the best part of writing a sentence is predicting what word the reader is expecting and choosing a different one

For me, I think a big part is that building software is suddenly new and exciting again, in a way that learning programming language #31 never could be.

🍿

As a person who enjoys doing stupid projects, AI is a godsend: I have done more stupid projects in 2026 than in my whole life previously

Until Nov 2025, this was a pretty good joke. Now…

I've been telling people for 25 years that Jane Street is not interested in formal methods. No more! And we're actively hiring to form a new formal methods team!

2026

Suddenly every PR has a surprise new reviewer in Claude Code today.

My daughter sends. She knows all about this. Also please come over so I can feed you

When we had [Fable 5] play the deck-building game Slay the Spire, ... Fable also reached the game’s final act three times more often [than Opus]. Oh yeah? I can beat that and I only required *checks Switch* 1500 hours of dedicated training. Oh. anthropic.com/news/claude-fa…

one must imagine sisyphus disappointed by the lack of late-game content

The main thing I've learned as a programmer leaning heavily into AI tools is that programming is SO MUCH MORE than just writing code - and while I can get amazing results out of the AI it's taking every inch of my 25 years of software experience

Never opening the json file with my full export of Twitter data.

"They're made out of weights." "Weights?" "Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights." "Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?" "The weights make the words. Are you understanding me?"

One of the better “Claude ~= me as a grad student” exhibits

"Telling a programmer there’s already a library to do X is like telling a songwriter there’s already a song about love."

anything that I'm doing that is more than a one-shot query/change/update that I'm not confident will be done by the 40% mark of a single context window I suspect subagents are involved in >80% of my sessions involving any complex work where state is getting created and updated mostly architecting and coding, but also most of OpenProse, Inc. runs out of a single git repo so a large share of our (still small, but growing) operations runs in claude code sessions, and all of those use subagents to break tasks down and pass context by reference

RT @Grady_Booch: @ShriramKMurthi @TaliaRinger “1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor in…

When designing DrRacket, we made sure that we regularly tested on underpowered Windows computers, so that our software would run well on generic public school machines of the era. Likewise, we test Pyret on Chromebooks. Make sure you experience what your users experience.

I guess it's not that weird that agents would have a manner of speaking (“smoke test”, “you're right to push back”). It's the kind of thing you notice on teams and joke about. It's just weird that we're all talking to the same coworker.