known exploit of Apple’s silicon memory protection in the M5 chip.

The latest flagship example is MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement), Apple’s hardware-assisted memory safety system built around ARM’s MTE (Memory Tagging Extension). It was introduced as the marquee security feature for the Apple M5 and A19, specifically designed to stop memory corruption exploits, the vulnerability class behind many of the most sophisticated compromises on iOS and macOS.

Apple spent five years building it. Probably billions of dollars too. According to their research, MIE disrupts every public exploit chain against modern iOS, including the recently leaked Coruna and Darksword exploit kits.

Mythos played a key role here:

We didn’t build the chain alone. Mythos Preview helped identify the bugs and assisted throughout exploit development.

Mythos Preview is powerful: once it has learned how to attack a class of problems, it generalizes to nearly any problem in that class. Mythos discovered the bugs quickly because they belong to known bug classes. But MIE is a new best-in-class mitigation, so autonomously bypassing it can be tricky. This is where human expertise comes in.

Part of our motivation was to test what’s possible when the best models are paired with experts. Landing a kernel memory corruption exploit against the best protections in a week is noteworthy, and says something strong about this pairing.

The bolding is mine. Apple spent five years creating this defensive structure and this small team armed with Mythos found a vulnerability in five days. We can, and probably should, look on the bright side that going forward every company building stuff like this will be using Mythos (or better) on their solutions before they are released. So we should raise the bar materially that solutions are secure.

There has to be a finite number of security vectors. Maybe we end up in a great place after uncovering these issues.

For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work. #

It is hard to explain to people outside of software how profound the changes are in the software world right now. This essay from an engineer explaining how the work has changed hits it well.

I’m sad. I don’t get into that state anymore. I don’t know how to be honest about this without sounding like I am complaining about progress, but I can’t pretend that something hasn’t been taken. The flow state I had for thirty years is not part of my workday now. The creativity that lived inside it is not there either. I do useful things. I do not feel what I used to feel while doing them.

This all lands different for different people. For me personally, I find I can lose all track of time and get extremely engrossed (flow!) working with a number of agents. However, I do note if I have three or four agents in different projects I start to lose track of the context of each one. But either way, this is very different work that putting on your headphones and writing code.

This is what free costs #

This website does a great job of showing you how various data elements are collected from your browser and how fast. You are “digitally fingerprinted” within seconds of visiting a website. You can, and I do, run software to defend against this activity. But this is a great example of why we need privacy legislation.

Journal #

Saturday @ 5:32 PM

My 2006 Deoxys Holon Phantoms 1st Edition PSA 10 card (PSA cert #67755632) has shot up in value in recent weeks. First time listing one of my cards on eBay!

Saturday @ 8:00 PM

Happy (early) Mother’s Day to my Mom and my sister! We had a nice dinner out at my Mom’s favorite Indian restaurant.

Sunday @ 12:00 PM

Mother’s Day bike ride along Minnehaha Creek to Lynette for brunch!

Sunday @ 1:00 PM

Happy Mother’s Day to Tammy!

Sunday @ 5:30 PM

We completed The Vault today (Mother’s Day Escape Room!) which was also the last room we hadn’t done at Puzzleworks. Room 105!

Sunday @ 10:30 PM

Tyler and I got to see the Wolves win at home in the playoffs. As a bonus we got to briefly see my brother-in-law Hector and his kid at the game too!

The Sheep Detective #

Monday @ 9:21 PM

We went to The Sheep Detectives tonight at Willow Creek and thought it was fabulous. Tyler and I were at another movie and saw the preview of this and he thought right away that Tammy would like it so we landed it close to Mother’s Day and brought her Mom with us as well. The premise sounds silly and we were skeptical, until we saw the Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

In reality it is an incredibly touching story, wrapped into a “whodunnit”, with sheep playing many of the principal characters. I think the sheep make the story land even better.

We all loved it. Highly recommended!

Tuesday @ 11:00 AM

Bemis Well Drilling made quick work of digging down about 10 feet to fix our well issue. The electric, natural gas, and fiber connections are all right under the backhoe there. They did a great job and got us back “in water” only about a week after the issue.

Tuesday @ 5:00 PM

I was ecstatic to share with TeamSPS that we now have an enterprise agreement for Claude. It was fun to get to share the stage with Erica Koenig to make the announcement noting the incredible capabilities we are putting into peoples hands. This is just the beginning.

Wednesday @ 9:30 PM

Our first MN United game of the season with the whole family there! Let’s go United! ⚽️

Thursday @ 5:30 PM

A fun thing about having a 3D printer is being able to take something that appears only “on screen” and make it exist “in real life”. I printed some of these Clash Royale Crowns for Tyler and I, as well as some for friends that play the game.

Thursday @ 6:00 PM

So I’m wondering “Is there a way to store hats on a hanger like thing in the closet?” After a quick search on Maker World I printed a Hat Hanger.

Suburbs @ The Parkway #

Thursday @ 10:00 PM

Somewhat even to our surprise Tammy and I hadn’t been to a Suburbs show. Neither of us connected with the band when they were first on the scene. We see Chan play all the time with The New Standards. So we decided it was time to fix that and saw them play at the Parkway. Good show and clearly we were in the midst of a ton of super fans. Seemed like half the audience had the black Suburbs shirts on.

Friday @ 3:18 PM

From a chat with Claude today…

“everything else is scope creep dressed as ambition”

Statistical word model or not, that was an insightful comment.

Briefly #

You should open this article just to scroll down and see the graph of bug fixes by month. This seems like validation that Mythos really is that powerful of a model. → Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview - Mozilla Hacks

I wonder if some embargo was recently released and people are talking about issues identified by Mythos. This one is a bit different than the Firefox report in that it only found one notable issue. Also curl seems like a very hardened code base. → Mythos finds a curl vulnerability | daniel.haxx.se

Vertical AI solutions are the next step for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. In many ways, it is a system prompt turned into a product. → Claude for Legal

“Claude saved my crypto!” → Claude AI recovers an 11 yrs old BTC wallet holding 400k USD

I need to spend some time making Lua with Claude. → Lua as a practical “soft-bedrock” language

My weekly plug on why RSS is so great. You should be using this to “read” the web. → How I restarted using RSS, and actually noticed! – Six Colors

Lovely feature exploration of things that feed readers could do. → Ideas for web readers

Clear semantics on what these actions really can or should mean. → On likes, reposts, and bookmarks

Want an actual social web with real people? Here you go. → Love Letter to IndieWebClub

This is an incredibly detailed exploration through all things WiFi. Radio frequencies, physical layers, more than you probably ever knew existed. → Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/ac/ax/be/bn)

Along with other new things behind-the-scenes with the Weekly Thing I’ve added this area where I can put some stuff at the end of each email.

