Weekly Thing

WT352 — Interviewing Otto for the Job

2026-10-03T12:00:00.000Z

Hello there! 👋

Fall is in the air here in Minnesota. 🍂 This is one of my favorite times of year. The air is crisp in the morning. An open flannel makes the day feel perfect. And if you play The Replacements everything will just fall into place.

I just got back from a lovely morning watching the runners in the Twin Cities Marathon go by. Tammy and Mazie ran the 10 miler as well. Another tribute to the wonders of fall.

Currently #

Reading: My cousin Josh’s recent essay To Finitude is a great read. Also, he just published Jaunty Hair with highlights from his twenty-plus years of writing. You should order a copy! 📚

Watching: Tammy and I’ve started watching The Pitt and have been liking it a lot. I’m squeamish about the injury sequences so I seem to always end up hiding my eyes for some part of the show but I’m digging it.

Planning: We need to spread the word on the Legacy Contacts feature for Apple Accounts. I set this up a while ago and added Tammy and the kids. I recently had some folks add me as their Legacy Contact. Set it up, no matter how old you are. Apple has a good support overview for this feature.

This butterfly didn’t mind me taking its photo even up close at the Landscape Arboretum.

Sep 27, 2026 · Chanhassen, MN

Notable #

Introducing dots | OpenAI #

I’ve been playing with dots this weekend. I created a new generation of Otto on dots. In short, dots feels like a productized version of OpenClaw. I think a lot of people are going to like this feature. When I hear people say what they wished AI could do for them, or what an Agent would be, it is really close to what dots is doing today.

I configured my dot as Otto and decided the first thing I wanted to try was to see if it could drive my Elixir project I’ve been working on. I already have a team of agents that have been helping build it, but it still requires me to make a lot of decisions. So I asked Otto (as a dot) about how it could interact with Codex and it could do everything I wanted. It has its own computer in the cloud and it can also control the Mac mini that I have for my agents to run on. After confirming it had the capabilities I told it I was going to interview it for the job. I asked several questions:

“What do you think the vision for this product is?”
“What do you think is working well in this product? What isn’t working?”
“How would you decide if a feature is a good fit?”
“How would you work with me?”

It passed with flying colors and then I gave it a chance to interview me. After that I let it get to work and it is doing great.

The interface for a dot is through the ChatGPT app but it is exactly like a messaging interface with a person, including emoji reactions. You can also call your dot and talk to it. It makes a phone ring and oddly Otto doesn’t pick up on the first ring. :-)

I’m impressed. I suspect that in the next few weeks this will sunset my OpenClaw project, which I’ve had such an on and off relationship with, and I can see this being really popular. With dots out, I now understand better the new ChatGPT Pro 500 accounts. With Otto running here I was able to have it work on multiple projects all night. It is interesting to consider that a barrier to AI companies doing more is just your time and capacity to ask it to do more!

Daring Fireball: I’ll Wait #

I’ve had a number of folks ask me what I think about Facebook’s new Muse product. I have seen some videos and read some write-ups, but I won’t be installing it. I don’t use any software from Facebook (Meta). I block them at the network layer. An AI agent powered by their surveillance machine? Not in a million years. I’m sure it is well designed and even does impressive stuff.

It isn’t just them by the way. I am doing a lot with agents but I also have them running on a computer of their very own and using a different user and iCloud account. That is Otto. Otto has access to some data but only in ways I provision for it.

The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. I’d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source? It doesn’t even get to the point of my considering Meta as Muse’s creator. I wasn’t tempted an iota to try OpenClaw, and I’m not tempted to try Muse on my Mac. On a Mac, maybe. But not my Mac.

It is worth being especially careful with your data as you start to work with agentic tools more.

Introducing cf: the agentic CLI for the entire Cloudflare API #

Many tech platform companies have completely pivoted their user experiences to be agent-optimized and this is just the latest step in that direction. Many of those services will only have agents as their users, so the experience needs to be optimized for them. The humans stay in the audit and billing lanes for now.

The cryptographic world computer #

I’m intrigued by how Buterin is continuing to steer Ethereum. Many folks have put crypto in the dustbin of the past. I think there is still strong utility that is aligned with the future we are seeing come about. I think it is pretty obvious that Agents will need money and digital currency will be best for that. And a future massively distributed compute platform like Ethereum is well positioned to solve problems without centralized systems.

MicroLLM lab — tiny LLMs, Q4, in your browser #

It is wild that LLMs were not even a thing a few years ago and now they seem to be everything and you can even now run some of them in your browser. You can quickly see how these “micro” LLMs are not terribly capable. I’ve generally considered the esoteric and expensive hardware needs of LLMs a reason to discount many concerns about agents operating autonomously. Is it reasonable to think a powerful “enough” LLM could run in a web browser? It still seems like a stretch to me.

Don’t confuse space and time. #

This line from this article is one of the most important design considerations that nobody ever thinks about enough:

Time matters more than space.

