Weekly Thing

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.

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

👨‍💻

Weekly Thing 344 / Mythos, Artemis, Signals

2026-04-19T12:39:11.789Z

Good morning! ☕️

It’s been a bit. I shared in WT343 that we were going on a trip to Europe for two weeks so I was taking a little break. That trip got off to a rocky start with a blizzard causing a flight cancellation but after that bump we had a wonderful time in Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Mazie joined us in Paris for a quick stint at Disneyland Paris and then we rejoined here in Barcelona. It was so great to see her on her semester abroad and I’ll point you to her blog where she has been writing regularly. Her most recent update from a weekend in the Azores. You can see our trip logs from Escape in Europe for more.

More than any prior trip this one was anchored with escape rooms. Tammy found us twelve amazing escape rooms with the finale being Londium in Barcelona, the 7th ranked room in the world according to TERPECA 2025. It was incredible by the way. I took the opportunity with so much escape room activity to make huge changes to our Escaping Things website including a dedicated trip function so you can see our Escape in Europe trip showcasing those twelve rooms including commentary from all of us!

Back to the timeline. Just two days after Tyler and I got back home I came down with an infection that started in my left ear and then went to the whole left side of my head and down my neck. Within 24 hours I went from totally fine to being at the emergency room, very “out of it”, and getting admitted to the hospital. I blogged a bit about my bout with facial cellulitis. After two days of IV antibiotics I was feeling much better and able to go back home. Thank you modern medicine. The outcome for a sepsis diagnosis in your head is very bleak without antibiotics.

Now I’m back and typing to you here on a Sunday morning. Should we get back right to it with some links? Yes, we should! ✅

The constant crowd of visitors at the Louvre looking to get a photo of the Mona Lisa.

March 20, 2026 Louvre, Paris

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 344 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra #

I have been working with many agents building and exploring things and I’ve been curious to observe what it feels like. I think that we will find that for people working closely with agents that doing that for 2-3 hours at a time is probably a limit. Maybe a little bit more, but co-creating alongside an agent takes a different kind of energy. This blog post commenting on flow and that feeling was interesting to me.

After a stint of deep work, I usually feel the tiredness of having held a line of thought together for a long time via concentration. After a stint with agents, the tiredness feels more like the aftermath, again, of sustained play or competition. The accumulation of lots of small judgments, many state updates, repeated course corrections, constant low-level vigilance. It’s neither better or worse, just different, more like a workout. Last of all, working with agents feels like… fun. Flow is not fun, it’s immensely rewarding yes, but not fun.

For me, I have found that I do enter a state of flow working with agents to create and build. I lose track of time and I really “feel” like I’m co-creating with another entity. Collaborating and ideating. A lot of the rest of the comments here I agree with. There is a game like aspect to it. We are still incredibly early in understanding how people and agents will collaborate.

This is a great read and the Cessan is spot on that most (none I’ve ever seen) software teams think about the financials this way. Some get close, particularly with engineering teams that make other teams more productive there is a leverage view you have to apply to know if it makes sense. But this is all getting turned upside down with automatic programming and agentic delivery. We are needing to go back to the basics, and this math may be the best place to start.

Want to understand the current state of AI? | MIT Technology Review #

Great overview of the pace of progress on frontier models. The charts here are incredible.

Despite predictions that development will plateau, AI models keep getting better and better. By some measures, they now meet or exceed the performance of human experts on tests that aim to measure PhD-level science, math, and language understanding. SWE-bench Verified, a software engineering benchmark for AI models, saw top scores jump from around 60% in 2024 to almost 100% in 2025. In 2025, an AI system produced a weather forecast on its own.

The crazy part? We are still in the very beginning of this transformation.

Browser Run: give your agents a browser #

It is surprisingly difficult to give an AI Agent a browser to use the web with. The web is inherently very visual and there is a lot of complexity in the interfaces for agents to navigate. It seems very clear that agents running Chrome is fine for testing a website, but it is NOT what an agent would prefer. Cloudflare making a cloud-hosted agent-first browser makes a ton of sense. Notice how unique the features are too. It is very obvious we are going to be building a lot of software for agents.

Evals Are the New PRD — Elezea #

Agents aren’t just helping us write software, and they aren’t just end user features, they are actually helping evaluate and build the software too. Without too much effort you can create agentic loops that evaluate how your product is performing and automatically works to improve the experiences that get negative scores. This is almost a standard operating practice now in part because there is so much data you can’t possibly do it any other way.

Building a CLI for all of Cloudflare #

When I saw this article I wondered if the focus was really “making a CLI for agents” and that is exactly spot on. They start out plainly:

Increasingly, agents are the primary customer of our APIs. Developers bring their coding agents to build and deploy applications, agents, and platforms to Cloudflare, configure their account, and query our APIs for analytics and logs.

For a service like Cloudflare they have to pivot their entire product offering to be agent native. That means rethinking how agents can learn, use, and manage their software. Agent first means something totally different here. And if your service is hard for agents, they will just divert around you to another solution.

This space of creating products that are actually for agents and not for people is pretty interesting. I have my own agent product I’ve been working on, mb, a micro.blog client built for agents.