You’ll note that I’ve switched the subject line for these emails. The new format lands on the shorthand I’m using to reference an issue WT and the number. This is WT348. And then instead of the three words I’ve used we are gonna do something that is a little more of a peak of what is inside.

Simpler. More readable. Shows up better on your phone.

A haiku to leave you with…

Crowns on the printer, kernels falling in a week — Mother’s Day, slow creek.

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

👨‍💻

Weekly Thing 347 / Scrum, FilamentHound, DO_NOT_TRACK

2026-05-10T12:00:00.000Z

Hello there!

On May 13th it will be the nine year anniversary of me sending these emails. Two years ago I introduced the Supporting Membership program and I love the fact that we can do some good together! I just sent a contribution of

$1,164.92

to the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the proceeds from the last year! 👏

This includes all membership as well as sales of the Yearly Thing book!

That also means we have raised…

$1,792.37

in total through this program!

Amazing. Thank you! By the way, check out the Supporting Members section of the website for more information and a super streamlined way to become a member.

Don’t want a recurring charge but you do want to be part of giving back? The members page now has a place where you can make a one-time contribution into the Supporting Members program. Cool huh?

Next week I’ll share more about the non-profit we are supporting for the 9th year. Stay tuned!

Sometimes these emails get long, and this one certainly did. Don’t skip the blog posts for the new Weekly Thing website and my Your Version Number project! Or just skip the blog posts and go right to them…

➡️ Weekly Thing

➡️ Your Version Number

Minnebar t-shirt collection from 20 years of barcamps!

May 02, 2026 Best Buy HQ, Richfield, Minnesota

New Weekly Thing Website #

I’ve commented that agentic coding makes things that were previously on your “list of impossible projects” into things that you can do. I have long had on my “impossible project” list the desire to create a website for the Weekly Thing that let the archive shine in ways that I knew were possible but no solution out there delivered. With 9 years of writing and 345 issues in the archive there is so much to surface.

To do this I knew I would need to build it on my own. I could use the Buttondown API to get the issues and make them accessible. But then I needed a website. I needed a content pipeline. Oh, and that archive has old formats from different platforms that were a mangled mess of HTML.

This was truly on the “impossible list” for me personally. If I wanted to spend tens-of-thousands of dollars, or probably even more, I maybe could have hired someone to build it. A laughable idea really.

So I decided to take my experiences with Claude Code, Claude Design, and Codex and point it at this problem. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the new Weekly Thing website experience.

I just have to say I’m so thrilled with the results that I can barely handle it. Rather than type a novel here I’m just going to list out what the site has. Even better, go there and explore:

https://weekly.thingelstad.com

Here is what the new site has!

1️⃣ Completely reimagined landing page to describe the Weekly Thing. Gone is the basic Buttondown paragraph of text and a signup button. The home page hopefully gives a much better feel for what the Weekly Thing is.

2️⃣ Archive page has full index of every issue back to number 1. This is also now optimized for the Weekly Thing with issue images, link counts, organized by year.

3️⃣ Thingy, the Weekly Thing librarian that has read every issue of the Weekly Thing and is ready to converse with you about all of it. I have wanted to make an agent like this for over a year and it is finally real. I’ve found this fascinating to play with and ask questions of.

You will see this feature requires you to provide your subscriber email address. It is only available to confirmed subscribers of the Weekly Thing.

You may recall in WT311 I shared a custom GPT that was sort of like this. That was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!

Some prompts that are fun to explore with Thingy:

4️⃣ Search is now super powered. The searching is indexed into the section of the weekly thing. This works way better than before.

5️⃣ On the page for each issue you will see that there is a Table of Contents on the left. It is a little thing, but another example of something I’ve wanted for a long time. The Weekly Thing is long and this gives a way to navigate. Also, each of those items is a hyperlink so you can now send a link to a specific notable link in a specific issue.

6️⃣ Big one – you can now LISTEN to the Weekly Thing. I’ve filled this in for the last 10 issues. On the issue page there is a “Listen” button where it will be read for you.

7️⃣ Podcast? Well if I have an audio file for each issue why not bundle that into a podcast. So I did. You should be able to find the Weekly Thing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It is propagating through other platforms. Should be on Overcast too.

8️⃣ Support for LLMs.txt! This is a bit hidden, but if you want to talk with the LLM of your choice about the Weekly Thing, give the LLM this link:

https://weekly.thingelstad.com/llms.txt

That provides an LLM optimized index of the entire 345 issues, as well as links to LLM optimized versions of every email! This means ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else can dive deep into the content. I have actually used this myself when asking a model to do some research with me.

A quick note about the audio:

This doesn’t replace or remove my actual podcast, Another Thing. There is still just one episode there but I’m not giving up on that.
The audio for the Weekly Thing is text-to-speech using a transformed version of the email text. It announces sections, gives links numbers, announces quotes, and cuts some sections. I’ve listened to a few and think it works reasonably well.
I’ll probably evolve the generated audio, and right now it only exists for the last 10 issues, but I plan to backfill all issues with audio over time.

Take a look. Try out the archive, search, Thingy. Listen to an issue. And let me know what you think… anything not work right? Read wrong? Something missing? Or just that you think it is all cool?

Your Version Number #

In 2018 I wrote about Your Version Number:

I think the version metaphor works. You are a different person in your 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. Your life changes in meaningful ways! MAJOR version! Each year we tend to think of new things and new goals, but we don’t break backwards compatibility. MINOR version! And I think most people try to make each day a bit better than the last. PATCH level!

I’ve had a shortcut that shows my version on my phone for the last year. And now I decided to make this a fun website!

Now available…

Your Version Number #

Super simple single-page app that allows you to add one or more birthdays and see the version number. The magic here is all the data is held in the URL so you can bookmark, set as your homepage, or share with others. And sure it is fun seeing you and your friends daily versions, but it is even more fun with all the custom themes!

dark – Minimalist dark mode with violet accents.
family – Warm cream + handwritten Caveat, family-album feel.
pastel – Soft gradient haze with pastel cards.
birthday – Confetti, balloons, and party-hat pink.
nature – Scattered leaves on linen, earthy serif.
ocean – Wavy gradients with a tiny shoreline wave.
galaxy – Deep-space gradient with neon numerals.
zen – Quiet cream with a vermillion first-letter.
weather – Sky-blue card with a sun/cloud per row.
polaroid – Taped Polaroid grid with a slight tilt.
tarot – Purple stars and Fool / Priestess / Empress cards.
newspaper – Broadsheet typography with section rules.
subway – Black NYC subway map with route bullets.
receipt – Thermal-printer monospace with QTY 1.
steampunk – Sepia gear-and-cog ledger.
brutalist – Yellow + red + black, oversized type.
comic – Comic panels with POW / ZAP / BOOM stickers.
memphis – 80s squiggles, triangles, and dots.
vinyl – Spinning 33⅓ records.
terminal – Green-on-black CLI prompt.
arcade – Pixel-fonted hi-score CRT cabinet.
vaporwave – Pink/cyan grid with a palm-tree sunset.
y2k – Frosted-glass chrome and blur.
pixel – Eight-bit pixel font on a dark green field.
gameboy – Classic GB DMG palette and cart silhouette.

