Guess my plan of maxing out my Fable usage this weekend is off. I've been returned back to the permanent underclass 10 days sooner than expected. anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

Tired of text-to-SQL and “agentic analytics” demos where the real bottleneck is data engineering? Me too. The next frontier is not data agents answering questions but changing the data estate. Introducing GitLake!

My early experience report with Fable 5 so far. It's very good. It can take large challenging work and break it up. I gave it an optimization problem that I had both Opus 4.8 and Codex 5.5 working last week. It solved the entire thing. Wrote a profile program along the way to prove things out. It's as big of a step up as I've seen in model capabilities in the last year.

I was recently diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. It's a "disease of chaos" that completely upturned my life for a couple months. I wrote a blog about it that goes into more detail and discusses prognosis. burntsushi.net/encephalitis/

Interesting interview as always from @adamhjk. The thing he says early on about their dev process at Swamp.club that I very much agree on (but haven't solved) is that your dev process can't have developers blocking on each other. PR review breaks this requirement completely. And I still don't trust the machines (or myself) enough to get rid of it. And I haven't yet built enough verification tooling to get to that point. It's my number one priority now, building tooling that does testing, benchmarking, verification so that the development process can be put into a full time agentic loop. We unlock that and we unlock roadmap on demand. In the meantime I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code that I don't dare ship. How do we support it? Is it robust? Can it be improved without collapsing on itself? Need to answer those questions first before we can.

Consider that the start of this graph was already at considerable scale. A shift of this size generally requires rearchitecting. To do it in this time frame seems impossible. So yeah, I have much sympathy for the GH team.

We released @InfluxDB 3.9 today! For our Enterprise customers, it has a beta of enhancements to our storage system enabling very wide & sparse tables and MUCH faster performance on single series queries. This brings the flexible schema and fast series lookups you love from v1 and v2 into v3 while maintaining support for infinite cardinality, scalable object store durability and the fully featured SQL query engine provided by DataFusion. Read all about it: influxdata.com/blog/influxdb…

Me to Claude

Good read from @breckcs on Adapting to AI and his work in 2025. I feel a lot of the same things. Although I'll say things shifted dramatically for me with Opus 4 and Claude Code in late May 2025 and have only accelerated from there. I've produced hundreds of thousands of lines of code in the last 6 months, but most of it has not gone to production and likely never will. Although there is some very big stuff getting released soon that includes the more well reviewed and iterated on bits of this mass of work. The challenge for me this year is to figure out how to actually harness all this new found power and capability without it collapsing the entire product. And how to rework product and engineering in this new world. I feel pressure to either adapt and thrive or fall hopelessly behind to other teams that make the best use of the tools and create processes that showcase what's possible. The possibility of the 100x or 1,000x team is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. His metaphor for being in a hot dog eating contest with unlimited hot dogs feels apt. The trick now is selecting which hot dogs to actually eat. blog.colinbreck.com/adapting…

This essay on bank tellers and why it was iPhones, not ATMs that brought the ultimate decline in human bank tellers highlights how AI could potentially disrupt jobs is a great read: davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-… This it captures it perfectly: “The ATM tried to do the teller’s job better, faster, cheaper; it tried to fit capital into a labor-shaped hole; but the iPhone made the teller’s job irrelevant. One automated tasks within an existing paradigm, and the other created a new paradigm in which those tasks simply didn’t need to exist at all. And it is paradigm replacement, not task automation, that actually displaces workers” A few months ago I stated that the productivity gains in software development would be limited by everything outside of actually writing code: x.com/pauldix/status/2006423… We’d run afoul of Amdahl’s Law where we’ve made creating code almost instantaneous but only gains modest improvements in our speed to deliver software. All the other tasks in the lifecycle would still take up too much time. I think that’s true, but the ATM/iPhone example highlights something more important for actually realizing the gains. Why optimize the speed of PR reviews when you can make them irrelevant? What does the SDLC look like when you rethink how it’s delivered and stop trying to automate individual human roles and tasks that currently exist? Something I’m thinking about in this magical time of AI where things that were previously impossible or unthinkable are daily routine.

Reading about Lossless Context Management, interesting approach: papers.voltropy.com/LCM

Reading comments on this HN thread started by a 60 year old programmer who is once again excited to create things due to tools like Claude Code and Codex. The responses are basically a bimodal distribution of either existential angst and despair, or this is the best time ever. I'm firmly in the latter camp, but also frequently wonder, where's it all going and what happens when we get there? At the very least, I'm excited to be building. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Happy to see Brooklyn Cat Cafe asa the top recommendation in this demo video! We adopted from there last fall :)

Vortex 🤝 Apache Iceberg Coming soon! @vortexdotdev @ApacheIceberg

Snowy Sunday here in Brooklyn. Might fuck around and try to write my own Claw.