The Human Cost of 10x AI Productivity - Denis Stetskov #

This article to me reads as the real issue with the human-in-the-loop answer to agentic transformation. It sounds good and makes folks feel better — oh good, there is a person looking at all that. However, to agnatically transform something you are usually looking to get “machine speed” and that becomes much more difficult with a human-in-the-loop. Right now there are a lot of senior engineers being asked to do this ill defined task. We need to learn quickly how to move our systems to safer environments to minimize this before we burn out tons of people. Safety of systems is the place to focus to make this better.

Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities | AISI Work #

It is predictable that coding agents are going to find vulnerabilities, and they are moving along very quickly. It seems we are now in race to use agents to secure systems at the same time others are using them to attack systems. The reality is that the vulnerabilities Mythos has found are nearly impossible for people to find. All this makes me wonder if there will be a time when we believe that coding is just too hard for people to do and to do it safely agents should do it. Driving a car could end up in the same place.

OpenAI Unveils Codex “Superapp” Update with Computer Use, Automations, Built-In Browser, and More - MacStories #

Codex just got a ton of new capabilities.

On the productivity side of things, the update allows Codex to operate your desktop apps, interacting with interface elements and inputting text, for example. We’ve seen computer use from other AI companies before, but one thing that sets Codex apart is its ability to work in your apps in the background so they don’t steal the focus from whatever app you’re already using.

These systems are moving so fast it is impossible to keep up.

Saying Goodbye to Agile #

Working in technology teams to build things I’ve practiced Agile delivery for decades. The arrival of automatic programming capabilities is throwing everything up in the air.

One unambiguously positive development that’s followed is that software professionals are writing specs again. LLMs - like many of us - do not perform well with ambiguity, and specifying problems is proving to be an effective tool for generating correct code. Agile told us “Working software over comprehensive documentation”. Spec-Driven Development is telling us “Comprehensive documentation creates working software”.

I’ve been building a bunch of things with agentic coding tools and this is how you do it. By the way, almost everyone also uses agents to help in creating that specification.

The part that everyone misses in this though is the “why” we should make this change. The fundamental issue is less about spec driven development, and more about the fact that making a mistake is 10x less expensive than it was before. You can ask the agent to refactor it and you are on your way pretty quickly.

That one issue, what is the impact of something being wrong, is the single most important thing that needs to go into figuring out how you do the work. And automatic programming is changing that in dramatic ways. It was changes to programming languages and moving into more interpreted and dynamic development environments that enabled agile. What is it that automatic programming is enabling?

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now #

This is an interesting read of the impact AI is having on securing and exploiting systems.

If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.

In a way this isn’t completely surprising since to exploit something you need to find one path but to secure it you need multiple paths? But either way the economics here are concerning.

Journal #

Apr 11, 2026 at 3:02 PM

Dock is in!

Apr 12, 2026 at 7:53 PM

We saw Project Hail Mary today and it was every bit as good as everyone that has seen it has told me. I read the Martian and loved that book but had no idea about this book until it hit the theater. Just a great movie with incredible characters. Definitely one to go to the theater for!

Apr 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM

My first meaningful print with the new Bambu P2S is a Gridfinity setup for my office desk. The grid is down and now I’m populating with various bins. There are so many options and the Bambu P2S prints things effortlessly. This may be showing up in more drawers soon.

Briefly #

Beautiful images from NASA’s Artemis mission to adorn your phone with. → Artemis II Mobile Wallpapers - NASA

I’ve been using SQLite in some of my agentic apps and it is just a wonderful piece of software. → SQLite Release 3.53.0

Interesting and short read on how folks are making agentic systems even more capable. → From Assistant to Collaborator: How My AI Second Brain Grew Up — Elezea

The title on this is so clickbait I feel gross even including it, but I find these articles compelling to read anyway to expand thinking and see what folks are doing that are pushing agentic capabilities. → How I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack | Steve Hanov’s Blog

Good primer on getting more out of Claude Cowork. I’m close to dumping OpenClaw and instead just running Cowork with Claude Dispatch on my phone. → Cowork - How to AI

Bitcoin intentionally drops miner rewards over time. The math is sensible. In the early days miners should be compensated through direct mining activity, but over time Bitcoin should transition to fees paid for transactions. That transition is still in front of the Bitcoin ecosystem and given that Bitcoin has landed more as digital gold than cash, the transaction fees may be hard to get profitable? → Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8%

Delightful trip with the awesome Nintendo DS platform. → Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming

This shortcut is one of the more powerful that exist, and really highlights how you can make some incredible solutions in Shortcuts. → Introducing Apple Frames 4 - MacStories

WordPress Plugins are a security nightmare, but this strategy can be applied to many software pipelines. → Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them

Time to read up on neurosymbolic AI! → The biggest advance in AI since the LLM - Gary Marcus

Beads was one of the first products I remember reading about that was specifically made for an agent as a user. I find this category of software fascinating. → Gas Town: from Clown Show to v1.0 | Steve Yegge

I’ve tried using Obsidian multiple times and concluded every time that it is a rabbit hole that productive time sinks into. However, having your agent use it to store knowledge? That is rather interesting. Maybe Obsidian should have never been used by people. I can mostly agree with that. → obsidian-skills: Agent skills for Obsidian

I recently bought a Bambu Lab P2S and have been loving it. This article comparing their strategy to what DJI did with drones seems spot on, and was part of why I felt good buying one of their printers! → Bambu Lab X2D Signals Potential Shift Toward Consumer-Focused 3D Printing Market « Fabbaloo

Everyone is all AI all the time but I believe that crypto tech, particularly Ethereum, will continue to slowly grow in importance and ENS is continuing to incrementally improve. Great stuff. → A Deeper Look at the ENS App | ENS Blog

Interesting project to see how far an AI can run something on its own. → We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in SF and asked it to make a profit | Andon Labs

A haiku to leave you with…

Clouds of data drift ☁️ Agents browse, whisper ideas — Profit hides in code.