Wait though, there is more.

Your Version Number: Work Edition #

I decided to bring the same version number semantics to your job! Here we have YEARS.QUARTERS.BUSINESS_DAYS! Add your whole team in and share the URL with everyone.

And of course the Work Edition has work themes!

boardroom – Board-update slide with KPI rail (ARR, NPS, payback).
slack – Slack channel feed with reactions and avatars.
slidedeck – Confidential business-review slide with three bullets.
earnings – Live stock-ticker on a black trading screen.
github – GitHub PR list with avatars, labels, and the Open pill.
whiteboard – Sticky-note grid in primary colors.
inbox – Gmail-style inbox with subject lines and senders.
okr – Q-scorecard with progress bar and ON-TRACK pill.
cubicle – Manila-folder corporate newsletter.
kanban – Jira-style cards in an In-Progress column.
standup – Daily-standup card with Yesterday / Today / Blockers.
invite – Calendar invite with Accepted check.
confluence – Wiki page with breadcrumbs and comment counts.
zoom – Gallery-view tiles with reactions.
spreadsheet – Excel grid with row numbers.
pomodoro – Tomato-timer Deep Work card.
ooo – Out-of-office auto-reply with handwritten signature.

A fun little project made possible with Claude Code and I. 🤩

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 347 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Redis array type: short story of a long development - #

I love that antirez (author of Redis) is sharing so much about his use of agentic coding. We need more stories from experts like this that provide mission-critical software. Also, software written in difficult environments like C!

Thanks to AI, the specification evolved a lot, via back and forth of feedback, intellectual challenges about what was the best design, what was the right compromise, what was too engineered and what not.

The iterations at the specification level have to be a huge unlock. For an expert to be able to explore different approaches in rapid succession allows you to innovate much faster.

You know what was the biggest realization of all that? For high quality system programming tasks you have to still be fully involved, but I ventured to a level of complexity that I would have otherwise skipped. AI provided the safety net for two things: certain massive tasks that are very tiring (like the 32 bit support that was added and tested later), and at the same time the virtual work force required to make sure there are no obvious bugs in complicated algorithms. To write the initial huge specification was the key to the successive work, as it was the key to review each single line of sparsearray.c and t_array.c and modifying everything was not a good fit.

He took a bigger bet, went for a bigger slice of functionality, and had a bigger outcome by using agentic coding tools.

When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing #

Getting AI tools to your company and getting individual use out of them is not the hard thing, it is figuring out how your organization learns and improves with this capability. I’m seeing this right now because people are bringing a typical enterprise mindset to token consumption. Buying AI tools isn’t expensive, but tokens are. And if you approach that with a desire to minimize token usage, you are going to destroy your potential. The question should not be token consumption, but instead value creation over token consumption.

I’m quoting at length here because I think this is so important.

I keep coming back to three capabilities companies will need in the messy middle.

Agent Operations: which agents and AI tools are running, what systems they can touch, which data they can see, which actions require approval, where identity, audit, permissions, and runtime visibility live. This is the control side, and it matters because agentic work eventually touches real systems.

Loop Intelligence: which AI-assisted (or fully agentic) loops actually produce learning, which ones stay open, which ones decay, where agents create leverage, where they sprawl into side quests, which teams are stuck in tight supervision because they lack tests, context, or intuition. Which teams are ready for looser delegation.

Agent Capabilities: how useful capabilities get distributed across the organization without pretending that three monolithic agents can do everyone’s work. AI is starting to behave more like a fluid base technology than a single application category. It does not fit cleanly into one “HR agent,” one “engineering agent,” one “sales agent,” each sitting somewhere in the enterprise zoo. The better question is how capabilities flow into the places where work happens: employee harnesses, background agents, product teams, platform services, local skills, MCP servers, evaluation suites, runbooks, examples, and domain-specific procedures.

This is where the platform question gets interesting. Who owns these capabilities? How does a useful agent skill discovered in one team become available to others without turning into a dead template? How do you enrich a developer’s harness differently from a product person’s harness, a support team’s background agent, or a compliance workflow? Which capabilities belong close to the team, which belong in a platform layer, and which should never be generalized because the local context is the whole point?

How you operationalize this in a company is not solved at this time. I’m seeing it myself and seeing others wrestle with it. I like the foundational elements that this article puts forward.

Another model that I’ve considered is the transition from capital with servers to ephemeral infrastructure in the cloud. In a way capital is a lot like your team. It is hard to move around, hard to acquire, hard to change, but also incredibly powerful for the right things. The cloud made a part of that very flexible and just-in-time. We are already using different LLM models to bring just the right amount of intelligence to a task. And like the cloud we know that required a certain cost in tokens which is easy to know.

This morning I was doing a weekly review on one of my agents and Claude Code used the logging I have to show me five different skills the agent has and, to the penny, how much each of those cost me over the last week. That visibility applied to other tasks allows us to get much smarter.

Agentic Coding is a Trap | Lars Faye #

This is a balanced article from an engineer seeing all sides of agentic coding. I found myself reading this and thinking that I agree and disagree based on the thing you are making. Not all code is equal. Some code deserves additional effort and oversight, and other stuff does not. I think folks don’t consider that enough. For some solutions I think the process that is described here is spot on. For others, I would not agree.

I do think the issue that everyone is seeing but nobody knows the answer to is how junior engineers learn the hard things. I don’t claim to know the answer, but I do know that just like so many other things there was a time when engineers needed to know assembly and for sure the “grey beards” of the time thought it was insane that a modern developer couldn’t add some assembly in the midst of their solution.

The abstractions keep growing. Prompts are a new abstraction. Claude generated plans are an abstraction. I think the leap for us is to consider them as much part of the code base as the actual code that the computer runs.

The assertion of Vendor Lock-in though I would disagree with. This line:

You know how much your employees cost; you have no idea how much your token costs will be day to day, month to month, year to year. If your entire team is using agentic coding as the default, your expense account will need to remain highly nimble.

To me the giant challenge in front of us is figuring out how you measure value creation over token usage.

Appearing Productive in The Workplace — No One’s Happy #

LLM capabilities are pouring into many professions and on the whole I’m bullish about this and think it will be transformational. However, there are disconnects that we need to become culturally attuned to. This article highlights one that we need to gain skill on first.