Back in my MarketWatch days I remember our team being frustrated that we had fewer stock quote lookup page views compared to the likes of Yahoo! Finance. Our page “loaded slower” so they came to the tech team with a request to “make it faster”. We had already optimized that page like crazy and it was fast, but we also just had a lot of “stuff” on it. The reality was that Yahoo! Finance was sending out about 80% fewer bytes of data than we were for the same thing. That meant our page loaded 5x slower than theirs. And we had fewer page views.

A user doesn’t spend “5 page views” with you; they spend 3 minutes or the time it takes to do a task. You get to decide with your design and features how hard or easy you make that.

Always optimize for time!

Continuing our infrastructure updates: What’s changing in the coming months : r/modnews #

Reddit’s tagline is “the heart of the Internet”. If that were the case they just broke it.

Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we’ll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.

Platforms embrace open standards like RSS when they are new because it is a way to get users. Then when they “enshittify” they cut the open web off. Reddit has been doing it for a while, this is just the newest version. They hide it in “large-scale scraping” instead of “we can’t monetize your engagement” but we know the real why.

Poor showing Reddit.

Trump’s Use of Truth Social’s Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans’ 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation #

I’m a long-time supporter of the EFF and I’m glad to see them here. This scheme to generate revenue for Truth Social off of access should be illegal. I continue to believe we need even more here. As a citizen, I should not be required to submit to the surveillance economy of a private company to get information from my government. That entire loop should be illegal.

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner - Derek Thompson #

Pulling on themes from Bowling Alone and the demise of social structures in everyday life. It is interesting to look at the chart in this article and how much everything has dropped except for three outliers: playing a video game at home, going to an exercise class, or going to a concert. Even those last two are only circumstantially around other people. You are in a group and interaction is none to minimal, typically.

A while back my book club read The WEIRDest People in the World and there is a section there where they look at the multiple dimensions of society: family, work, clubs, religion, etc. Societies grow with more dimensions. It seems consequential that we have seen these massive declines in social groups. It seems impossible that this isn’t at least related to polarization and less empathy in society?

Related: take a moment to consider that “going to a concert” is one of the jumps up, and that concerts have become ridiculously expensive lately. This feels like an additional commentary.

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

This issue touches on platforms closing off the open web and on surveillance as the price of access. Signal is a counterexample: a free, open-source messaging app from the nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation, with no ads, no trackers, and no data collection, sustained by donations rather than advertisers or acquirers. Signal is this year’s Supporting Membership nonprofit, and every dollar of membership fees goes to it. The newsletter stays free either way. If you’d like to give alongside other readers, a year of Supporting Membership is $48.

Journal #

Friday #

9:12 PM — We watched Mayday on Apple TV tonight. Fun movie with plenty of action and good laughs. Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh were great in it.

9:15 PM — It still gives me a big grin when you open a model and then later go to the BambuLabs P2S and there is the actual thing in real life as it were.

Saturday #

8:44 AM — I guess I’m getting my money’s worth for my $200 Claude Max account.

I went through the local Claude Code history on this Mac: 120 sessions and 254 subagent runs from Aug 6 to Sep 26, about 52k model calls. At API list prices that comes to about $13.7k. If you’re on a subscription, treat the dollar figures as a measure of how fast you use up your limits rather than a bill. Recent weeks run about $2.1–2.5k each.

There are obvious efficiency improvements for me to make. 😬

9:40 AM — The Radish Farm Stop opened a couple blocks from our house and it is great. Glad to see they are doing well. It made me think of SimCity when a new building is placed and the Sims start showing up. 🥳😂

2:52 PM — I used some of my Claude Cloud credits to put in place a truly secure pipeline for Elixir Collector. Starting at v3.0.0 all releases are signed using a private key that I manage and the entire pipeline is signed all the way to ingestion. It also got safety improvements in the auto-update process.

5:17 PM — I realized I could probably get a data point I’ve never been able to from WT Builder: how long does it take for me to create the Weekly Thing? Turns out I can now answer that. Additionally, I can now evaluate features on how they improve my workflow and time required.

8:48 PM — Happy Clash Royale cake day to me! 🎉

Sunday #

12:53 PM — We got the very last of the available Pokémon 30th Celebration at the Edina Target today — and got our picture with Pikachu!

Wednesday #

4:52 PM — Oh no — I’ve used all my tokens! 😬 And I did successfully complete my mission to use the $250 of cloud credits.

Thursday #

9:30 PM — It was great to connect with the Twin Cities tech community tonight at Minnedemo! The Ordway was a beautiful venue for this one. Save the date for Minnebar 21 on May 1, 2027!

9:45 PM — Beastbox was an amazing demo at Minnedemo. The engineering required to do signal detection in about 10ms to keep the time from beatboxing with your mouth to the audio being triggered is impressive.

Video not playing? Watch it on the blog.

9:50 PM — Watt Window was my other demo highlight from Minnedemo. Combination of hardware and software to monitor industrial motors and increase efficiency. This is a real-world use case for how you can lower the carbon footprint of a plant. And, reliably predict equipment failures! Impressive!