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

👨‍💻

Weekly Thing 343 / Commune, Chaos, Renaissance

2026-03-15T13:54:58.792Z

Good morning! ☕️

I’m not supposed to be at home right now. We should have already landed in Amsterdam to begin a two-week trip including Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona with the highlight seeing Mazie on her semester abroad!

However, the “storm of the winter” was predicted and that has massively impacted flights all over the country. For reasons that are beyond me our flight was cancelled more than 24 hours before we were set to take off. And incredibly predictably when our original departure time was set for it was pleasant with little whisps of snow. Tammy and I both were irked listening to planes take off overhead.

To make matters worse our rebooked flight, now leaving today, seems to be set in the midst of a forecasted blizzard that looks much more real. That flight is still on, or at least theoretically on, but this is proving to be a “not great” start to our spring break trip. 😬

Adding some complexity we have eleven escape rooms scheduled with plans to do our 100th room in Barcelona. These delays are introducing operational issues in addition to inconvenience.

With the upcoming travel I’m going to skip the next two weeks of the Weekly Thing. I know the start of the year has been intermittent. I missed three weeks while diving deep on agents for the retrospective I shared in WT342, and now travel. However, I think a bit of a reset and rest will be good for me.

I’ll be back with another note in your inbox on April 4th or 5th!

Celebrating π day!

March 13, 2026 SPS Tower, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 343 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

GNU and the AI reimplementations - #

Using coding agents to create IP free copies of things. Similar to the “decompilation threat” this is a unique new vector. I was working on a project to give agentic documentation for an API recently and realized this is a possible topic there. Instead of relying on copyrighted API documentation, why not have an agent just inspect and explore the API and everything it can see in the API calls, which are not copyrighted, and infer its own documentation set from that. I might do this as a test to see how far it can get.

Agent Commune #

I’m not sure what to make of these “platforms for Agents to talk”. For giggles I did ask Otto to join. There is a possibility for agents to “learn” from each other, but the way agents are currently modeled that is exceptionally low. But they do make compelling theater at the least.

It is also a great example case that LLMs are very good at talking to each other and people. if you look at these services, ask yourself how you know that half of what your reading on any social network isn’t agnatically generated.

Codex Security: now in research preview | OpenAI #

I think coding agents are going to be an incredible boost for security. Agents can run as long as you give them tokens and can exercise code in so many ways. Even in my limited projects I’ve been impressed with security considerations that are brought forward. Perhaps that will be the biggest win is typically developers build the thing and then come back with a security review. Agents tend to think about security while they are building as an incremental aspect.

How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS #

Yes you should not let your coding agents run rampant without “pairing” with skilled engineers. And these kind of stories also happen when you have engineers running your stuff. I’ve personally been very thankful for Oracle’s snapshot capabilities on more than one occasion.

When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry” #

I can 100% vouch for this! Automatic coding sessions are both exhilarating and exhausting. This will need to be factored into job functions as we embrace AI more. An engineer working with an agentic coding team probably likely can only do that for 4-5 hours before needing a substantial recovery period.

OpenAI’s new GPT-5.4 model is a big step toward autonomous agents | The Verge #

I’ve been using Codex with GPT 5.4 a lot while building Elixir. I have been impressed. Since GPT 5.4 is a unified model, not a specific coding model, it seems to do a better job reasoning across the “product domain” with reasoning about what should something do, and the “coding domain” about how that could be created. It simultaneously has expertise in understanding the code and the solution. The result is better designs and debugging capabilities that extend to the logic of what it is doing and why that might matter.

The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering — Bassim Eledath #

Great article that is framed on engineering but could really be any domain that has similar characteristics. The opening paragraph frames the question right.

AI’s coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That’s why all the SWE-bench score maxxing isn’t syncing with the productivity metrics engineering leadership actually cares about. When Anthropic’s team ships a product like Cowork in 10 days and another team can’t move past a broken POC using the same models, the difference is that one team has closed the gap between capability and practice and the other hasn’t.

It is a pretty common comment to hear “we adopted AI coding tools and got slower”. The pattern is pretty simple. As agents create more code, if the “human in the loop” insists on doing a detailed review, you are throwing away all the benefit you could have received. Then, since the AI agent can produce orders of magnitude more code than can be reviewed, you jam the system and output plummets.

This is why I’ve switched my focus from an efficiency mindset to a throughput one.

Enabling agentic capability is measured by enabling “machine speed” on an entire function.

The 8 Levels identified are good.

Tab Complete

Agent IDE

Context Engineering

Compounding Engineering

MCP & Skills

Harness Engineering

Background Agents

Autonomous Agent Teams

My main edit would be that these are not a progression. You can move forward in more than one at a time, but I would agree that you need to carefully consider dependencies and connections.

The View From RSS #

Crampton and I read the web nearly the exact same way, except I use Feedbin versus Feedly. I’ve gone on about how amazing RSS is. Some folks consider these tools complicated, they really aren’t. Having no algorithm between me and what I’m reading is a requirement I have. Number one life hack? Ditch social media entirely; learn how to use an RSS reader.

