From a Head of Engineering who spent a week in SF, meeting a bunch of AI startups: "When I was back, I wrote a memo about my impressions. The #1 was how these amazing startups I met: they mostly did not have a business. But we do. So be VERY careful in copying what they do." (cont'd)

Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 is out and actually seems pretty good for coding! Here's what it produced (via Claude Code), with one bug I reported, that it found and fixed: senko.net/vibecode-ben... Compare with Opus 4.8, Fable 5, GPT-5.5, GLM-5.2 and others here: senko.net/vibecode-ben...

I find it annoying I can't easily share a screen region in Meet or Teams (in GNOME with Wayland, using Firefox), so I built myself a tool to help with that: blog.senko.net/mirroring-a-...

It finally happened. Today I had to use AI (Claude) to search my mails in Gmail, whose search has turned to crap.

Name a TV show you’re positive no one remembers but you… www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUYe...

For those that say you can't get in flow mode with AI: you're mistaken. I've just spent several hours preparing a - wait for it - SLIDE DECK with Claude Design (I focus on the content, leave design to it), without noticing how the time flew by.

Not your servers, not your tokens (today), not your data (tomorrow?) There are many angles to this and none are pretty: 1) Loss of credibility for *any* US company. 2) Anthropic IPO story got considerably worse. 3) Digital sovereignity shifts from "vitamin" to "painkiller". ...

Fable 5 saturated my "LLMCraft" vibe-coding test, mere 6 months after I introduced it: senko.net/vibecode-ben... (you can't see it on the screenshot, but the workers, click effects and fights are animated - and yes, there are mobs to fight!) All tests: senko.net/vibecode-ben...

Hot take: AI intuition is a core skill in the age of AI. This includes: * practical understanding (feeling) of how AI works * experience with good and bad AI input (prompts) * understanding failure modes * recognizing AI slop * knowing when to stop * knowing when not to use it

Local, small, open-weights models are roughly comparable to the frontier ones from a year ago. Google's Gemma 4 12B (released today by Google) performs roughly as well as GPT-4.1 on my Minesweeper test: senko.net/vibecode-ben... Full list of models I've been testing: senko.net/vibecode-ben...

In case you are in the camp of “Andrew Tridgell is vibefucking rsync” please read this.l and adjust your priors. medium.com/@tridge60/rs...

In, what's perhaps my only public appearance this year, I channeled my inner Jerry Maguire discussing code quality in the age of AI with Elixir Wizards. I also showed off an item from my spring/summer '26 collection, because, what, after all, is fashion, if not a statement 😎️ Links in the comments

We need to rationally discuss the impact of AI on software engineering. Instead we get angry mob coming out with pitchforks like here: github.com/RsyncProject... The bug report is a screenshot from someone who assumes AI broke something. The comments are abysmal. We can, and should, do better.

Is AI a crutch or a power tool? Is it going to replace us, enhance us, or make us stupid? All depends on how we use it. Here's how I, personally, want to use AI: blog.senko.net/how-i-want-t... (Entirely human written, even if I did use a few —'s and one "it's X, not Y" phrase. AI did typo checks.)

DwarfStar distributed inference is now on GitHub: you can run 2 bit Flash using 2 64GB machines, or 4 bit Flash with two 128GB machines or 4 64GB, ad so forth. Prefill speed will increase thanks to pipelining. Generation will pay the latency.

Testing Claude Code with Opus 4.8 in "ultracode" mode by implementing an RTS game. Pretty good results: gist.github.com/senko/24d117...

Opus 4.8 effort selector in Claude Code. I have a nagging feeling I'll hit my token quota in the next 35 seconds.

How much overlap is there between X and BlueSky? Have you seen this same post of mine on X? If so, please like or comment here to let me know (since I can't create a poll here).

In Plan 9 in ~2001, we introduced "private" processes that even a sysadmin couldn't access, debug, etc. I just learned Windows Vista added the same in 2007. The difference? We did it to protect keys held by the security agent, while Windows did it to protect media content. Priorities! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Results Age xkcd.com/3245/

Kakvu biste računalnu igru smjestili u Zagreb? ZICER i Grad Zagreb organiziraju prvi gradski game jam gdje možete osmisliti svoju ideju, razraditi prototip igre i natjecati se za nagrade. Kao ovogodišnji HACKL hackathon zadali smo za zadatak korištenje gradskog 3D modela u izradi računalne igre.

