Recent status at 12k feet

I know everyone is about to log off for the long weekend, if they haven't already taken the week off. But I thought I'd quickly share a little more about what I'm working on. Please share! retrofit.sh #llm #ai #sql #postgreSQL

A sneak peak at what I've been working on for the past few months retrofit asciinema.org/a/oR3DsRNCBv...

“Computational thinking is a way humans solve problems; it is not trying to get humans to think like computers. Computers are dull and boring; humans are clever and imaginative.” — Jeannette M. Wing (2006) h/t @olivia.science dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Hit my 100th RDR for this project. Hope to have a demo online this week before I drop out and off the grid.

Thanks for publishing this. I'm definitely more Claude centered in my dev workflow but I've really enjoyed looking at both your kata skills and arcaneum for inspiration!

My current LLM toolchain chris.wensel.net/post/llm-too... #llm #ai

Knew the fires would be a problem for my plans this year but thought it would be my CA plans, not CO.

Ugh now I have to stain it

Some Sunday Black Boy Joy

Eric Ambler, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Screenwriter, #BornOnThisDay in 1909, in London 📸 Elliott Erwitt (1952)

we are presenting our paper "Terms of (Ab)Use: An Analysis of GenAI Services" now. join us #FAccT2026 programs.sigchi.org/facct/2026/p...

lol for years we used to joke (but also sort of meant it) about starting a Journal of Negative Results when I was working in Precambrian rocks. The number of times people tried dating the same failed samples … would have been nice to have had that publication.

Haven't had time to blog about it, but I've released a set of skills I use every day to resolve bugs and feed my RDR process with complex features or debt. I pushed them to this repo, ymmv. github.com/cwensel/kata... #llm #ai #claude #codex

The Lodestar is back on course. Don’t miss a single transmission. Sign up here: thelodestar.starlog.com

That's right, friends! STARLOG is back and I'm the editor-in-chief. We have so much good stuff for you in our first issue, coming this November!! Science! Sci-fi! Fantastic weirdness! Plus you can subscribe now to our podcast hosted by @jhoffman.bsky.social and @da7e.com!

protip for arcaneum users github.com/cwensel/arca... > arc log tail --lines 50 to watch and ensure your skill are pulling in research materials (via search) during any design phases or when creating tests.

Hi everybody, I organized the #Artemis2 photos for you. Index pages containing all ~10,000 images in chronological order with time stamps and focal lengths, color coded by which of three cameras was used to shoot them. countlessworlds.com/data/artemis/

A survey of thousands of workplace leaders found “the only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled.” (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/o...

What a surprise ….. “Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I've been using a spec first LLM dev model for about a year now, it's evolved quite a bit. I recent got around to converting the process to live behind skills. github.com/cwensel/rdr/...

We wrote a new blog post on why co-locating workflow state with your data is powerful: www.dbos.dev/blog/co-loca... When workflow metadata and application data live in the same database, they can be updated in the same transaction. That simplifies tough problems like atomicity and idempotency.

mined some recent rdr process transcript history using Arcaneum to index transcripts. Now looking at FSM cli tools to speed up the flows as LLMs are unreliable as state machines. chris.wensel.net/project/arca... #llm

This essay is a meditation on this exact problem: lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/11/th...

You can help to keep Ukrainians safe. By contributing, you are allowing people to survive and helping people to persevere. You are also letting them know that they are not alone, and that you can see a better future, and want to part of it. Please help if you can. snyder.substack.com/p/sky-defens...

I'd really like to know where Opus 4.7 and 4.8 got these verbal tics from. It constantly says stuff like "load-bearing" (instead of just saying it's important), or "X-shaped" instead of "looks like X". Do people really talk like this somewhere (I'm assuming in Silicon Valley?)

Arcaneum 0.7.0 is out github.com/cwensel/arca...

“I mean, your society’s broken… Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let’s blame the people with no power & no money & these immigrants who don’t even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault.” —Iain Banks died #OTD, 9 June, 2013 www.theguardian.com/books/2013/j...

Read “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance” from @mitpress.bsky.social - sales benefit EFF! www.eff.org/Privacys-De...

An experiment: https://thinkstack.com is an attempt to curate 0-3 conference talks every day that are worth watching from tracking over 700 YouTube channels. Not every day is a winner right now but there's definitely progress. Feedback welcome!

Indexing Claude transcripts in Arcaneum is becoming a bit of a superpower. I refine my workflow through search to improve poorly designed skills or finding new ones. Or even fixing poorly defined tools I use/create/contribute to. github.com/cwensel/arca...

Posted some revisions to my spec based development process. YMMV github.com/cwensel/rdr chris.wensel.net/post/rdr-pro...

Given the recent burst of activity around enterprise pricing and contracts, I think April 2026 was the month when both OpenAI and Anthropic found product-market fit https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/

TIL keybase.io is still confirming identities on profiles

Got curious, so wired it up tokenmaxxing.odio.dev tokenmaxxing.odio.dev/u/cwensel

In my last role, leadership wanted the Product folk to ship code and felt LLM/AI was the path forward to reduce reliance on engineering. I think that's a bit backwards. Engineers should now be enabled to be more product and user focused reducing the need for PMs.

i suspect lot's of folks racing to complete pet projects or launch startups before the subsidies end...

Just pushed a 0.5.0 release of Arcaneum - github.com/cwensel/arca... Mostly stability fixes, but no guarantees it will work on your system. Embedding pipelines are hard.

Given a persistent immutable staging area and pure tasks, you can recompute the entire warehouse from scratch. That's the power of functional data engineering. Design your pipelines to be backfillable from day one.

Here's my book!!! The Psychology of Software Teams, it's coming out in July, you can already pre-order it at some online retailers, and it has a WHOLE CHAPTER on "The Performance Paradox" to help you become a *resilient* high performer :) www.routledge.com/The-Psycholo...

So many folks in my tech community have been very successful at a path they set out for themselves. One of the unfortunate difficult risks of this is that it does tend to make you gather people around you who only value you for the exact type of success you've chosen to try to achieve

Refining my spec first model, I indexed about a 100 research papers and two dozen blog posts and asked Claude to identify any spec validation prompts for single specs and sets of specs.

The hints, which Warp Records continually sends out, do not differ from those issued by imposters. One of them insinuates that Warp Records is eternal and will continue issuing hints about a forthcoming Boards Of Canada LP until the last night of the world, when the last god annihilates the cosmos.

Kode Vicious: KV the Apostate Faith-based computing versus the unnatural science Whether we ask an LLM or a recent graduate to type the code is less important than knowing what the code does, how it was built, and when to look under the hood queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

New late night restaurants are opening in SOMA. Nature is healing.

This is one of the most efficient pieces of comedy writing I've ever read. Not a sentence is wasted. *chef's kiss*

“It would have been nice if at least someone had been willing to stand up for academic freedom and publicly say that we find the policy problematic. But no single person, department head, dean, or provost, has done so.” https://chroni.cl/4cliCou

I wrote a paper that deals with cascade failures through interoperable systems in the context of the banking system: jcl.law.uiowa.edu/sites/jcl.la...

Anne Carlisle in Liquid Sky (1982)