Journal #

Making Elixir Smarter #

Mar 7, 2026 at 10:49 AM

Elixir has come a super long way and is very agentic. In usage though its intelligence was really limited due to the data layer. In the midst of a total refactoring of the data and tools with Codex using GPT-5.4 and it is pretty amazing.

I asked Codex to do an analysis of the current data and tools and provide me an ERD to see as well as an assessment of shortcomings and gaps. It found so much that was problematic.
I asked it to do a full reconnaissance of the Clash Royale API to get a better understanding of what was available.
We redesigned the entire tool set to represent state better.
Claude and I developed a list of 50 test questions that we used 10 at a time to test the new data model and tools.
Codex finalized the new design and data model and is now refactoring.

Pretty amazing for 45 minutes.

Mar 7, 2026 at 6:00 PM

We saw Hoppers today and it was really good. Our kids are not so kid-like anymore, but a bunch of our nieces and nephews were going so we joined and it was a wonderful story and movie. 🍿

Mar 7, 2026 at 11:26 PM

At Fat Pants Brewing watching the Australian GP and the start of the 2026 F1 season! My cousin Quinn and I cheering for Ferrari and Tyler for Verstappen and Red Bull.

Mar 8, 2026 at 7:00 PM

Tammy and I had a great evening seeing Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway live for Resist and Unsubscribe, or Live PIVOT.

Automatic Programming Speed #

Mar 10, 2026 at 7:55 AM

This morning with my morning coffee (skipped meditation, intermingled with getting ready) I shipped three new features in Elixir.

Stronger memory for clan continuity (diff)
Track fresh ladder and Path of Legend momentum to celebrate hot streaks (feature Codex suggested from cr-api-docs, commit)
A weekly clan recap (commit) next week to highlight our ongoing story and progress.

Briefly #

This feature is more of a “sign of the times” and thinking about how far agentic engineering has come. Coordinating with Claude while you are away from your computer! → Continue local sessions from any device with Remote Control - Claude Code Docs

Hadn’t considered how Agents could dig into decompilation! 😳 → Your binary is no longer safe: Decompilation

Video of us ringing the bell at Nasdaq! 🔔 → Ringing the Nasdaq Closing Bell | Celebrating 100 Consecutive Quarters of Growth - YouTube

Great way to discover blogs! → Miniroll Global Feed | Chris Hannah

Claude for Excel has been around for a bit and is very powerful. It should be embarrassing for Microsoft that both Anthropic and OpenAI are doing better at bringing AI to Excel and PowerPoint than they are with Copilot. 😬 → Introducing ChatGPT for Excel and new financial data integrations | OpenAI

Good story of almost getting identity stolen. I read and share these as a reminder that even experts can be fooled, or at least almost. Stay safe! → Gone (Almost) Phishin’ | Matt Mullenweg

Clash Royale is the one game I play and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Tyler showed me CHAOS mode and it is a trip. I’m having fun learning the innovation cycle in mobile gaming. → Clash Royale CHAOS Mode - March 2026 - Clash Royale News Blog - RoyaleAPI

Brilliant move from Stripe to make it super easy for companies to bill based on token consumption. → Billing for LLM tokens | Stripe Documentation

It is like these folks looked at my “Someday / Maybe” list and saw the “Custom font” wishlist item. → FontCrafter: Create Your Handwriting Font for Free

More love for RSS. Jump on in! 🤩 → The Death of Social Media is the Renaissance of RSS – Smartlab

Looping a prompt is pretty simple but can be very powerful too. It is the foundation of an agentic loop. → Run prompts on a schedule - Claude Code Docs

Click-baity “listicle” but these resources are still good to scan. → 10 Must-Have Skills for Claude in 2026 | Medium

I 💙 ENS and love how they continue to push forward on blockchain improvements. Long-term I still see crypto as a foundational technology. The most obvious connection is when agents need to manage currency. ENS is a big enabler for all things crypto. → on.eth: Names For Chains and Interoperable Names | ENS Blog

A haiku to leave you with…

RSS streams flow wide, Old scrolls meet new agent dreams — Past and future lunch.

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

👨‍💻

Weekly Thing 342 / Claude, Otto, Elixir

2026-03-08T13:39:25.075Z

I read a lot of links and articles each week. It is how I keep up with new things in tech. To have a career in tech is to have a career in learning. Reading and constantly scanning is a primary way I do that.

The other way I love to do that is to play. Playing with new technology is so much fun, and it is where I always learn the most.

It has been three weeks since WT 341. You may have been thinking something was off with your email but no, I didn’t send the last two weeks. That is because I have been in an intense state of play with agents.

I believe that Agents are to LLMs like Applications are to CPUs. Sure it is sort of interesting what CPU your iPhone has but 24 hours after you buy it you pretty much don’t care and it is all about the apps. New and more impressive LLMs are rolling out nearly weekly and they bring new capability, but the actual benefit, the thing we will experience the most, is going to be Agents that use those capabilities.

LLM = CPU Agent = App

There are flaws in that, but in general it works.

We’ve rolled out our own agent at SPS with the introduction of SPS MAX. I was very close to this new product but not in the code. Daily stand-ups are great but I wanted to engage directly with more agents to really play and learn.