In any previous era, the quality of a piece of work was a more or less reliable signal of the competence of the person who produced it. A novice essay read like a novice essay; novice code crashed in novice ways. AI has severed that relationship. A novice now produces work that does not betray the novice, because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all. It is the system’s. The person, in the transaction, becomes a kind of conduit, capable of routing the output to a recipient and incapable of evaluating it on the way through.

As a recipient of information we need to now perceive that you can have expertise-signal with novice-capability. This was previously not possible. The signal actually looks a bit like a student cheating and handing in someone else’s work. That isn’t the right framing though since it is common to do this while performing a job. People routinely engage with expertise without the domain details. But as a recipient of information we now need to ask two questions: is the information presented of the quality it deserves, and is the person or system providing it actually capable of the assertion.

The article goes on to define how we can test that capability.

Generative AI does well on tasks where feedback is fast, where being approximately right is good enough, where the human remains the final arbiter. Drafting a memo, generating examples, summarizing material the reader could verify if they cared to. The University of Illinois Generative AI guidance [7] and the PLOS Computational Biology “Ten Simple Rules” paper on AI in research [8], among the more careful documents now circulating, list much of this explicitly: brainstorming, copyediting, reformulating one’s own ideas, pattern detection in data one already understands.

Read broadly I think it is critical that we know when we are “playing tennis without a net” as it were. If you are using AI for a task that is not testable, you need to treat that different than one that is testable. Testability of the assertion is key to knowing where you can get leverage. This is the magic unlock with software, because code is testable within limits. And the place where automatic programming still needs expert engineers is the untestable bits.

How do you apply this testability to other domains? And then how do you calibrate expertise into the system? Ideally expertise determines ways to make things testable that appear not to be. That is where I find real leverage. The LLM itself can be used to make the untestable output testable.

Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS - David Smith, Independent iOS Developer #

Lovely essay emphasizing the artisanal effort put into making a feature work in the best way possible. I had to re-read when I hit the line “So… I commissioned a custom map.” What? The extreme number of iterations put into making this user experience delightful is impressive and a good peek into what goes into making a truly remarkable experience a reality.

How people ask Claude for personal guidance — Anthropic #

Interesting article including actual data. It is super interesting to me that “Health / Wellness” and “Professional / Career” are 27 and 26% respectively. Then a 50% drop-off to the next two, followed by another 50% drop-off to everything else. When I saw this it was like a giant blinking sign saying “COACH”. Both of those areas are places where people get coaches if they can afford it and have a big enough need. AI coaches has always been an area I think we will see a ton of specialization in. Opening access to coaching feels incredibly powerful. It is also interesting that these two areas have lower rates of sycophancy.

The other take away is how the sycophancy rates are dropping with each model. That proves this is a problem solvable by training.

The Death of Scrum — An Interactive Essay #

This article (worksheet?) hits on many of the topics I referenced in my Software Is Liquid post from last week. When constraints, inputs, and outputs change it is necessary to review the system you are operating to see what changes are needed. That is what brought Scrum into existence and it is the thing that should make us question its utility going forward. The challenge to me is if not this, then what. There are four options suggested here: Shape Up, The Linear Method, Continuous Flow, and Agent-First Development. It will be interesting to see if we are able to move, as an industry, to something that is more focused on the particular aspects of the outcome we are shooting for, as opposed to the limitations and constraints of the system we have to work in.

Journal #

May 1, 2026 at 11:13 AM

Had second Shingrex shot yesterday and so far feel okay. First shot gave me shivers but it was a lot colder then. Hoping for the best and good to avoid shingles. 💉

May 1, 2026 at 4:00 PM

Unwelcome surprise to have water ponding around the well head at the cabin. This isn’t good. 😬

May 2, 2026 at 8:38 AM

So great to connect with Minnebar OG’s this morning. Awesome to have Ben and Luke here to celebrate Minnebar 20!

May 2, 2026 at 3:00 PM

Tyler led his first session at Minnebar today! He did an amazing job talking about AI in Schools and what is good, bad, and how schools should adapt. 👏

May 2, 2026 at 5:00 PM

Tyler and I were lucky enough to be interviewed for the Minnebar 20 special video today.

May 2, 2026 at 1:34 PM

Great TeamSPS group at Minnebar 20!

May 2, 2026 at 7:08 PM

PLA run to Microcenter.

May 3, 2026 at 12:11 PM

PLA storage organized and ready to go!

May 3, 2026 at 6:06 AM

Up and writing at 6am for the next Weekly Thing!

While I’m doing that I’ve got Claude Code backfilling audio versions of the Weekly Thing, and another Claude Code instance doing some incremental work on Elixir.

May 3, 2026 at 12:12 PM

Tyler and I are at Fat Pants Brewing for the last-minute rescheduled Miami GP! Go Ferrari! Go Red Bull!

May 3, 2026 at 4:29 PM

Pokémon afternoon at Minnesota Card Show!

May 6, 2026 at 9:26 PM

Prompt I gave Claude Code on a recent project.

I would like to iterate faster. I would like you to use the ANTHROPIC API key and ask Haiku to generate 20 questions for each agent persona that Jamie (me) would reasonably ask. Then run those questions to each agent and see how they respond. Adjust based on that and keep iterating until all 4 agents respond to the 20 questions okay. Make sense?

Worked well.

May 6, 2026 at 5:07 PM

Mazie is home from her semester abroad! 🥳

May 6, 2026 at 9:24 PM

We are all into Noah Kahan, and Mazie is maybe infatuated with his music. We had a nice night on the couch with her back home and the incredible Out of Body documentary about his rise. It is incredible how quickly Kahan’s popularity exploded and the movie chronicles the journey.

Briefly #

It is incredible what you can make a font do. This seems perfect for a variety of inline data visualizations. → Datatype — variable font that turns text into charts

Delightful bit creating QR codes with pencil and paper. (Bonus, local Minneapolis blogger I wasn’t following!) → Hand‑drawn QR codes — Seth Larson

I went to “3D Printing: One step closer to the home replicator?” at Minnebar 20. The presenter shared that he had created this website to help people get good deals. It was a great session. → FilamentHound — Best Prices on 3D Printing Filament

Ansible without the YAML. → pyinfra - Fast Python Infrastructure Automation & Configuration Management Tool

I’ve commented about platforms making command-line interfaces to allow agents to use them, and shifting to agents as their customer. MCP is an evolution and secondary channel to do that. → The AWS MCP Server is now generally available | AWS News Blog

ENS continuing to improve blockchain accessibility, but also showing the state of the art in how blockchain native applications work. It is funny to me that the massively decentralized ENS is learning delegation from the centralized DNS system. → Names Are No Longer Single Objects | ENS Blog

