I really enjoyed Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold last summer. A friend recommended Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy as a good follow up read.

One of the best parts about being on the train (Amtrak) is seeing all the other people that are completely jazzed to be on a train.

Went to do something simple: set up DNS record Decided to make it way more complicated: initiate transfer from original registrar to cloudflare so that I can use an ALIAS DNS record

The people do not yearn for automation

is it a bug or a feature?

I've probably posted this one before, but what a great set from four tet www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cd5...

I go to the mountains for a long weekend and Opus 4.7 drops while I'm gone 👀

My next fiction read is Jesse Ball’s The Repeat Room. It’s another recommendation by a friend who recommends so many of the good books I read.

Mid-April and only four books in on the year 😬 I’ve got some reading to do.

Sometimes a little bug lands in your old fashioned and you’ve got to sip around it.

Listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue on vinyl while putting in some focused pool practice with the Mighty X drill — had me deep in the zone 🙇

If you thought :wq was a cool way to quit vim, wait until you here about :cq This quits with an error code which is very useful when vim has been called by another program like git, claude code, a REPL, etc. It prevents the calling program from "submitting" the vim buffer's contents.

*open up article I'd like to read in browser* *start to read article* *see how small the scroll bar is* *scroll to bottom of article to see if it is really that long; it is* *close browser tab*

I consumed a lot of media over the past week: - Knights of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO) - The Traitors S1 (Peacock) — later seasons are *much* better - Project Hail Mary (Alamo Drafthouse) - Demon Slayer: Entertainment District Arc (CrunchyRoll)

My main mode of operating is to imagine that "the situation resolves itself somehow." And let me tell you, it almost never does.

Substack is doing something with their email subscription validation checks that prevents "plus addressing" your email when signing up for a newsletter 🤔

Hidden Knowledge Unlocked: Wrigley Field is bikeable from Logan Square in under 20 minutes. Much faster than the blue line to Addison and then the 30 to 50-minute game day slog of a bus ride down Addison.

Seems instructive to both find the uneven edges of what LLMs do well and to experience how important domain expertise is in sifting through the bs. The intuitions behind using LLMs well are not obvious or free — it takes ongoing experimentation ime

How would you define an "abstraction" in software engineering? Not with examples, but like as a definition

I am "Netflix send DVDs in the mail" years old 🥴 www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2026/04...

I can already tell that "mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font" is a phrase that will live rent free in my mind forever

This is one of the best (at this level of concision) laymen explanations and demystifications of LLMs that I’ve seen. A frequent misconception I hear is that LLMs remember your conversations and train on your conversations. Sorta true, but probably not in the way they are thinking.

I’m reading yet another one of Keigo Higashino’s Detective Galileo murder mysteries — this one is called Invisible Helix.

5/ In general, work that shortens feedback loops is the most valuable "metaproject" work that can be done on a project. Doesn't matter what feedback loop: testing, compiling, deploying, getting customer feedback, analyzing data, whatever

I didn't have "Tamagochi embedded in my LLM coding harness" on my bingo card.

I took advantage of the Easter weekend to get my entire family hooked on The Traitors 🔪

I’m finally getting to Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins. Unique novel written from the perspective of obituaries sometimes jumping back and forth by many dozens of years.

I tried out a version of @mattpocock.com "grill me" prompt to flesh out the details of a vague feature today. It has been several model releases since I last did this kind of LLM interview prompt... and I was really caught off guard by how useful it was. still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/271

two-hour set with Fred Again.. and Thomas Bangalter (of Daft Punk) 🤩 www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfF8...

I didn't expect at this point in my life that I'd have an unpaid part-time job doing all the little daily games.

Lately I include "Use Red/Green TDD" as part of planning prompts in Cursor. 1. I've been getting good results. 2. Unexpected benefit is that reviewing agent diffs tells a nice story because it shows files in edit-order -- test -> relevant file, another test -> relevant file, so forth.

Fun bit of grep history I just learned from a lobsters commenter: “Grep is in fact short for the ed command g/<regular expression>/p shortened to g/re/p and then dropping the slashes.” lobste.rs/s/kqnoi9/oka...

I incorrectly assumed that Zsh was using `readline` just like bash and a ton of other command line programs. Instead, it uses its own implementation called `zle`. github.com/jbranchaud/t...

Migrating the rest of my workday to out on the porch

this is exactly right and explains why most handwringing about building systems we don’t understand is misplaced. pre-LLM software engineering already consisted almost entirely of building systems we did not understand

It’s baseball season, baby ⚾️ For the fourth year running I went to the Cubs home opener. Despite the threat of pleasant weather, a cold front managed to blow in and make for a chilly, rainy 4-10 loss.

So many good shell tricks in this post — many of these I use everyday like Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E and some bash substitution tricks, but also many new-to-me tips that I’ve gotta work into my day-to-day still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/265

I popped in to the Wednesday night 8-ball tournament at Chris’s Billiards for the first time in forever. Won all my matches and ended up in the money 🤑

I'm hearing the term "AI Psychosis" all over the place right now. still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/263

dear god, no wonder my laptop is heating the room I'm in

It's all, "you must be in the office 3 days a week" and "we will monitor badge scans", but suddenly if your name is Claude they have no problem with you working remote from your favorite data center.

Ruby's "case equality operator" (`===`) is such a powerful, foundational language feature that underlies a bunch of expressive language capabilities. I only just learned about `#grep` which is very cool and the subject of my latest TIL github.com/jbranchaud/t...

I’m out here reading in the sunshine and I can see my cat through the sliding door glaring at me with so much jealousy — might have to look into getting a collapsible catio this summer.

Have you had the experience of negotiating an LLM token budget during your job search? What was that convo like?

(explaining to an LLM how to have a breakthrough) okay you're going to need to work on something unrelated for a week or two, then take a shower, at which point the solution will just appear in your head

How often do you go look for an answer directly in core language/tool/framework docs or man pages? Versus how often do you go to google or an LLM first? Related, is there still value to knowing how to navigate some of your core docs well?

Updating the signature line of my email to read, "Josh is a human and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses."

worse than that, this denial leads to extremely wrong predictions about what is going to happen over the next year (it’s going away any time guys!), and getting those predictions roughly right is very important for people’s careers and their professions’ ability to cope and adapt

I asked Claude to whip up a quick page that uses a D20 mechanic with logarithmic weighting of the rankings plus a vibe check to help me fill out my NCAA March Madness Bracket. It decided to really lean in on a D&D vibe 🏀⚔️🎲

Thanks to a solid recommendation by @jakeworth.com, I've added an icon and header definition to still.visualmode.dev "/stɪl/ n. an apparatus used to distill my ideas from raw to refined."