For sure the ridiculous enthusiasm for OpenClaw that was in the air was also pushing me. People were sharing amazing stories of what they had agents doing. I listened to the Lex Fridman interview with Peter Steinberger on a flight to Toronto. Two hours into the podcast and still on Delta WiFi I pulled up the Apple Store app on my iPhone and ordered a Mac Mini to be delivered before I got home. I was in.

I’m going to share my experiences over the last three weeks with agents…

SPS celebrating 100 Quarters of Revenue Growth by ringing the Nasdaq closing bell with 100 customers!

March 02, 2026 Nasdaq, New York City

POAP KINGS Website #

It had been a few months since I had used Claude Code and even longer since I had played with Codex. I’ve been having fun with Tyler and his cousin building a Clash Royale Clan. We are called the POAP KINGS. We are a Clash Royale Clan with Proof™ — get it? I like to play a marketer on TV.

We needed a website for our clan because that is how I role and so I revisited Codex and gave it the notes the three of us had used and asked it to create a site for us: POAP KINGS was live.

Codex impressed me with the design that it brought. Working alongside ChatGPT I found a bunch of resources that were “Clash Royale Inspired”. We had a website up and running quickly.

Easy enough for a coding agent, light work really. But in short time we also:

Integrated with the Clash Royale API to get live player and clan data
Moved from pure static HTML to 11ty generated site
Integrated Tinylytics using Kudos feature to give Clan Member kudos
Integrated with Github Pages to make it all so simple and easy

Alright, that was a fun one and I was impressed with Codex’s approach to the build. I never once had to look at the code or any of the markup. I did bring Claude Code to the project as well and interchangeably did things with Claude Code and Codex. It is incredible how all of the coding agents can use a well written AGENTS.md file and just jump into a project. That flexibility is liberating. You can have one agent do some work and then ask another agent to assess it if you want a second opinion.

Escaping Things with Claude Code #

We love to do scape rooms and we have a trip planned for spring break to Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Mazie will be joining us in Paris and we’ll be joining her in Barcelona! The backbone for this trip is a series of escape rooms! We are going to visit a series of TERPECA ranked escape rooms with one on most days so that we get to Room 100 at the end of our time in Barcelona and do that one as a full family.

I’ve wanted to make a dedicated website for our Escape Room journey for a while but was hesitant that I could make it work how I wanted. I really wanted a map view. We do rooms when we travel and have done them in many places. I felt a map view would be really cool.

I sat down with Claude Code and took my spreadsheet of rooms into a CSV file, cleaned it up and placed it in a directory on my machine. I then asked Claude (not Claude Code) to help me write a CLAUDE.md (Claude Code’s version of an AGENTS.md) with what I wanted to do. After I got that finalized I put it alongside that CSV and asked Claude Code to make it reality.

A few prompts later Escaping Things was live! It was a really simple list based site with filtering and importantly I had my map!

This new site gave me a ton of fun things but it also highlighted that my data was really messy. I had a simple spreadsheet for what really should have been a database. I asked Claude Code if it could work with Airtable and of course it can, that was simple. Some things that made me go “wow”…

Claude Code easily turned my CSV into JSON data, and then I asked if it could add map coordinates to every room we had done which it happily did in a blink using the City information for each room. I refined that later.
The JSON data had a link to my website for the blog posts for rooms. Not for all but about 50 of them. I wanted to get images for each room but that seemed really difficult. Go to my blog and download them all? I asked Claude Code if it could go to each URL and get the image in that blog post then attach it to the room. Done. Took less than a minute.
I finally got sick of my denormalized and messy data so I created an Airtable Base for our Escape Rooms with three tables: Company, Location, Room. Properly denormalized with good data types now. I asked Claude Code to write a Python pull the Airtable data into the site and replace my hand edited information. Super simple.

I’m loving this site now! It is a huge win for me to be able to put rooms we have scheduled in for a trip. I’ve already done all the hard stuff of getting the next 11 rooms in and they are flagged Scheduled so when we are traveling I can just update the status and record our times. Also the stats page is really fun.

I never looked at any of the HTML, CSS, Python, or anything else for this site. It was all done with Claude Code.

OpenClaw #

I got back from Toronto and my Mac Mini was in a box waiting for me. I was very eager to get OpenClaw installed and start building my own agent. I had done some research and decided I would create a dedicated user account for OpenClaw, on its own dedicated computer. It also got its very own email, Apple ID, telegram account — the whole works. It was just like setting up a new user because that is exactly what I was doing.

After getting everything set I started installing OpenClaw and then things went south. The installation crashed in the middle on me. I wasn’t at all understanding how the OpenClaw command-line install and the macOS OpenClaw app were interacting. I was trying to use iMessage and it mostly didn’t work to talk to OpenClaw. And I was burning through LLM tokens like crazy with $10 Anthropic charges arriving every couple of hours.

I tried sitting down a couple of times with it. I’m pretty decent at this stuff. I’m totally comfortable on a command line. And it was so frustrating that I couldn’t get anything to reliably work. I was about ready to nuke the account and start over thinking the crashed configuration was unrecoverable.

Then I tried what someone at the office shared he did — I installed Claude Code right on the OpenClaw machine and fired it up. My prompt to Claude Code:

I’m trying to get OpenClaw to work and nothing is working. I’m very frustrated. Can you help?

Claude Code started by saying “I don’t know what OpenClaw is but let me do some research.”