Web browsers added a “do not track” feature years ago. Don’t take too much solace in it though, since it is not enforceable, just a way of sharing a preference. It is also the case that a lot of other tools send tracking information, so this environment preference is an attempt to create a similar mechanism. → DO_NOT_TRACK

Interesting data on the evolving roles of Dads in the household. → How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were

Some good news! 🎉 → Meta lost 20 million users last quarter | The Verge

To all the Moms out there I want to wish you a Happy Mother’s Day! Y’all are amazing. Particularly all the Moms I know. Nothing but delightful and wonderful women in that group. Our kids have been blessed to have an incredible Mom, and both Tammy and I are the wonderful results of great Moms. Love you Mom! Love you dear! 🥰

A haiku to leave you with…

Hand‑drawn QR dreams, Redis arrays tell stories — Dads learn to listen

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

👨‍💻

Weekly Thing 346 / Wuphf, Landsat, Eclipse

2026-05-03T13:54:35.604Z

Good morning! ☕️

It has been really nice this morning to get up early, sip on some coffee, go through these links, and get this email to you. There are always interesting niches to explore, rabbit holes to jump into, and things to learn. More so now than ever before. 🕳️🐇

I’ve been making some massive changes to the Weekly Thing website by the way. I’ll share the specifics next week, but if you want to explore early check it out. Hint: have a chat with Thingy. 🤖

How about another sneak peek just for you? Folks probably know that I find the idea of your version number and birthdays thought provoking. I love the idea of a daily incremental improvement. Well, Claude and I whipped up Your Version Number to make that even more fun. Add one or more birthdays, select a theme, voila. All state is in the URL so you can bookmark, send to others, or make it your home page. 🎉

See you next week! Jamie v5.4.120

Docks ready for boats to arrive for the summer.

April 26, 2026 Excelsior, MN

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 346 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

The Other Reasons Why Podcasting is Hot #

I listened to this same Pivot episode that Doc Searls comments on here and it seemed the comment on “people actually listen to the ads” rang a little odd to him too. His assessment of what actually makes podcasts great is spot on and no surprise are the same things that make the open web so great — your in control, it isn’t owned by one company.

I haven’t gotten traction on my Another Thing podcast but it is still there and I’m not giving up. I did recently add the option to listen to issues of the Weekly Thing on the web, which then made a podcast a super simple thing to add. Search your podcast app of choice for Weekly Thing and you should find it.

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports Anthropic #

There were grumbles about Claude Code getting less smart and here Anthropic shares what they changed that caused this and what they did to fix it. It is an interesting read because the three changes span a change in a default, an actual bug, and a reasoning change. When I read this it feels like the kind of thing that agentic engineering teams are going to need to be really good at. It also strikes me as a difference between products and agents. If you build a product and ship it, minus bugs it will behave deterministically. The last item on Claude’s issue was a change in behavior that impacted coding performance. That isn’t a feature change. This is what “performance management” for agents looks like.

Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy #

This is the first “real” use case I’ve seen where agents are given access to payment methods and buying something on their own.

Starting today, agents can provision Cloudflare on behalf of their users. They can create a Cloudflare account, start a paid subscription, register a domain, and get back an API token to deploy code right away. Humans can be in the loop to grant permission and must accept Cloudflare’s terms of service, but no human steps are otherwise required from start to finish.

This is specifically done with Stripe.

This all works via a new protocol that we’ve co-designed with Stripe as part of the launch of Stripe Projects.

There is a not-so-subtle signal here that both Stripe and Cloudflare see agents, particularly coding agents, as their customer. If you fire up Codex or Claude Code and say “build me a thing”, they want the agents to prefer their platforms because the actual end-user probably doesn’t have a strong opinion and the agent is just looking to get the job done. It will likely pick the solution that allows it to do that most completely.

I can’t help but connect this back to crypto too. This solution is fine but it is fully platform lock-in with Stripe enabling it. The better answer, and I nearly guarantee we are going to get here, is giving your agents a crypto wallet and sending digital currency to it to get the job done. No lock in, no worry about the agent having access to your credit card, no risk it overspends, and instant settlement. This is so completely crystal clear and doable today.

Prediction: digital currency will take off with agent proliferation.

wuphf: Slack for AI employees with a shared brain #

This feels like someone was in my brain. I’ve been thinking about messaging between agents a lot lately. It isn’t a big leap to think about five different agents needing to communicate and share messages. However, it is a whole different thing to consider thousands of agents that are the same focusing on different work communicating. Instantly Slack comes to mind, but at a volume and terseness that would be very "agent’, not human. You can clearly imagine organizations where you have an agent discourse system operating in one style and speed, and a person one that is very much like Slack today, with an interop layer between them. This project is that agent system, sort of.

PS: We’ve been re-watching The Office as a family so the name of this app was fresh in my head and made me LOL for real. WUPFH.com!

I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. Here’s Who Showed Up. #

This is a must read post. I love the framing here:

This isn’t someone scanning specifically for my server. This is the background radiation of the internet — a constant, automated, planet-wide sweep of every IP address on every port, all the time, forever. If you’ve ever had a machine with port 22 open, this is what’s been happening to it.

In less than a minute this honeypot registered activity. I absolutely adore the “background radiation” term. it is a perfect fit. There is a constant swarm of bots attempting to gain access to hosts like this. Forever.

The fact that they bots just login, get the name of the OS, cover their tracks, and then leave is creates an incredible picture. The robust multi-layered economy built to find hosts and exploit them is in full effect here. This is literally the “top of the funnel” activity for evil doers.

Build with Micro.blog #

I’m a fan of micro.blog but the documentation for their APIs and services has always been lacking. This is a great resource. I pinged Vincent after he shared it that it would be great to make it easier for LLMs to use. He added llms.txt support in a couple of hours. Clearly he’s building with agents. The next day I had Claude Code work up mb-audit using that LLMS.txt endpoint to build a thing I have wanted to exist for micro.blog for a while.

If you want to create something use micro.blog, this makes it super easy.

Lessons on Building MCP Servers #

Great learnings for folks making MCP servers. I particularly like the design checklist at the end. All that is missing is packaging that up as a Claude Skill! There is a ton of art that comes into play when designing these as well as agent tools. Similar domain models. Doing this right is key to getting agents to operate consistently.

Journal #

Apr 24, 2026 at 9:40 PM

Tammy and I went to Michael tonight and I really enjoyed the movie – more than I was expecting. His music was such presence when I was a teenager. Billie Jean is still amazing.

Apr 25, 2026 at 9:05 AM

Refining Elixir’s agent definitions by having Opus review prompts that Sonnet has modified from OpenClaw’s refactor to be used by Haiku. Seems like magic. 🪄

Apr 25, 2026 at 2:30 PM

We started the Dragon’s Keep room at Trapped Puzzle Rooms strong. First 20 minutes or so we just plowed through everything. Smooth! Then it all fell apart in the 2nd half. We completed but were 12m over time! See Dragon’s Keep on Escaping Things for me.