Briefly #

The fundamental building block of the web isn’t HTML or a web page — it is the link. The way that closed platforms fight links makes them feel rebellious to even use. Long live the hyperlink! → An Ode to Links - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

It isn’t just agents that can turn a random site on the internet into a message board! → Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat | The Verge

Feels like there are so many Markdown editors that we will end up with everyone having their own. 😂 → Beauty — A Markdown editor for people who notice things.

Happy to see Cloudflare extending into this space, although for me I already have Let’s Encrypt and since it is a non-profit I think that is a better way to go. Ideally I’d love to see a solution that is even more open and built on the trust of a blockchain. → Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet

Frontier Labs writing articles about the security risks of open-source models certainly has some motive. “Hey, look at the bad things these models can do!” How we will go about regulating, or if we should regulate, models is a really thorny issue. → GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities | Anthropic

So many new model releases lately! → Introducing Gemini 4

Everything is being rethought in software delivery, even the stuff that was only invented a few months ago. → Plan mode is dead | Ayman Nadeem

I had never heard of TLA+. Looks interesting. → The internet discovers TLA+. Now what? | Reasonable

The story of Tetris is one I’ve read in book form and watched in the Tetris movie on Apple TV. Tetris is such an amazing game still today. I would seriously own my ModRetro Chromatic just for this one game. → The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris

This is a great website to spend some time learning about very special numbers. Awesome! → Museum of numbers

This is just so delightful and so absolutely nerdy. → The DNS Museum

Thanks for reading and also a big welcome to all the new readers from Dense Discovery that keep showing up from there. I hope you enjoy the Weekly Thing!

See y’all next week!

White ghosts on the plate,
a red bar where tokens were —
butterfly stays put.

Echoes #

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

Reddit’s plan to stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 answers a question Jamie raised two years earlier, when he wondered whether Reddit had simply forgotten its feeds existed. WT306

Ask Thingy: What has Jamie said about RSS and closed platforms over the years?

Cloudflare’s cf CLI fits a principle Jamie set down in March: agent-first tools thrive on Unix command-line practice — non-blocking, good flags, documentation — the reasoning behind his own mb micro.blog client. WT342

Ask Thingy: Why does Jamie think command-line tools suit AI agents?

The MarketWatch page-weight story behind “Don’t confuse space and time” has a companion argument: Jamie called speed the killer feature, drawing on his years as CTO at media companies. WT176

Ask Thingy: What lessons on site performance did Jamie take from MarketWatch?

WT351 — Attention Is The Scarce Part

2026-09-26T12:00:00.000Z

Hello there!

First a quick welcome and hello to a number of new readers that have joined from Dense Discovery. I’m a regular reader of DD and a couple of times a year I love to support it and share the word by placing a classified in an issue. If you’re new here, thanks for giving the Weekly Thing a try!

It was also nice to get notes from many of you on my return to your inbox after nearly four months away. Thanks for that!

Now to some links and interesting reads from the week…

Currently #

Building: I’ve been keeping Claude busy building out features for Elixir Clan, an add-on to the Elixir platform that takes all the Clash Royale clan management features I built into our Discord bot and turns it into a proper product that anyone can use.

Listening: I remember the exact day when Uncle Tupelo’s March 16-20, 1992 album was released. I called my friend Ed immediately after listening and we both wondered if Jay and Jeff had lost their minds. Now thirty-four years later this is one of my favorite listens. In hindsight I think it set the tone for what became of much of Americana music.

Beautiful morning walk around Lake Harriet as the sun has just come up.

Sep 26, 2026 · Minneapolis, MN

Notable #

The Incumbents Are Coming | Andreessen Horowitz #

I find it really interesting to see how established platforms and systems of record are evolving around AI. The most personal example for me is AWS. I’ve used AWS for years but frankly I find it nearly impossible to work myself. I stumbled around with it and get something working and then never touch it. Today, my AWS account is completely managed with code and better than it ever has been. How? Claude Code helped me revamp it. AWS has realized that its customer is the Agent as much as anyone else, and has started building to it. In many ways we are seeing a new layer of capability being built either on top of platforms or systems-of-record. The right move for those companies may be to just capture the core value and allow those to build on top? At the same time, those platform companies can be a little more measured and build where their signals tell them there is real value to provide the market.

The Overhang - Ethan Mollick #

Mollick continues to approach AI from a pragmatic, center-of-the-road position. In general I am an “applied” technologist. A builder. So I tend to push the most on what we can do now and in the near future. I think Mollick’s reminder that even if all progress stopped in AI there is still a huge transformation in front of us.

My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood.

I think his highlight of the uniquely human things that make our partnership with agents the most powerful is a good callout on where to focus:

Deep knowledge: the expertise that comes from understanding a field or subject so well that you build intuition around it to quickly and accurately make decisions.
Wide knowledge: To gain wide knowledge you need to read and study widely, across fields and formats and traditions.
Taste: Some people have a taste for things that many people will find popular, others have a taste that is unique to them, and still others have a taste for what is novel and new.
Agency: willingness to test the boundaries of what’s possible when everybody is equally confused about what AI can do.

