Anthropic comms is crazy. “Here’s a 38-page essay about the existential threat of AI and how underprepared we are.” *30 min later* “Also you can now connect your B2B SaaS apps to Claude.”

For people wondering how they can price so high (and why many advertisers will pay for it) read this: www.dbreunig.com/2022/06/06/w... They’re in the “shiny object phase”.

Probably worth revisiting this bit I wrote in 2016… www.dbreunig.com/2016/08/04/a...

I wanted to download a file from a Claude Code Web instance, not commit it to Github. I don't know if you've tried this, but the first working solution it arrived at was outputting a gz file as base64 then asking me to paste it into a txt file.

Regarding the Claude “Soul Document”: I wonder if training models on documents like these influences our perception of these models as sentient. In many ways, LLMs are playback machines, which we talk to as human. It reminds me of facilitated communication. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilit...

Dara visualization in the wild.

An irony of the AI age is that relationships matter more. www.economist.com/business/202...

Got nerd-sniped into shepherding Claude while it implemented just-bash in Python. It's a good continuation from whenwords. The test coverage is high (the orig repo and Bash itself). I really like this idea of emulation as an option prior to using a full sandbox. github.com/dbreunig/jus...

AI writing feedback always feels a little off to me… Like it's been post-trained to death on linear reasoning sequences, or something.

You can bet $10k on the Dodgers making the playoffs, to win $100. Or you can put $10k in a 1 year CD at 4% and get $400.

It is amazing how poorly labeled and undersold that chart is given the importance of what it conveys. The gap between the two lines is the value of a human in the loop. www.anthropic.com/research/ant...

Terence Tao's takes on how AI helps mathematicians resonate the most with my feeling about coding agents as well.

This is a perfect but of humor for a very specific niche of shareware enthusiast. cc @ernie.tedium.co youtu.be/z34DIbpu46M

Today I'm launching whenwords, an open-source software library with NO CODE. whenwords supports Ruby, Python, Rust, Elixir, Swift, PHP, and Bash. I’m sure it works in other languages, too. Those are just the ones I've tried. www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a...

I am simultaneously awed by the inventive, perfect UI...while instinctually recoiling a the notion of dial-a-nostalgia creation.

At the DSPy meetup we hosted, Omar Khattab gave a great talk about the philosophy of DSPy, why it matters, and treating AI engineering as an actual engineering discipline. Here's the recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I77y...

Iannucci! www.avclub.com/kumail-nanji...

Anybody know what's going on in Arkansas?

The final 2025 issue of my newsletter just went out. This was my first year maintaining one; it seemed to go pretty well! buttondown.com/dbreunig/arc...

The most useful book I read this year was "The Railway Journey," by Wolfgang Schivelbush, which explores how the arrival of the railroad shaped culture. It helped me contextualize the impact of AI better than anything else. Strongly recommended. amzn.to/4jlb5sS

Looking back on 2025: jagged intelligence becomes a fault line. It's been an incredible year for AI, shaped by the success of synthetic data and coding applications. The challenge is to now building trust through reliability. www.dbreunig.com/2025/12/29/2...

Every month or so, I wonder why no politician picked up and ran with this story. www.newsweek.com/kroger-execu...

Why I write (and you should too!) www.dbreunig.com/2025/12/27/w...

Can someone at @popsci.com let us know how much traffic they get sent thanks to Apple continually linking to this article in Weather?

One big applied AI story in 2025 is the rise of inference endpoints that call models equipped with web search, access to files, and code execution. The share of “naked” model calls dropped. www.dbreunig.com/2025/12/19/h...

Jose was 20 years ahead of his time. (This feels like something @ernie.tedium.co would have written about) www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

They fine-tuned an LLM specifically only by feeding it out-of-date bird names, and it started talking like it lived in the 19th century

One of the best blogging mechanisms ever was selecting text from a webpage and clicking the Tumblr bookmarklet.

Reports about AI usage ended up telling a consistent story: www.dbreunig.com/2025/12/06/t...

This week’s Money Stuff podcast ends suspiciously abruptly, with an edit cutting off a heavy @matt-levine.bsky.social sigh while discussing Goldman paying $2B for Innovator Capital.

Regarding the Claude “Soul Document”: I wonder if training models on documents like these influences our perception of these models as sentient. In many ways, LLMs are playback machines, which we talk to as human. It reminds me of facilitated communication. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilit...

It's worth reading both Nuzzi's & Lizza's recent writing, not because of its subjects, but because it effectively conveys the invisible, essential work of great editors. As someone who is _not_ a professional writer, but writes in public a lot, it is incredibly validating to see these ROUGH drafts.

Here's a fun OSM task you can do: add the location of Flock cameras. One mapper in our neighborhood has been on a roll: www.openstreetmap.org/node/1333152...

I gave a talk about Overture's GERS (an open, free, maintained ID system for geo data) at CARTO's Spatial Data Science Conference. It's so much easier to demonstrate the benefits of GERS now that there's a community growing up around it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8YZ...

Fantastic example of using Overture Maps' GERS identifier, from Carto and @mike.teczno.com carto.com/blog/gersify...

💯 theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

This probably the wrong person to let your video generator run wild with, and perhaps the likeness best equipped to take legal action. www.theguardian.com/film/2015/ma...

% of US men under 30 who say legal sports betting is a *bad thing* for society 22% in 2022 47% in 2025 No other demographic group has seen a bigger increase.

@bransonreese.bsky.social A friend of mine is a high school teacher and he recently sent me this text: "Just got shamed by a student for saying 'the Deftones' instead of 'Deftones'. I will never recover."

Mark your calendars! In this #podcast, @jed.co and @dbreunig.bsky.social will use Drew's blog post – "Why LLM advancements have slowed: The low-hanging fruit has been eaten – as a starting point for their conversation. Read the post here: www.dbreunig.com/2024/12/05/w...

🆕 #CNG2025 session video The live webinar has ended, but the conversation continues! In this talk, @dbreunig.bsky.social explains why our definitions of location are fragmented and how we can standardize "place" like we did time ▶️ youtu.be/stiYfBB0KC8

When a new use case arrives (chat, deep research, browsers), AI companies school like fish towards it. Blue oceans turn red in a year or so. What can we learn from this pattern? www.dbreunig.com/2025/09/13/t...

This is too funny: what3words pivots to AI: what3words.com/products/pro

Surprise?

GOAT. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Chatbots may be incompatible with ads as we know them. What options are there? www.dbreunig.com/2025/09/02/c...

My monthly newsletter, wrapping up August's writing, just went out. Unintentionally, this is very much a Labor Day issue, with a few articles about AI's impact on work and workers: buttondown.com/dbreunig/arc...