Apr 25, 2026 at 3:33 PM

Beautiful day for MNUFC v LAFC! ⚽️

Apr 26, 2026 at 1:30 PM

A little early still for tulips but always a nice time to explore the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

Apr 26, 2026 at 6:00 PM

It is really important that you store your PLA in a dry environment. Humidity causes problems when printing. One of the cool things about 3D printing stuff is you mostly just print it. I now have ample PLA storage using this Drybox Sterilite 20 Qt project.

Apr 26, 2026 at 6:36 PM

TIL: the most hamburger that Lions Tap has gone through in one day was 580 lbs. Father’s Day drove a big surge.

Apr 26, 2026 at 10:00 PM

We watched Eternity tonight and it was a great movie. A very interesting concept and a touching story. Recommended. 🍿

Apr 30, 2026 at 8:55 PM

Let’s go Wolves! 🏀

Apr 30, 2026 at 11:45 PM

For the 2nd half of the Wolves game I got to sit court side – right next to the scoring table! Incredible experience that close. Those dudes are huge! Bonus to see the Wolves win the series and send the Nuggets home. Plus getting on TV. The Nuggets coach liked to stand in my view though. 🤩🏀

Briefly #

Cool app built on the Morty API that helps you book escape rooms for a trip with defined dates and locations, build the schedule, and even manage logistics across the bookings. → Skeleton Key

I touch on this topic in my Software is Liquid post. Prototyping is now best done in code. → AI Prototyping Is Changing How We Build Products at Uber

Life is not a problem looking for a software solution. My angle: the digital and the organic are different worlds. Sometimes they should work together. Sometimes they should stay in their lanes. → Beware Software Brain | The Verge

This made me smile. → Your Name in Landsat 🛰️

Love for tools that give users power over platforms. Consider this my weekly endorsement of using RSS and a feed reader. → Using the internet like its 1999 - The Universe of Joshua Blais

Bridging databases with streaming interfaces is a powerful feature. My Elixir project could possibly benefit from using this. → honker: SQLite extension + bindings for Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics

This feels like Microsoft responding to how powerful (and good) Claude for PowerPoint and Excel are. → Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint | The Verge

Super handy library if you need to display a directory structure or similar information. → Trees, from Pierre

I’ve talked to a number of parents who are doing some agentic game coding with their kids. I love it! What a great way to expose folks to the power of AI and have fun with your kids. This framework looks interesting to make even better games. → OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games

Hmm, this seems like an obvious thing to look for. We have increasing data that microbiome is very powerful and important. And obviously coffee would affect that. “Behaviourally, coffee drinkers exhibited greater impulsivity and emotional reactivity, whereas non-coffee drinkers demonstrated better memory performance.” Wonder if the probiotic I take is handling my two cups of coffee okay? → Habitual coffee intake shapes the gut microbiome and modifies host physiology and cognition - Nature Communications

I sent this feature request into YNAB years ago. Fun to see it finally land! → Why Don’t You Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer | YNAB

It used to be that Anthropoic and AWS were BFFs. But now AWS has OpenAI models. And Google is getting cozy with Anthropic. Everyone needs the money, and everyone needs access to frontier models. → Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic

Delightful website to learn about Mahjong. It is on my long-list to learn this game. Tammy actually went to a class with her mother to learn it recently. → Mahjong: a Visual Guide

Software supply chain issues are growing. It would be a help to the whole industry if Github put some guardrails in GitHub Actions to help people not be so insecure by default. → GitHub Actions is the weakest link

Great way to plan out eclipse trips! → Solar Eclipse Map

I like that we are getting more “backup your cloud stuff” tools. It is all fine for us to have cloud capabilities but I don’t like the fact that I don’t have my own copy. Having a dozen terabytes of local storage with software constantly mirroring your cloud activity locally is the right answer. → Parachute Backup - Backup Utility for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos

A haiku to leave you with…

Coffee stirs the gut While AI dreams in the night Both keep us awake

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

👨‍💻

Weekly Thing 345 / Codex, Headless, Wikiwise

2026-04-26T12:00:00.000Z

Good morning! ☕️

I hope your weekend is off to a great start!

This week was filled with big tech stuff: Apple CEO transition, GPT 5.5, Claude Design. The pace is just moving faster and faster.

I have a long blog post in this issue that is a talk I gave turned into a post that hits on speed and how fast things are changing.

But today we have more important things. Today is Tammy’s birthday and we are going to be making the most of it! 🎉

Enjoy the links and have a great day!

Incredible light coming into Sagrada Familia. (I’m still using photos from our trip to Europe a few weeks ago.)

March 25, 2026 Barcelona, Spain

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 345 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

OpenAI’s New Codex App Has the Best ‘Computer Use’ Feature I’ve Ever Tested - MacStories #

Add this to the long list of things I need to directly play with. I will share that I’ve been incredibly frustrated with OpenClaw and am about to give up on it. The continued progression of Claude Cowork and now Codex computer-use features seem like they are much more mature and reliable to get work done.

Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents #

There are a lot of email services but not many that are fully designed for agents. Agents are going to want email as a core service just like we do, but they are going to want their email inbox to work differently. This is going to happen with many, many services.

I have to share that I have some flashbacks here to the period when we were making “social everything”. Social media was the focus and we thought Social ERP and Social HRIS would be a potential tidal wave that would dislodge established players. That was a complete mirage.

I think this time is very different.

Headless everything for personal AI #

This “headless” term is pure marketing and I sure hope it blows by, but the concept I agree with completely. Matter of fact I’m already playing here with my mb project. I’ve been working on a lot of agent building and thinking about how agentic systems compare with typical product building that has been the focus of most things I’ve done for my career.

Products are designed for people and our huge context windows, visual preferences, and a desire to enable the user to do whatever they want at any time with buttons and events.

Agents have a limited context window, much prefer text interfaces that are easy to parse, and thrive on non-blocking command line calls.

There is overlap between these but less than you might think. Part of the reason that building agentic systems is moving so quickly is removing some extremely expensive and time consuming things that products need. You need a concept, some visual system. You need user testing. You need to consider a whole event model. With agents you don’t need any of that.

And on top of that, you can just ask the agent how it is working. You can ask another LLM to generate interactive test data. You can move so much faster.

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs #

Anthropic’s newest major capability for Claude is Claude Design. I wanted to get my hands dirty with it so I pointed it at the POAP KINGS website which was entirely created with Claude Code, including the design. I thought the design was okay but I had just added a blog feature and it was getting unruly. I pointed Claude Design at the Github repo and it went to work. I answered a number of questions about what I was hoping for and over the course of several prompts it provided a very solid iteration forward.