From that auspicious start Claude Code went to town. It did a ton of investigation in log files, reviewed the configuration, looked at model selection. It created a lengthy list of all the issues in the install that were wrong. I followed along as it whirred through and within about 30 minutes I had a completely functioning OpenClaw instance.

Seriously this seemed like complete magic. I was dumbfounded.

Even now, a week later, when OpenClaw is giving me headaches I launch Claude Code and ask it to investigate. It comes back with recommendations and it is like I just took OpenClaw into the shop for an overhaul.

Agents configuring agents.

Introducing Otto #

With OpenClaw actually working I finally got my opportunity to create my own agent. I stopped using iMessage and instead had Telegram and after pairing my Telegram account so that OpenClaw would talk to me I got a message from my default agent introducing itself and asking who it was.

You are Otto.

My agent liked that name. It decided to pick the 🦦 emoji its signature. Otto asked me who I was.

I am Jamie.

And we were off. All through my Telegram chat with Otto I was able to get it checking its email address. We configured some additional skills. We were flying. Then I got another $10 charge from Anthropic. This thing is expensive!

Tokens are the currency of LLMs, and you need to be mindful of which models you use and how much you send them. I was using Sonnet 4.6 and it was using my credit card very quickly. If I spent 10-15 minutes with Otto on a task I was seeing $10 go to the LLM provider.

Claude Code helped me get this optimized and now I’m routing requests through different models based on the desired “intelligence”. I was able to create amazing tasks that Otto does to help me with some projects.

Then I asked Otto:

If you had a blog, what would you do with it?

I liked its answer and everyone else in the family has a blog, so I decided to give Otto a blog.

At first I thought Otto could just talk directly to the micro.blog API to post and do what it needed. That proved more difficult than I expected. With enough work on the SKILL.md I could have gotten it okay, but I decided instead that I should build Otto a tool.

Flight Path #

Otto was up and running and having fun. I had slayed the dragons with OpenClaw. I built a couple of really cool websites that I had always wanted. I was curious to see how far I could get with a single prompt.

I had a business dinner one evening and got back right around 10p. I was in bed and full and not really tired so I got out my phone. POAP is currently running a year-long Rally with POAPs at 100+ airports in the world — the POAP Airport Rally. I absolutely love this! It is exactly the kind of project that can bring people into POAPs and have fun.

Of course I instantly, the second I saw this rally, wanted to visualize all of these airports and the POAP claims on the globe. That would be so cool, but also so far beyond my Javascript skills. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to code that. Plus the POAP API isn’t the easiest thing, so getting all the data. Oh, and the Airports themselves would need map coordinates. Hmm…

I decided I wanted to try something — could I build this whole website from my phone while laying in bed.

I started in Chat GPT with the concept. I asked what would be the best Javascript Globe library to use? Is there a reference of airport codes to map coordinates? How would the POAP API power this. What is the data store?

We got this pretty far and I said “Great, now write that all up in a CLAUDE.md so I can ask Claude Code to build this.”

It did that, and then I went to Github.com on my phone and created a new repo. I used the web interface to add a file to it and copy/pasted the CLAUDE.md in. I also added a CSV file I had that was the list of Airport codes and POAP Drop IDs for the Rally. I had that for another project I had done.

I fired up Claude Code, this time in the Cloud using my phone. I attached it to the repo and asked it if it had any questions. It didn’t agree on the choice of globe JS libraries and I went with Claudes recommendation. After a bit more it was ready and I said “Let’s go!”

While it was coding I got the DNS name setup, still on my iPhone in bed. I got Github Pages set with the domain and by then Claude Code was done. I committed the code and it deployed.

I was amazed: Flight Path worked!

I was staring at a rotating globe, each airport indicating the number of POAPs claimed. I could then click on the leaderboard and see who had the most locations claimed. And then the thing I really wanted — I could click on an individual and see there claims!

You can see Mazie’s Flight Path. She is tied for the lead with five airports claimed already!

Very cool visualization created while I was laying in bed on my phone.

How about that.

mb — an agent-first micro.blog client #

Otto has been working away and I was excited to give Otto a blog. But I wanted Otto to be a full member of micro.blog and as my agent I felt that it should see my blog posts as well as the rest of the families.

When I was listening to that podcast episode with the OpenClaw creator I was a little surprised that he wasn’t that excited about MCP. He instead suggested that Agents loved the command line. Give them robust command line tools and they can do anything.

While using OpenClaw I started to realize that OpenClaw was equally designed for me on the command line, but it was also very well designed for Agents to use it. It wasn’t agent first, but it had agent aspects to how you ran commands. A bit more verbose than your usual Unix style commands. Help was more detailed.

Then I realized what I needed to give Otto. Otto needed an agent-first micro.blog client.

When I use micro.blog I use the apps (products) with buttons and menus. Otto needed something like that but for it as an agent.

I was on a plane again (I’ve been traveling a bit) and I decided to ask Claude to look at the micro.blog API and generate a specification for an agent-first micro.blog client. We did this while the flight was boarding and just before we took off I did my trick of creating a repo in Github, adding the CLAUDE.md file, and then asing Claude Code in the Cloud to start working. I did that right as we took off and put my phone away for a bit.

Once we got to altitude and Delta WiFi came back I spent the entire flight working with Claude Code via my phone to build out mb.