Wrote some thoughts on vibing and code quality. It's too long for this place, and my understanding is that links to the other place that shall not be named are not appreciated, so here's a LinkedIn version for you 🙈️ www.linkedin.com/posts/sasaju...

GitHub is part of a $3T company and has been inserting itself into every part of a developer's workflow for a decade now. I fully expect them to handle that.

28 years ago, I built MicroLinux - the first Croatian Linux distro: senko.net/microlinux/

Make It Myself xkcd.com/3233/

Ako da - pridružite nam se na ZGBit meetupu u Maksimirskoj 51 sutra (16.4.) u 17 h. Prijavite se na sljedećem linku jer je broj mjesta ograničen. Vidimo se! www.meetup.com/zg-bit-zagre...

I am amazed that to this day people blame Spotify for artists getting paid peanuts. Spotify pays a huge sum (70% of their revenue) to record labels, who keep the lion's share and pass on crumbs to the artists. How the labels convinced the world that Spotify was the bad guy here is beyond belief.

The peril of laziness lost bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/t...

About (not using) MCP

See, the Earth is flat. Also, fragile.

Ovaj smo mjesec na gradskoj skupštinu imali izvješće o radu u 2025. pa sam kao i prošle godine pripremio sažetak napravljenog u gradskom IT-u u protekloj godini kao novi newsletter.

Exploring how a clock untethered to our civilisation norms - but still useful in everyday life - could work: senko.net/clock/ (inspired by a recent HN discussion)

I wrote up my experience with using mutation testing for catching bad, smelly, LLM-written tests: blog.senko.net/improving-ai... Turns out, it's really useful and easy to do.

Turns out mutation testing is effective for making sure LLM-written tests actually do something useful.

This is a fun and useful tool! 1) drives home the fact that once you publish something, it's there, there's no going back, no matter what legions of GDPR legalists tell you 2) interesting to see how the writing is perceived from a neutral party, might highlight some aspects one is not aware of

I spoke about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit last month, in a fireside chat hosted by Eric Lui - here's the half hour video plus highlight quotes and extra notes from our conversation simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/14/...

On AI hype, flame wars, and dealing with the resulting hype fatigue: blog.senko.net/flame-wars-a...

Code reviews don't scale when you have thousands of lines of code built daily. We need to rethink them in the age of AI. I posted some of my thoughts about it here: senkorasic.com/articles/ret...

did captain picard lead the x-men

Ever wondered what that helpful "curl | bash" installer actually does? Paste it into curl-bash-explain.dev and find out!

Lansirali smo novi web gradskih vrtića s objedinjenim pregledom javnih nabava i natječaja za zapošljavanje. Uz to su modernizirane i ujednačene stranice pojedinih vrtića s lako dostupnim informacijama o upisima, jelovnicima itd.

Github is down. If only we had a DISTRIBUTED version control system...

A few months ago I gave a talk about responsible AI-assisted software engineering: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Dk... Since then I see more teams shifting towards the "vibe-code" (light review) end of AI usage spectrum - I'll have to make an update soon :)

Here's how I use bubblewrap to (mostly) safely use Claude in yolo mode in Linux: blog.senko.net/sandboxing-a...

Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...

Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...

Word of the day: clauding → coding using an AI agent. "Vibe coding" has negative connotations and "AI-assisted software software development" is unwieldy. What if you use Codex? Well, if you can google using Bing, you can claude using Codex.

This is slightly depressing: Claude Code just churned 4K lines of code (addition to existing project), I just had to add two lines of config. Of course it didn't work. Spent half an hour debugging. I incorrectly copy-pasted those two lines.

AI labs scraping your sites steal your content and increase your hosting costs to boot. Agree or disagree? Here's my humble suggestion on how to solve the AI scraping problem: senkorasic.com/articles/ai-...