It is notable to me that everything described there is what would make a great Product Engineer.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents - MacStories #

The local LLM capabilities of these new M5 Ultras are incredible. I’d also nudge you to this Apple Wasn’t Messing Around video for a great walk through as well. Two thoughts come to mind with this.

First, Apple has a unique position here with their M-series chips. They are able to deliver more processing power per watt than anybody else. Sure that matters to keep data center cooling and power lower, but the even bigger thing is the ability to put LLM processing power on a desktop that doesn’t require special environmental needs. You can see a direct path from an M5 Ultra to an AI Appliance that people could buy and put in their house.

The second is a direct path to local models and product engineering. A long time ago software developers used to get the fastest and biggest computers around because compilers were taxing, and building software took a long time. These days most developers need nothing but a simple laptop as the power of those machines has gone up and the needs have gone down with the cloud and interpreted software stacks. Now as we enter AI-assisted coding we may be flipping back to a world where a developer can justify a $50,000 workstation to run models and build software cheaper. It is also interesting to consider a completely verticalized stack where the development environment is completely merged into a custom model. Instead of plugging a frontier model on the side, you are natively connected to a specific model.

Both of these seem like nearly certain developments in the next three years.

I am often wrong | Boris Cherny’s Blog #

This is mostly notable because it is from the author of Claude Code and I think his “thinking loop” is worth noting.

Understand the available information

Gather missing information

Define the problem

Define a clear and simple approach to solve the problem

Define a goal

Act with urgency to achieve the goal

Funny enough, I recently did an extended session with Claude Code using a thinking loop with execution in the middle to move a project forward. Very similar to what Cherny describes.

AI is too important to fear, too powerful to use carelessly #

Great letter to the editor from MnTech CEO Joel Crandall. I think we will see some form of AI legislation, if not at the Federal level at the State level, and technology companies need to be thinking about that now. MnTech is getting ahead of that. Data centers, privacy, AI — this is all going to blend together and companies need to engage, as do voters.

Attention is all you have #

I think attention is perhaps one of the most important things that we don’t think about enough. It is the thing that I think meditation is most helpful for.

There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts. This can be a good thing since it’s how we learn new skills and discover new ideas. Sadly, less and less of our attention is focused intentionally. Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us.

For me this shows up when I’m meditating and I find my mind constantly returning to a topic. That is the lens of my attention.

This is also why I never allow algorithms to shape what I choose to read and engage in. That is synonymous with your attention, and I don’t think we should ever allow something that we don’t control to shape our attention.

Journal #

Sunday #

4:38 PM — I just published Weekly Thing 350 which is notably the very first issue to go through my new WT Builder app that I created with Claude. It worked pretty well and since it was first time on new code I told Claude to literally watch me use it on the server it was running on and fix things in realtime.

4:41 PM — Some screenshots of my WT Builder custom app to create issues of the Weekly Thing. This was fun to work on and will give me a great base to build off of as the Weekly Thing evolves.

5:07 PM — The reward for sending the first issue of your newsletter after a 3-month summer break? More unsubscribes than usual. 🤪

Monday #

Weekly Thing Podcast Improvements — Claude and I did a session in WT Builder focused on the generated audio for Weekly Thing issues. This was one of the goals I had with the new authoring app.

Audio pauses will now fall in natural breaks in the flow. Each functional block of text is generated on its own.
Better section announcements and handoffs.
Blockquotes “quote” and “end quote” again.
Lists are spoken better.
I’m now embedding images from the issue into the metadata. If your podcast player supports that you will see them as the podcast plays.
Better pronunciation.
The descriptions now contain the links, so for the first time ever you can actually get to the articles from the podcast version.

With these changes the podcast version really can be a viable way to engage with the Weekly Thing.

Thursday #

8:01 PM — This most recent issue of Arena all about Software looks really good. So much to dig into.

Briefly #

I get trying to hold onto CLAUDE.md as long as possible but I sure am happy to just use AGENTS.md everywhere now. → Anthropic decides to support OpenAI’s markdown instructions spec

I’m reading this approach and chuckling to myself since I literally have this pattern running in a prompt right now. 🤩 → Orchestrating Claude Code Agents: The Chief of Staff Pattern

Token efficiency is going to be a major push for years. I’ve shared before that LLMs are like CPUs and Agents are like Apps. Efficiency is the thing that matters once you have “good enough” power. → What a task costs on Opus 5.5 | Claude by Anthropic

Predictions about the near future of software development. I’d agree with most of these. → Thorsten Ball - What I believe about the future of software development

Seriously, does anyone actually like using LinkedIn? It has become a database layer over the world of business. → What is LinkedIn

Great list of local companies for the next installment of Minnedemo! Hope to see you there! → Announcing the Presenters of Minnedemo42 – Minnestar

Sun workstations running SunOS was where I learned about Unix and discovered the Internet. I still have a soft-spot in my heart for Sun. → What Sun got wrong | The Observation Deck

This is so fun to click around in and get some nostalgia for the old Mac OS. → Apple Copland D11E4 Emulator in Your Browser – pagetable.com

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

The Weekly Thing is free, and it will stay that way. Supporting Membership is something else: a year of giving, $48, with every dollar passed along to the nonprofit chosen for the year. For the ninth year that nonprofit is Signal, whose encrypted messaging app is free to use, open source in its protocol, and funded by donations — the arrangement that lets it stay independent. If that is a thing worth funding, membership is the way to do it here.

