In our latest episode we talk to technology entrepreneur Doug Burke about his experience building a personal AI assistant named Sam, using Claude Code and other agent tools. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I've added an AI policy to ripgrep that was shamelessly copied from uv's policy. I plan to add this to the rest of my projects, but if anyone wants to offer feedback on wording, now would be a good time! github.com/BurntSushi/r...

Jeez. arxiv.org/html/2605.24... Future software deployments look like: 1. Deploy the agent to build the thing for that custom environment. 2. For any changes, deploy tickets to the agent. Are we going to be shipping and preserving code in the future?

Agree with this 100%: "But today what I crave is original expression. I don’t care if the grammar is wrong, as long as it’s different..." This one drives me nuts too: “you’re not imagining it, the problem is real.” I instantly hate whatever I'm reading that includes this crap.

In the latest episode we bring back Bob Farzin to help us discuss building software with a team of agents: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

another banned sentence: "the [noun] is real."

100% this

I am getting so sick of em-dashes.

chatGPT pretends to be a person more than Gemini or Claude

current status: wearing a hat with a desk on it.

I bought a desk and the desk company sent me a hat with desk on it and I never really thought about wearing a desk hat before but I guess it's okay.

Not only does @samaaron.bsky.social do great educational work getting kids interested in programming by live-coding music – he also does deep engineering work on the underlying audio synth engine, which now runs in web browsers!

My new plan (surprised no one's thought of this yet) is to sub guacamole for butter in every recipe that calls for it.

I love this thing and I want one for my house: https:// boat.horse/clock/

Wow. "When AI routinely completes tasks in seconds, the reference point for how long a task should take can shift – and as a consequence, unaided work starts to feel counterfactually more effortful, a process structurally analogous to hedonic adaptation..." arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

"Honestly, I don't want the product to tell my users to kill themselves," he said. "But the fact that it can is kind of what makes the product work in the first place."

readmaxxing. listening-to-birdsongmaxxing. goingoutsidemaxxing.

Started a new tag on my blog to track stories about AI-powered security research, which is very much having a moment right now - 11 posts so far already simonwillison.net/tags/ai-secu...

In our latest episode we go back to basics and discuss hash tables. Turned out we didn't understand them as well as we thought, so we look at their history and some recent interesting developments: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I read last week in a New Yorker piece about how turbulence is getting worse: > The computer models that [atmospheric scientist Bob Sharman] has built can predict where rough air is most likely to arise. "The problem is," he said, "when we go to meetings with the airline industry and suggest...

entire thread is incredible, but just absolutely screaming at claude code having \u2014 (unicode number for "em dash") baked into its source mastodon.social/@jonny@neuro...

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this post: blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordp...

how diffie hellman key exchange works (with as little math as possible)

I've been vibe coding SwiftUI menu bar apps for my new Mac, turns out Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are both competent at Swift programming, no need to even open Xcode! simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/...

My friend @mikemull.bsky.social pointed out to me that among the people we know going hard on agent coding, they all seem to be doing the same amount or *more* computering. In other words, so far nobody took a look at the productivity gains and concluded, "Rad! I can go outside more now!"

I blogged about an aspect of reviewing llm-generated code that seems so offputting: erikaker.com/posts/2026-0...

The NEW Designing Data-Intensive Applications dropped on my desk this morning and at 600+ pages it landed with a thud! If you work in data, this book definitely belongs on your shelf. It's undoubtedly one of the most, if not the most, important and relevant data systems book you could read.

"A few contributors even act as a proxy between the reviewer and the LLM, copy their reviewer’s question, reply with LLM-generated response. For the love of god, please. I want to emphasize this is incredibly frustrating. This is the top contributing factor to potential burn outs for me."

I don't know when they added Funcrusher Plus to Spotify but my current feeling is that I want to crush my whole weekend with this one of the greatest records of all time.

claude costs $20/mo but attaching an agent harness to the chipotle customer service endpoint is free

new machine, nix from the start, never going back

We give our report on @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social 23x, where Erik worked as a volunteer this year. (Note: you might hear my dog whimpering toward the end-- she was fine she just wanted snacks) www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I wrote some words (typed *all* of the characters even!) about some Claude Code tooling I've been messing around with: erikaker.com/projects/222...

I started using Claude code over the last two weeks to build software and it feels weird, but I made this fun tool to help out which levels up the whole experience to an insanely productive degree: erikaker.com/projects/222...

MCP is dead. Long live the CLI | Discussion

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

I’m sorry, a password manager didn’t have a dedicated security team previously? If you use these clowns you’re negligent.

Beating this game is my single goal for today: rose.systems/animalist/

Our latest episode is mostly Mike waxing nostalgic about the heyday of recreational programming, especially the late A.K. Dewdney's _Computer Recreations_ column. We also explain taco shops. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

...and we're back. For our first episode of 2026, we're talking about S3 and cloud object storage. Plus, we finally figure out what an exabyte is. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

claude code is fucking insane i know literally NOTHING about Hegel. ZERO. and it just built me a complete system of German idealism

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Playing with the new (to me) 37mm Sekor C on the RB Pro SD, futzing with a wireless strobe trigger and some shutter drag as my kid does a lipslide into the Channel Street bowl Ilford Delta 3200 in PyrocatHD. #filmphotography #skateboarding

a uh, psa about bincode www.reddit.com/r/rust/comme...

About 20 years ago I was in a pretty film-nerd video store telling a clerk that I liked Akira Kurosawa films when he asked, "did you like Ran?" When I said, no, I was bored, he said, "how big's your TV?" I said, "like normal sized?" So then he said "that's your problem: your TV's too small."

Here's a daily affirmation for you all from the time capsule of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1, episode 8 (first aired 1997): "The printed page is obsolete. Information isn’t bound up anymore. It’s a living entity. The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive."

We did another tech news roundup for the holiday week, but it's mostly about data centers. We recommend you save it for after the Thanksgiving feast-- it should pair nicely with a food coma and a nice Pinot Noir www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I made up a word this week, numismarrhea. It means "dirrhea of the money." It's the first medical term I've invented, so I am feeling sort of proud of it.