Skeletons. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Listening To: Lunar by Liquicity. Smooth, celestial drum and bass. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

"Often the model isn’t flaky at understanding the task. It’s flaky at expressing itself. You’re blaming the pilot for the landing gear." This quote and the blog post's finding, line up with a mental model of LLMs that I've found useful. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Listening To: Not Here Not Gone by Blackwater Holylight. Hard rocking, shoegaze-y music. Feel the sound. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

New term “Software Factories” from StrongDM: If coding agents can write faster than we can read, treat the app as a black box and test observable outcomes end-to-end. Useful for some applications, unlikely to be for all. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Static site changelog: Series Pages. Like tags, series of posts now have a dedicated page listing all constituent posts. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Listening To: SONIC TRASH by ROMES. Nice and edgy rock, touches of industrial. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Storage layer update for Knowledge Bases (OCaml). Perfection killed my motivation, so I committed the ugly code and moved on. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

n8n vulnerability — the exploit details are interesting, but the bigger point is scarier: LLM agent systems concentrate lots of sensitive data in one place. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Frost and crisp sunshine in Seattle. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Listening to Fade by Sub Focus. Contact is a very nice drum and bass album from Sub Focus, all of the tracks are polished. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Listening to HARDWAREZ by MASTER BOOT RECORD. Digital, chiptune metal. A unique style that I didn’t know I wanted. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

"The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone." Adam Serwer for The Atlantic. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Interesting to watch the orchestration of coding agents moving from speculation to expensive reality. On Gas Town and Cursor's recent experiments. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Without a breakthrough on the prompt injection problem, it’s inappropriate bordering on unethical to expose unrestricted LLM chat to the general public. We software engineers should avoid "chat" as a general interface and keep LLMs constrained to controlled prompts. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

In this post I condemn the U.S. military action in Venezuela. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Listening To: Half Life by Grafix. Drum and bass! I especially enjoy the more acid stylings in songs like Skyline. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings." Quote from Ursula K. Le Guin that brings me hope. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

It continues to be more profitable to get on the sustainability train than to try to cling to fossil fuels. alexleighton.com/posts/2026-0...

Year in review: 2025. Worked on my OCaml static site generator and then used it: 164 posts, RSS, tags, search, and images. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Luminous by Fred V. Upbeat, melodic drum and bass, for when you want to feel good rather than edgy. Shoutout to track 2: Collide! alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

TIL: Python has ExceptionGroup and except* to raise multiple unrelated exceptions and then selectively handle only the ones you care about, while re-raising the rest. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Ex Machina by Metrik. More drum and bass! alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

A tale of two gaps: the Darién Gap (60 miles of jungle breaking the Pan-American Highway) and the Cat Gap (~7 million years with no cat fossils in North America). alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Free Energy by Dummy. Psychedelic rock; shoegaze or triphop at times. Very nice. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

VPNs are a trust exercise. I use Mullvad because I have yet to see it fail any external tests. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Giolì & Assia’s DiesisLive handpan set. Lovely electronic music on the rim of an active volcano (Vulcano, Aeolian Islands). TIL: “volcano” is actually derived from myths about Vulcan and this specific island. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

TIL there are bearings that are simply a metal surface rather than spheres or rollers. Babbitt metal bearings encase their rotating part, and are soft on purpose — the metal's microstructure provides stability AND reduces friction. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Luminescent Creatures by Ichiko Aoba. Delicate, crystalline Japanese vocals over soft, contemplative piano and guitar. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Little Worlds — a tiny Seattle photo set. Mushrooms and moss, lichen and wood. Mutual life, everywhere you look. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Life Of Leisure by Washed Out. Lovely, nostalgic album made popular by Portlandia. The sound is so laid-back and richly detailed that you want to lay there and let it envelop you. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Changelog: I added individual image pages to my static site generator — every image now links to its own page with alt text and variant encodings displayed. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Songs From My Castle Tower by MJ Noble — drum and bass / jungle under ethereal vocals and flute. Evokes a hyped-up fantasy soundtrack. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

TIL about the Linear Pottery culture’s brutal, still-mysterious collapse: mass graves of headless bodies on the edge of 7000-year-old settlements, from a fascinating article in Science. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Why I like TypeID (type + UUIDv7), how it will keep identifiers git-merge-conflict-free for my purposes, and adapting the OCaml library into the knowledge-bases repo. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Splashes Of Colour by Teen Daze — chill electronic music. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Photos of the early light over Lake Washington. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: It's now safe to turn off your computer. by </body> Cybernetic, dark synthwave. I love the edginess. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Unison 1.0 released today. It's built on content-addressed code — every expression is identified by its hash. This transforms distribution, version control, API compatibility, among others. I've been watching from the sidelines, but now it's time to dig in. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Wikipedia Picture of the Day: Basilica of Superga above Turin, Alps in the background. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening to “Radio” by Bershy — instant classic. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Alexa’s new “AI” voice leans into pseudo-human intimacy, but LLMs aren’t intelligent and shouldn’t pretend to be. Selling them to act like humans distorts what they are and guarantees an uncanny, disappointing product. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

TigerBeetle’s “Write Last, Read First” rule clicked instantly for me because it’s how we kept indexes consistent with the main table in DynamoDB at Amazon. Main table with strong consistency as the system of record and the indexes as systems of reference. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Solid, in-your-face rock and roll from Blue Zero on the CONFUSION EP. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Charles Stross imagined corporate-born AI reshaping markets in Accelerando, which a recent “economy of AI agents” paper feels reminiscent of. I wrote a short note on the connection: alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: Recursive Infinity by The Algorithm Cyber djent, synthwave metal, taking you on an operatic odyssey. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Right Into The Dark — onwards through a moody and dramatic day. alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

TIL: about Server Sent Events (just a standardization of the old Comet pattern), and Websockets (starts as HTTP, drops down to a binary frame-based protocol over the TCP connection). alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

Listening To: CHASING SHADOWS by Magnolia Park Copied from their bandcamp description: Pop Punk ┌П┐(►˛◄’!) alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...

From the November 20th Wikipedia featured article, regarding the Nuremberg trials — 🤔 wondering if a Wikipedia editor has something on their mind regarding current American politics... alexleighton.com/posts/2025-1...