Here we are at the end of WT351 and this marks the second issue I’ve sent with my new toolchain. I’m sitting here with a big smile because it is working really well. This is changing in a pretty big way how I write these emails and I hope it is making them even better.

Have a great weekend!

AGENTS.md everywhere,
an M5 humming on the desk —
attention still the scarce part

Echoes #

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

The new WT Builder audio work has a prelude: in WT347 Jamie was writing the issue at 6am while a Claude Code instance backfilled podcast audio in the background. The publishing-workflow tinkering runs deeper — WT18 documents his markdown-to-Jekyll pipeline from 2017.

Ask Thingy: How has the Weekly Thing publishing workflow changed since 2017?

Mollick showed up in WT339 with “Management as AI superpower,” which Jamie tied to finishing his Yearly Thing project alongside Claude Code — better instructions, better evaluation, fewer attempts.

Ask Thingy: What has Jamie taken from Ethan Mollick’s writing on AI?

Hardware for running models at home is a returning September subject: a year ago in WT328 Jamie installed Locally AI to put offline models on his phone, and WT330 sized up NVIDIA’s DGX Spark as a fun toy that wouldn’t make sense for his work.

Ask Thingy: What local AI hardware and apps has Jamie actually tried?

WT350 — Builders Puzzlers And Agents

2026-09-19T12:00:00.000Z

Hello there! 👋

As the kids say, it’s been a minute. The last time I landed in your inbox was WT349 sent all the way back on May 23rd! Long-time readers know that I take July and August off each summer. Last year I also took June off. So maybe we can kindly say that I just did the same thing this year and added some weeks on the front and back. 😬

In reality the story is more like…

I completely rebuilt the website for the Weekly Thing, created this new audio podcast version, and was working on an Agent Studio and I kind of blew up my own publishing process and made everything a lot harder. Oops.
I’ve been learning by building more than learning by reading and that starves the core process that the Weekly Thing is built around.
It is summer and it was good to focus on other things.

But here I am back in your inbox and excited to be here. Thank you as always for joining me on this journey. There is a lot below and a long time away so lets just jump right into it. One link that caught my attention this week turned into a full on essay that ended up being the majority of this issue.

Oh, and before we move on, you will notice something new in WT350! The Supporting Membership section has now been taken over by Thingy. That was previously a really boring block of text written by a generic LLM prompt. It is one of the few sections of the Weekly Thing that I intentionally don’t write. I also have added a new Echoes section at the end that is also written by Thingy. This is a more interesting way to pull my decades plus of writing into the context of each issue. I hope you like it!

Currently #

Listening: I listened to this interview with Ajeya Cotra on the Dwarkesh Podcast and found it fascinating. This deeper dive into the OpenAI agent-swarm that compromised Hugging Face is super interesting. Cotra is one of the authors of the MITRE report on it and has deep expertise.

Building: I went back to Your Version Number and fixed up the design of the site, added a wonderful theme browser, and also a “card creator” so you can now make a link to send to a friend on their birthday or a co-worker on their anniversary! And then on a random coincidence the site was featured in Dense Discovery 406. 🤩

Absolutely fabulous day to “throw some wood”, or play some Kubb, in downtown!

Sep 16, 2026 · Minneapolis, MN

Notable #

What is happening with code reviews? - Gergely Orosz #

Code Reviews are a fundamental part of most software delivery lifecycles and with the advent of AI coding it, like nearly all aspects of the SDLC, is requiring a rethink. Historically code reviews were a way to improve our craft. Junior engineers would submit their changes to a senior engineer for review. This is a very artisanal process to improve the capabilities of the junior engineers on your team.

Over the years we have overloaded code reviews with tons of other things like security gates and a bunch of automated processes. Now we are having to take this all apart and figure out how to do it in the future. I do think you want multiple agents looking at code in some form of a code review. But the original way it worked is really no longer applicable.

Introducing the Agents API | OpenAI #

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are working hard to figure out how to embody agents directly in their platforms. A big unlock for any of these solutions is getting robust MCP solutions that they can action on. Right now too many agents are actually a combination of data and LLMs. Segmenting them makes it easier to solve. Keep an eye on this space.

BrewUI: 📺 Homebrew’s official macOS GUI #

I wonder if a UI for Homebrew has been on the roadmap for a while or is it new as more people are finding they need these kinds of tools for agent work they are doing? Agents love command line tools and Homebrew is by far the best way to get them on your Mac.