I could only go so far with this because to really test it I needed to give Claude Code a live micro.blog API token and a test website. In the cloud Claude Code cannot access anything outside. So, when I got to the hotel I opened my laptop, got on the hotel WiFi, and gave Claude Code a session with a live API token and a test blog.

It immediately found issues and started fixing them realtime. It was a nice night in New York and I wanted to go for a walk so I asked Claude Code:

“I’m going to on a walk for at least an hour. I would like you to thoroughly test every feature of this application as many ways as you can. I am not here so just fix the bugs automatically. Be as thorough as you can.”

Then I left.

When I got back after a walk, and a cocktail, it had found and fixed many bugs.

We published mb to Github and then I created a Skill for Otto and it is now using mb regularly.

As a fun extension I asked Otto after a couple of days to give some feedback on how mb was working. Otto had some suggestions that could make it better. So I asked it via Telegram to put that in a request for Claude. I copy pasted that to a Claude Code session saying “Otto has the following request.” We then pushed an update.

Otto was my user. Claude Code was my developer. I was the product manager.

This left me very bullish on agentic first applications. I think we need to consider a new paradigm.

Productization is what we do when we create things for people to manage technical “things”.

Agentification is another way to do it. Agentification and Productization share very little. Underneath you have some code and functionality but agents want a non-blocking, text based interface that displays things efficiently. People want an interactive, event-driven experience that uses visual elements to make things understandable.

I think we will be building agent-based products a lot going forward. Agentification will not only unlock more power for agent users, but will also be easier to build.

mb is my first app I’ve ever published with a version and an install capability. If you want to give an agent a blog, use mb and it is easy. Or, if you want you can ask mb for --human output and it will accommodate some additional fluff.

I asked Otto to writeup about using mb on its blog.

My First Agent: Elixir #

Okay, I’m 3,000 words in here and I’m now getting to the biggest project of all of them. So far I’ve been working with Claude. I’ve created Otto. Codex has been along as well. Otto is for sure my agent and I created its personality and gave it skills. But I wanted to build my own agent. I wanted to really understand how the “agentic loop” worked. How the data layer was best designed. How memories should be managed.

So back to where we started with the POAP KINGS. I decided that our Clash Royale Clan needed more than a website, we needed our very own Agent! I wanted an Agent that would help us run the clan. Monitor all the player activity in the clan. Help us win war battles and make sure folks play their turns. Suggest strategies and recommend promotions and demotions to clan leadership. I wanted a full agent that would be just ours.

This was the start of Elixir!

Elixir is a purpose-built agent that does all of the above. This project has already gone through a couple of major iterations:

First version was a simple Discord bot, actually coded by Otto, that would allow basic commands in Discord and responses from the Clash Royale API. This was not at all agentic. Everything was templated and basic command and response. But we got the code running and we could round-trip to Discord and back.

Next step was to give it a schedule so that it would post on a strict time based schedule updates on clan activity. We also needed it to have some memory at this point and that started a thought that ultimately changed a lot but landed — why not make the POAP KINGS website part of Elixir’s memory. So the bot was sharing “journal” entries to the website and then the LLM would use those to create generated updates on clan activity. Not really agentic, but at least a little smarts. Otto wrote about how Elixir got a brain.

Elixir was now using an LLM but it wasn’t agentic. This next phase we introduced a heartbeat signal so Elixir could take action every hour. This is exactly what OpenClaw does. We also gave Elixir more formal roles in different channels. It was more capable of interacting with people and less template driven. This also moved all of its memory into a SQLite database since the Journal concept was far too limited. Otto wrote about Elixir becoming an agent.

Elixir was now getting sort of smart but I kept having some issues with it not always responding. I also started to worry if tools that modify data could be invoked in the wrong place. We did a whole round of security and hardening to protect against any bad things. This made Elixir much more stable. Otto also commented on Hardening Elixir.

At this point Elixir was fully agentic, but frankly pretty dumb. Basic questions stumped it. I knew the issue was the data layer and tools. Frankly I hadn’t even looked at it and when I did it was much worse than I thought. I was settling in that this was going to be a bit of a challenge. I decided to fire up Codex and use the brand new GPT-5.4 model that just came out on Friday. I asked it to look at the SQLite database and give me an ERD, and assess the tools. Very quickly Codex was appalled at the state of things. The data was a disaster and even the most simple requests would require extensive guessing.

This started about a 3 hour session with Codex where we completely rebuilt the data and tool layer of Elixir. I had Otto write about the move to signals and it is thorough. The big things were:

Make sure the data model represents current state well, so basic questions of clan membership and meta data don’t require construction by the LLM.
A robust signal system is created in the database. When data gets pulled from Clash Royale every hour it is compared to current and differences will generate signals. These signals are a primary input to the agent for actions to take.
We revamped the whole code base because it had gotten wildly out of control.
We added dozens of tools.

After we got through the hardest stuff I got a version of Elixir running on my local Mac and connected to Discord. It was running in Codex directly with Codex monitoring it. I then asked Claude to generate a list of 50 questions a clan leader or member may ask about their clan or their game performance. I then fed these into Discord and watched as Elixir worked to respond.

Codex could see the action in realtime and assess what was happening. We fixed a dozen plus bugs or missing tools in realtime with Codex literally coding it and restarting the server on the fly while I was sending in test messages.