The most helpful thing in Claude Design is that you can select a specific element and make a very pointed design comment. It is hard to do that in Claude Code. Overall it was very good at understanding the visual language. And in the end I just hit Share and sent the design to Claude Code which then dutifully updated the site with the new look.

Impressive, particularly for a beta, and the connectedness with Claude Code is very powerful.

Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind #

Interesting read filled with what seems like a decent amount of common sense.

Their findings are not unique. Other teams have also found that drops in testosterone during their partner’s pregnancy are also linked with higher investment, commitment and satisfaction after birth, and that this hormone’s level was even linked to the men’s reactions to baby cries: it made them more alert and responsive. In 2018, a team in Gettler’s lab also concluded that fathers with lower levels of testosterone tend to be more involved in caring for babies and toddlers.

Tons of podcasts and newsletters for men are focusing on keeping your testosterone high and that it is a problem for men as they age. Data also shows that being in a good relationship and having kids drops testosterone levels. We shouldn’t ignore either to the disadvantage of the other, but it is also important to not just look at one thing in isolation.

Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.0 | OpenAI #

Incredible example images created by the newest image models from OpenAI. I know everyone, including me, is all focused on Anthropic right now but GPT-5.5 and this are pretty impressive.

Mac Power Users #845: Intentional Technology with Patrick Rhone - Relay #

Was great to see the Twin Cities own Patrick Rhone on the latest episode of Mac Power Users!

An MCP server for Fastmail — National Email Day #

This might be the first MCP server that becomes my BFF. I’ve been a Fastmail user for many years and when I saw this I instantly went into Claude and added the connection. It was super-simple and then I asked Claude if it could see my email and there it was. I’ve not done anything all that advanced with it but I’m very happy with how seamless and easy it is. It is also great that it connects to my Claude account and instantly was available on all of my Claude interfaces. Oh how I wish I had a similar MCP for OmniFocus.

Is Your Site Agent-Ready? #

Tool that inspects a website to see what AI capabilities it is advertising. Useful if you wish to make your site as useful for agents as possible. I’m surprised thought that it didn’t look for llms.txt support.

Introducing GPT-5.5 | OpenAI #

Most of the highlights here are about coding. I fired up codex on Elixir’s code and asked it to do a review and assessment. It came forward with strong suggestions and quickly understood everything. The model seemed notably fast to me. Just overall it is still mind-blowing how this is all evolving.

Journal #

Apr 17, 2026 at 7:47 PM

Tyler and I are going to do a Minnebar session this year – Elixir: Creating An Ai Agent For Our Clash Royale Clan. This will be a lot of fun to share with everyone and tell some of the POAP KINGS and Elixir story.

Apr 18, 2026 at 4:01 PM

There is a fox that has been mostly living at our cabin property for a couple of years now. This year she had pups and they sure are cute to see scamper around.

Apr 18, 2026 at 4:02 PM

It is still such a “wow” when you hit print and go downstairs a few hours later to grab something useful. Tyler and I are having a great time with the Bambu Labs P2S.

Apr 18, 2026 at 8:30 PM

Cold April night for MNUFC v Portland match. ⚽️🥶

Software Is Liquid #

Apr 20, 2026 at 7:52 PM

This started as a talk I gave internally to a group of technology leaders. I’ve adapted it here, stripping out the company-specific material, because the core ideas apply well beyond any one organization.

I want to throw out some ideas about what I think is changing in our industry. What I’m going to describe is one of the most rapidly evolving, most dynamic changes I have ever seen in a twenty-plus-year career in technology. I believe there are things changing right now that will fundamentally redefine how we practice our craft.

Where we are #

Let’s bookmark where we are. Agents are real. I’ve watched one go from nothing – zero, no code, no design – to a working alpha with real users making real decisions on it, in about five weeks. A year ago, this was an idea. Now there are production agents running.

Agentification is the next major milestone our industry is going through.

I’m old enough to say this: there was a time before the web and a time after. A time before mobile and after. A time before the cloud and after. And now, a time before AI and agents and after.

I think this is going to be the most transformative of all of those.

You have to acknowledge one paradox of where we are: we are building the best practices before they exist.

We’ve been here before. Those of us who lived through the cloud transformation remember being ahead of the industry, figuring out how this ephemeral compute stuff works, how to make it all function. There weren’t patterns the industry had settled on. That’s where we are today. There are no clear patterns for how agentification happens. We’re going to build those patterns and learn alongside the industry.

That’s okay. Just be aware of where you are. It’s fine to be out ahead of the curve; you just have to always know when you’re there, because it’s a risky spot. You don’t want to be too far out.

Getting philosophical: software is becoming liquid #

I want to get a little philosophical.

For the last two months, I’ve pushed myself into a level of AI engagement that is probably unhealthy long-term, honestly. If you ask my family, they would agree. But what I’ve been trying to do is really wrap my head around the core concepts that I think change how we do what we do.

Connect this back to other transformations. When we adopted a mobile world, we all knew we needed to be mobile users to lead it. Can anybody build a great mobile app if they’ve never used a mobile phone? Obviously not. So to lead through AI agentification, we have to be really close to it. I’ve been pushing myself hard to do that, because as you build experience, it gets harder to refactor how you think.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about: what is the cost of being wrong? And how do we fold that into how we create things?

Step back for a moment and think about how we do our craft. Say we’re building software. We spend time on discovery. We create stories. We have designers go off and make wireframes. We do all kinds of things to make sure that, when we actually get to the point of building, we know we’re doing the right thing.

Why? Because the act of building software has been incredibly expensive. The last twenty years of my career have been about figuring out how to effectively turn ideas into working software and how to make sure that, when we do, we’re not wrong – that we’re producing valuable capability. That’s what technology teams around the world have been focused on. The teams that do it well do these things better than the teams that don’t.

Here’s how I’ve come to think about it: software has historically been a solid. It’s chiseling something out of granite. We have our ideas, we sit down, it’s hard work, it’s challenging, and we chisel it out of granite.

I think that’s changing. I first heard this from somebody online and it didn’t land for me at first – I thought, that doesn’t make sense. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was spot on. The assertion was: software is becoming liquid.

We’ve operated for two decades in a world where software is an incredibly difficult solid to shape. With AI and agentic development – automatic programming – software is becoming malleable. If you’ve worked with agents on software, you’ve had the experience of thinking: I can refactor this code faster than it would have taken me to do all the guardrail work to make sure I didn’t make the wrong decision in the first place.

When the economics of what you do change that profoundly, you have to question everything.