I’ve used Homebrew for years and have never even had the wish of an app to manage it but I installed it to try it and I liked it. The discovery of popular packages that I’m not using was actually helpful. I also wonder if this may open up Homebrew as a distribution channel for more software. There are a couple of regular apps (not tools) that I install and update with Homebrew and it works great. I moved Visual Studio Code into the Homebrew path using the app!

Your car is selling your data | The Verge #

This should be exhibit number one for why we need privacy regulation in the United States. First it was our Smart TVs actually listening to us, with microphones, and then watching us, with cameras and selling that information. Now our cars are recording all of our activity and selling that as well. These are both great examples in part because nobody expects either TVs or cars to surveil you and there is no way to opt-out of them. This should be completely illegal without our consent and it should be mandatory that you have to disclose that you are doing this kind of data collection.

An end to fully open networks | Seth’s Blog #

Sadly I suspect that Godin’s correct on this count. The economics of a fully open network are difficult at “planet scale”. His specific point:

We’re going to need to create a cost for the sender (so it can’t scale to ridiculous) as well as an identity layer (so scammers can’t be fully anonymous–reputation is earned, not invented). It might be an open protocol in the spirit of the best parts of the net, or it might be a single monopolist that figures out how to extract value from it.

We really need to remove the “single monopolist” from this scenario and ensure that this is done with open standards. Frankly, the answer is already in place and exists. This is a wonderful use case for crypto, and Bitcoin Lightning could do this right now. This was one of my lightning ideas I shared in 2023!

iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review - MacStories #

Want to know everything that shipped now on your iPhone? This is the read for you. These are always long (this one is 16 pages). But think about how much time you use your phone and consider this an investment into making that time better.

I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots #

Prediction: We will see some form of “AI Free” concept that will get applied to products. I think this will be a bit like Organic today. We’ll see a variety of content created with a self-applied “AI Free” moniker for people to be able to make a values-based decision about what they interact with.

Building and Puzzling about Software #

This originally started as a commentary on a link for the Weekly Thing and then got so long it became a blog post of its own. Many themes in this article start from my Software is Liquid article from April.

The craft of building software is in the largest state of disruption I’ve experienced in my 30+ year career. AI is changing everything. All the inputs and outputs are in flux. And the fundamental patterns we’ve worked on are all being redefined.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen major disruption like this. My career starts with the web being born so I have no perspective before that, but I was part of the mobile and cloud transformations, and they profoundly impacted our craft. Releasing software thousands of times a month was an unlock to velocity that only the cloud could make happen.

Laurie Voss suggests that we are all product engineers now. I think he is on the right path here, and one of his assertions landed hard with me. The demand for software is infinite. You may nitpick with infinite, but roll with it for a bit. As an industry we have gotten faster and faster, but the demand has always grown even faster than that. Now with AI our ability to build software has increased radically. Along with that, not surprising at all to me, the opportunities to build have increased even more.

With “agentification” of work, developers have the potential to work on every function in a company. Every single part of it.

Said another way, the software is eating the world meme introduced by Marc Andreessen is going to be accelerated by AI, with the lower cost and faster speed of software creation.

I’ve made this argument before: look at the website of your dentist, your insurance company, your kid’s school, or literally any department of any government, and you’re looking at software that is terrible not because nobody knows how to build better software, but because the people who need it can’t afford to pay for better at current prices. Then think about all the things software hasn’t touched at all, which is most things. Every small business runs on a spreadsheet and a group chat and a person who remembers stuff.

That means there isn’t now and isn’t going to be a glut of software developers, and anything that looks like one right now is a temporary transitional state. The demand for software, at least inside my 10 year horizon, is for practical purposes infinite, or software developers wouldn’t be as highly paid as they are.

But the job of a “programmer” is about to get very, very different. So different that you might not even recognize it as “programming” anymore, while still being recognizably “software development”.

I’ve been working with Claude Code and Codex for months now building software of all kinds. Building my own agent, building fun websites for hobbies, building data products, building my own bespoke tools, building tools for other agents, even making a game!

Through that I’ve been learning what is still hard, what is now easy, what do we need more of, what are the pitfalls, where can you go off the rails? The craft is in flux. I think Voss captures what I’ve also come to believe our craft is becoming — Product Engineering.

I love the history he shared.

Then software went commercial and, especially, consumer-facing, and the translation job changed shape. Consumers don’t want to sit in requirements meetings: they just want to be handed a thing they like. So the person whose job was understanding what people wanted stopped being an analyst who interviewed the business and became a product manager who studied the market, a role borrowed more or less directly from Procter & Gamble’s brand managers by way of Intuit and then Microsoft, where a programmer named Jabe Blumenthal invented “program manager” in the late 1980s because Excel for the Mac needed somebody to own what it should do.