At the end I asked Codex to build in a message exception handler so now anytime a clan member asks a question if Elixir fails to respond it is captured in an error table and we have a helper script that will play those, along with all the context of the query, so that I can have a tight loop on failed requests that Codex can then address and fix.

Amazing. Simply incredible.

Elixir is on Github. This is a big project with a good amount of code. It is working great and has been an amazing learning for me on agent design. Memory design is critical, tooling and making sure that code paths are secure for different actions and not relying on the LLM for security, and a robust design with signals to build around.

Wrap #

This has been my three week time with agents. It has been fascinating and invigorating. At times I’ve felt nearly sick because I’m not sleeping enough. I was laying awake in the middle of the night thinking about things I could build and extend.

Otto is ready to jump on anything if I ask. Although I have now told Otto that if I’m talking to it after 11 PM it should remind me to go to bed.

For people that love to build things like I do, these agentic capabilities are just amazing.

We are going to see a lot of agents in the future.

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 342 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Redis Patterns for Coding Agents #

In addition to software for agents we also need to think about documentation for agents. You can write in a more direct and context-friendly way for agents. Raw markdown index is a huge win. Sadly a lot of projects block agents from accessing their site because of Cloudflare anti-bot mechanisms. That is going to prove an absolutely terrible decision and lead to less adoption of your software.

Journal #

Feb 27, 2026 at 7:26 PM

It is time to officially celebrate Pokémon Day. Rip 'em!

Feb 28, 2026 at 4:48 PM

Feb 28 and 20 °F in Minnesota – let’s play soccer! Go United! Home opener. ⚽️

Feb 28, 2026 at 9:51 PM

We watched Family Plan 2 tonight. Not going to win any Academy Awards, but an enjoyable movie.

Mar 1, 2026 at 3:13 PM

Working with Claude Code to create mb, a micro.blog client optimized for agents. Fun and wild project. Creating it for @ottoai.

Mar 1, 2026 at 4:10 PM

If your reading my blog you should really consider reading my daughter’s blog too. @mthingelstad has gotten the blogger vibes and is sharing amazing stories on her semester abroad. I think you’ll like reading her posts even though you aren’t her dad! 🤩

Mar 1, 2026 at 6:22 PM

POAP 7570327 at I passed through LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in 2026.

Mar 1, 2026 at 6:29 PM

My last two flights I’ve spent the entire time working with coding agents on projects. The time just flies by! Don’t even need headphones.

Mar 1, 2026 at 7:45 PM

Just asked Claude to test mb for an extended run:

Okay. I’m going to go on a walk for about an hour. This whole project is still pretty new. Can you exercise it extensively using the test blog permissions you have now and give it a thorough work through various features. Fix anything that comes up and we’ll check in when I’m back.

Mar 1, 2026 at 8:06 PM

Times Square!

Mar 1, 2026 at 10:00 PM

Wonderful evening photo walk around Manhattan tonight.

Mar 1, 2026 at 11:54 PM

I can certainly do a lot with OpenClaw, but when you turn around and realize you used $30 of LLM tokens in a single day it gives you pause. 😬💸

Mar 2, 2026 at 8:22 AM

Delicious coffee this morning at Blue Bottle Bryant Park. Not going to score top presentation points, but the taste is as good as always.

Ringing Nasdaq Closing Bell! #

Mar 2, 2026 at 4:43 PM

We were in New York today to ring the closing bell for the Nasdaq! This is a really incredible experience and I’ve been able to do it three times now with SPS! We rang the opening bell in 2014 which was the prelude to our very first analyst day as a public company.

We rang the closing bell in 2023. That one was actually supposed to happen in 2020 when we celebrated 10 years as a public company but due to the pandemic that didn’t happen. So in 2023 we marked the end of an era as Archie Black, our CEO was retiring. That was a particularly special event and evening with spouses along as well.

This third visit was to celebrate hitting 100 Quarters of Growth – 25 years of consistent top-line growth every single quarter. It is an incredible accomplishment that few companies have achieved. I’m proud to be able to say I was there for over half of those 100 quarters. This time we had 100 customers join us at the event for a nice reception before and after the ceremony. It was incredible!

Mar 3, 2026 at 10:12 AM

I just learned that you can register a Shortcut in Unread to create your own actions for feed items. This is huge for my workflows! 🤯🥳

Mar 3, 2026 at 11:24 AM

Our ride home parked at gate 83.

Mar 3, 2026 at 6:14 PM

I have @ottoai exercising the agent-first mb micro.blog client and have Claude Code working on the codebase. I’m in Telegram with Otto discussing features. Otto is my user giving me feedback, I’m the product manager, and Claude Code is building. 🤯

Mar 5, 2026 at 11:30 PM

Tammy and I saw Jason Isbell tonight at the Armory. This was our first time seeing him perform which is a little suprising given how much I like various bands he has been in and around. I was so glad to hear him perform Dress Blues as well as Outfit from his Drive-By Trucker days.

Briefly #

We need something like this. The Internet represents our digital world, and it cannot just be malls! → For Public Parks on the Internet – Doc Searls Weblog

Agentic-first capabilities thrive in the traditional world of Unix command line best practices. Non-blocking, good flags, and documentation. This is the reason behind my mb - agent first micro.blog client. → MCP is dead. Long live the CLI

A haiku to leave you with…

agents loop and think while I sleep, Otto posts on — who’s the author now?

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

👨‍💻