Every paradigm built on “software is expensive” needs re-examination #

Go back further. Most of us spent the early parts of our careers in agile flows. Before that, everybody did waterfall. Why? Were they just not as smart? No – they were operating under a different set of assertions. If you made a mistake writing C code, it was really difficult to unwind. You’d take months to refactor a mistake in your domain model that showed up in C code.

Then we got Python, PHP, interpreted environments, continuous integration. The paradigm changed. Suddenly: what if I’m wrong? Fine, I’ll refactor. Refactoring Python is cheaper than refactoring C. That’s just a fact.

So here comes agile. We can do this differently. We can be more responsive.

The cloud is the second part of that story. The cloud says we can do the same thing with hardware – we don’t have to worry about where we put the server. The cost of being wrong, if I put a server in the wrong data center, is not easy to undo. But in the cloud, that’s a couple of commands.

We are in that same spot again.

AI is transforming the cost of creating software in a way that should make us question every single process we have that is fundamentally built on the assertion that creating software is expensive.

I’d argue that maybe proof of concept doesn’t make sense anymore. What we used to call a proof of concept is now discovery. And how do you do discovery? I think you do it in code. Your discovery process is entirely in code. Do you then throw the code away? No. Why would I? It’s liquid. I bend it, move it around, get it where I want it.

The act of discovering through creating changes things pretty fundamentally. That paradigm is going to take us a while to absorb. I really want you to think about what you have in your world that makes assertions that building this stuff is extremely expensive. And when I say “cost,” don’t just think dollars – think organizational cost.

That’s assertion one: software is becoming liquid.

Managers belong in the code #

Here’s my second assertion. If you’re a people leader, this one is for you.

I used to have a very firm belief. When I saw a people leader – a director or a manager – in code, that was a warning sign. Almost always, when I saw a director or manager in code, they were probably avoiding something harder that they were supposed to be doing. “Oh, you’re working on the actual software? I bet you have a personnel problem you’re not dealing with.”

I don’t think that’s true anymore. Agentic engineering changes that fundamentally.

The issue historically was a simple one of context window. As a manager, you couldn’t truly know the codebase because it was too complicated. It was a solid asset your craftspeople were working on. You had to focus on the people systems. You just couldn’t hold both of those things in your head and be effective.

Agents change that paradigm entirely. There is no reason, as a director or a manager, why you shouldn’t be talking to an agent and asking about the quality of the asset you’re accountable for. And as a people leader, you are accountable for the assets your people create. So why aren’t you having that conversation?

Why would I ever start a conversation with an engineer with, “how long do you think that’ll take?” I should have had that conversation with Claude Code first – looked at the source, asked: is this a big refactor? If we went this direction, how would that look?

This flips even further on its head when we think about agentification, because increasingly we’re going to be creating software not for people to use, but for agents to use. Think about how that works. You work with an agent to create the software. Another agent uses it. The agent using it gives you feedback on how it’s working. You take that feedback back to the coding agent and ask it to iterate.

What are you in that loop? I don’t know – a product manager, I guess.

I’m doing this today on multiple projects at home – using agents to give each other feedback. This speed and paradigm shift is foundational to how we have to adjust our thinking.

Rethinking velocity #

The last thing I want you to really think about: as an industry, we need a step-function change in how we think about velocity.

How long is something going to take? I’d argue every paradigm you have for answering that question is broken now. The cost understanding is broken. The complexity understanding is broken. It’s all broken.

The only way to truly gauge it is through the second thing I mentioned – getting closer to the asset you’re accountable for, getting closer to the code and the product.

Just like mobile – where you couldn’t understand how to build an app until you’d experienced one – you can’t understand agentic transformation until you’ve experienced it firsthand.

Don’t be scared to go close to the code. Don’t be scared to ask your team, “Hey, how do I get that code out of Git? I’d like to look at it and do some analysis.”

These are superpowers. Every single one of us can put a cape on. You didn’t have these before. I think it’s amazing. And the whole industry is going to go through this transformation.

The change curve, and the rate of change #

I want to close with something about change itself.

There’s a model called the Satir change curve. Every one of us sits at a different point on it right now. But just like every transformation before it, your progress is gated by your own engagement – by your own willingness to rethink the craft you have and to let go of things that may have been important for the last two decades but aren’t important anymore.

I invite you to come down this path.

Personally, it’s not easy. And what’s not easy is the rate. Think about it: we had two or three or four years to figure out mobile. We had half a decade for cloud. The web took an eternity – it was the first one. Here, we’re trying to do this in about a year.

Why? Because it’s enabled by all the other capability we’ve built, and because the potential is so big. The return on investment, once we identify things, is measured in weeks or months – not years. That’s a completely different thing than any of these previous transformations.

I hope you heard something here that grounds you.

Software is liquid. The fundamental economic paradigms have changed. You are able to lead through this.

Hypergrowth #

Apr 22, 2026 at 6:00 PM

This growth is hard to even comprehend.

Anthropic says Claude Code is now growing revenues at a $2.5 billion run-rate, a number that has doubled since January 1. Claude Code was launched in May 2025. Six months later it was at $1 billion. Its sales are growing faster than a 1980s F1 monster, pulling the whole company along with it. Anthropic hit $14 billion in ARR in February, $19 billion in March, and around $30 billion this month. – Software Eats Its Own

Even being prepared for that level of scaling is impressive.

Apr 23, 2026 at 9:00 PM

We had a great presence from TeamSPS at the Aspirations in Computing awards event tonight and welcomed three of the four high-school interns that will be working with us this summer!

Briefly #

Long article but I like these kind of deep-dives into languages. This one makes the case that Ada was well ahead of its time in many ways. → On Ada, Its Design, and the Language That Built the Languages

I am a fan of wikis but getting them integrated into your knowledge system isn’t easy. Using a wiki to collaborate with an agent seems like a solid path. → Wikiwise — Build your own Wikipedia

It is super interesting to see the changes that AI models get between releases. → Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

I’ll miss Tim Cook being at the helm of Apple. I’ve got a ton of respect for what he has built and how he has led Apple (with a couple of recent exceptions). → Daring Fireball: ‘Community Letter From Tim’

We have tickets to go see Noah Kahan in Minneapolis this summer. Our whole family is really into his music. → Noah Kahan: Tiny Desk Concert : NPR

Nothing much to add. 😬 → Daring Fireball: Trump on Tim Apple

John Gruber commenting on the CEO transition at Apple. Gruber is my go to for deep Apple insights. → Daring Fireball: Another Day Has Come

This brought me back! I remember being so excited when I got my Zip drive back in the day. It seemed so fast and could hold so much! → Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

As a fan of Ferrari and specifically Ferrari Formula 1 I greatly enjoyed this episode of Acquired. → Ferrari: The Prancing Horse and the Business of Desire — Acquired

A haiku to leave you with…

Wiki of my own, Clouds of email drift in play — Agents sip the sky.

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