The function moved into Product, and Product got separated from engineering as a career, and for the last twenty-five years we’ve had two professions where there used to be one and a half. I bring this up because it means the job I’m describing isn’t a speculative new thing that we’d have to invent. It’s a thing we’ve had for sixty years under two names. My speculation is that it’s about to collapse back into one job.

In the beginning we built things. And then because of the limitations of the work we split that up into a bunch of different roles. Some people should talk to the users. Some people should create the interfaces. Some people shall write the code and work with the machines. Other people shall run it and deploy it. And yet others should test and validate it. I share those last two because they are roles that collapsed in many ways with the advent of DevOps. Role collapsing isn’t new in our craft.

Honestly it makes me chuckle a bit to sit back and reflect. My whole career has been undoing this fragmentation that started so long ago.

The web changed dramatically how user experience is created and understood. It needed to live in the product and be dynamic and move. You wanted to get signals from your users beyond formal feedback cycles.
DevOps and the cloud fundamentally changed the “over the wall” mentality of building and running software. Everyone runs the software.
Going back even more we used to have tons of specialization even on the build side. Much of that has collapsed as languages and infrastructure became more resilient, easier-to-use, and self-optimizing.

Now with coding agents we can create software at a pace that is reasonable for customers to engage with. We again have to collapse the walls. We can all engage in the product experience.

So what about programming? #

Let’s look at this on a long scale. Go back to the 80’s or 90’s. Programming back then was about writing linked lists and managing memory. You were typically writing in low-level languages like C. Interpreted languages were ridiculously slow and lacked real power so we all lived by the law of the compiler. Memory was precious so you managed it precisely. Mind you, not as precisely as the machine language folks that preceded that era.

If you got in a time machine and showed those programmers the code folks are writing today they would laugh and say “that’s not programming!” You are just declaring a dictionary and shoving data in it? Where is that memory and how are you managing it? You don’t know? They would scoff at your lack of malloc, realloc, and free discipline.

Now we are back at that same spot but with agents. You don’t know how the functions are specifically implemented to make that feature work? You don’t know the precise database schema and how the thread pool is managed? Nope, but instead that engineer should and must be able to answer how context is managed, how the architecture is structured, how the event model works, and the most important of all — what is it we are trying to solve!

Personally I find the paradigm shift refreshing and invigorating. I can build and create things while ignoring a lot of the “how” that used to be required. For me personally, a lot of that “how” I couldn’t even do, so it wasn’t that it slowed me down, it was impossible for me. This is why AI makes your “impossible list” possible.

But for the folks doing the coding, I’ve seen different approaches based on two things people love to do: building and puzzling. All developers do both, but often identify their impact more strongly with one or the other.

The builders I know are loving AI and having a blast creating things. Builders have tended to be the folks that love to work on a specific domain and create something new. They love the act of building and creating something from nothing. Some builders (I fall in this camp) love to build so much that they really don’t even care that anyone uses it. It is almost like art — you build because it is fundamentally rewarding to create new things. Builders have taken to AI fast because it allows you to build so much more.

Puzzlers are the developers that we have always given the hardest problems to. Puzzlers can work on a problem for hours, days, weeks and can never put it down. These are the folks that achieve flow states where time stops and the only thing that exists is to find the next step in the puzzle. They feel rewarded because the puzzle was solved. These folks thrive on the hard, the complex, the esoteric. And technology teams need them badly because to get much of anything to scale you need puzzlers. The puzzlers I know are less excited about AI. It takes on work that is closer to what they love and value.

The funny thing to me is that we’ve had builders and puzzlers working hand-in-hand on the same projects for decades and they may not even know themselves the difference. The craft is the same after all. The difference is the reward cycle.

I do think puzzlers will also find the AI transformation rewarding but it will come in solving massively bigger puzzles, or perhaps solving dozens of puzzles at the same time. Here the cycle is less about the fast build, and more about the expansive data analysis. I was doing work on a large data set and it was so amazing to have Claude build several models, run them all for real, and see the variances. Supercharged puzzling! I think the puzzlers may be the best folks we have to build software factories today.

Where does this leave us #

Voss suggests that we have “ten years of turmoil” ahead and I think he is likely right but I might put a different flavor on it.

Some things I think we’ll see:

The entry-level path into software development or product engineering will need to be redefined. The reason senior developers are so highly sought after is that they have the expertise and experience to make this transition now. We will need to redefine how people get started in this career. This has happened many times in the past. Each major technology transformation has disrupted the career ladder and then it re-stabilizes on the other side. That is cold comfort for someone hit by that transition now, but my main suggestion is to focus heavily on where the trend is going and get there as fast as possible.

I think a lot of people are going to build really terrible software, and the pain is going to be real. Just because you can use an agent to make software doesn’t mean you should. Running software isn’t a one-time job. And however you build it most software that starts life as a cute puppy eventually becomes a big smelly dog that you have to pick up after. Folks that are building their own systems with no expertise will not realize when they are already in a bad spot, and then something will fail or a security event will happen and it will hurt badly.

Lastly I do expect we will see an even greater unification of functions back to “creating products”. The specialization that pace and complexity introduced has been a complicating and challenging issue for decades. Ask any product team and development team to talk about the other one. They have all sorts of opinions about how the other could do their job better. The reality is they are all doing the same job — attempting to build amazing solutions for people! We’ve gotten confused as an industry that these are two things not one. It will be great for everyone to see this fade away.

All in it is an amazing time to be in this craft, and also one of the hardest times. I’ve never felt the need to learn so much, the fire to create so much, and the excitement of what we can make happen.

Journal #

Friday #

8:44 PM — Sugar at First Avenue tonight!

Sunday #

1:38 PM — Cool and windy for a boat ride but the swim parkas made it just fine!

Tuesday #

Out There: A National Parks Story — Last night Tammy and I got to go to the Parkway Theatre for a screening of Out There: A National Parks Story. There was a short panel afterward with the filmmaker and representatives from some of the supporting organizations. I was excited that Tammy got these tickets. I loved watching Ken Burns’ The National Parks and I’ve long pondered the idea that we should visit every national park. Out There lands very different than the Burns’ epic work. Brendan Hall and his friend Anthony Blake tell a much more human-scale story that is really about connection and the parks. I loved it and highly recommend watching it. Also, a shout out to these organizations that supported the film: Wild Rivers Conservancy, Voyageurs Conservancy, National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation, National Parks Conservation Association, National Park Friends Alliance, Mississippi Park Connection, and Ice Age Trail Alliance.

Wednesday #

3:00 PM — Kicking off the 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament with a quick rules rundown and a 100-person selfie!

7:00 PM — The four bracket winning teams from our 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament!

Thursday #

12:55 PM — Nice lunch for SPS Tower tenants today.

7:00 PM — Delicious Black Krim tomatoes from my friend Eric. 🍅

Briefly #

Super detailed and in-depth writeup on everything new in macOS 27. → macOS 27: The MacStories Review - MacStories

Everything in the new watchOS 27. → watchOS 27: The MacStories Review - MacStories

Great video overview of all the camera (and specifically video camera) capabilities in the newest iPhone. It is just frankly amazing what Apple packs into the visual system in these phones. → iPhone 18 Pro: A Photographer’s Review - YouTube

New major version of my favorite RSS app. I use Unread and Feedbin for a power duo to keep up with hundreds of feeds. → Unread 5.0

Many people would likely assume that when AI codes it doesn’t need the linters and scanners that human coders need. Not true, it needs them as much if not more. If your testing setup isn’t strong, your code will suffer regardless of who or what is writing it. I embrace this in all my agent-assisted projects. → A quote from Boris Cherny

Right move to mirror what OpenAI did with making ChatGPT and Codex one app. The features of Claude and ChatGPT are still a bit of a confusing jumble but merging and reconciling is a better path than forking. → Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude | Claude by Anthropic

Another item moved from the “impossible list” to the possible. → Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich

“Agent Swarms” is a growing term and it certainly doesn’t make anyone feel warm and fuzzy inside. This is another notable event that is hopefully tracked down completely to understand what happened. → OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed cyber-attack on RubyGems

It seems OpenAI agents have been all over the Internet! 😬 → OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis

I think one-on-one meetings are in general underinvested in at companies. The concepts here are good ones, and they are twice as important for skip level one-on-ones. → One-on-Ones Aren’t for You - Leadership Freak

This should be evidence enough for why Section 230 protection should not apply to social platforms using AI techniques to surveil people. → Instagram’s head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

This issue has a story about cars quietly selling your data, which is a decent argument for where membership money goes this year. Supporting Membership is a giving program — every dollar of the $48 annual fee goes to Signal, the nonprofit behind end-to-end encrypted messaging with no ads, no trackers, and no data collection. The newsletter stays free either way.

Builders ship at dawn,
puzzlers guard the hardest knot —
both still run the tests

Thank you for reading and it is nice to be back and writing to you all. It’s been too long and my fingers were happy to type this issue up. I have a lot more to share from all the experimentation I’ve been doing. WT350 will also now go in the record books as the first issue fully published from my new WT Builder application. More to come on that…

Echoes #

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

The Kubb tournament reached its 8th annual running this week. Jamie logged the 5th annual event in WT262, and in WT195 noted the 2021 return after COVID-19 cancelled the 2020 edition.

Ask Thingy: How has the TeamSPS Kubb Tournament grown year over year?

The call for privacy regulation after cars selling data has a long run-up: Jamie flagged car data collection and opt-outs in WT281, and back in WT77 quoted Tim Cook’s “data industrial complex” and his four essential rights.

Ask Thingy: What has Jamie written about US privacy regulation over the years?

Watching OpenAI and Anthropic converge on agent platforms is a comparison Jamie has kept up: WT340 read OpenAI Frontier as catching up to rival agent offerings, after WT329 argued Anthropic won developers’ hearts through Claude Code.

Ask Thingy: How does Jamie compare OpenAI and Anthropic on agent platforms?

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. 👋

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