Morning, nerds. I was trapped in a dopamine loop working on my side projects until 3am again. How's your Friday?

Thursday inspo

testing

testing

Got sick of using multiple social apps. So I've been making my own meta social app that tracks conversations and news from people I am connected with across different platforms! It uses a local model for summaries and some very carefully crafted, in-progress algorithms, vibecoded auth flows

Zero rest for the wicked! I'll be speaking about boosting Claude Code performance with prompt learning on March 17. Can't wait to share! luma.com/gwd1hbzo?tk=...

Coworking in Camden 🍵 What are you building today?

Love this for the UK but sad it's getting less funding that some LLM wrappers in the valley: share.google/BRpZXR4snvSz...

Waking up to a lot of, "but engineers don't want to be managers!" Beginning to think engineers think managing is the same thing as mentoring!

I've heard a lot of "juniors are skipping learning hard lessons! Seniors are underwater with AI-generated slop!" But I'm not sure that's what's happening. My GitHub squares turned emerald green around November. That was AI. Much of it was not carefully crafted...

What would you do?

GitHub + MCP might have been AirBnB + ReactNative headline of MCP servers. I interviewed one of the engineers behind GitHub's infamous MCP server to find out what the team learned from launch, and how they've changed their approach: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSQA...

Wrote up a tutorial for how I run a Ralph Wiggum loop (and you can, too!) github.com/nearestnabor... Do not be intimidated! The bulk of it is having long, soulful conversations with Claude Code about what success looks like

Hi from Mima!

Regular reminder that expert opinions tend to be negative and that both women and men penalise women for expressing negative opinions. If you're wondering where all the women experts are at, likely they are crushed beneath your own positivity bias

I ain't poppin'. Gotta try harder

Testing can you hear me?

Hang on... I think I was here for a Ladytron concert right before the pandemic!

Just published my first agent skill: convert comic pages to scripts! This was something really hard to do as a cartoonist—creating accessible descriptions of comics. I never had time for it. Now anyone can convert comics images to scripts: github.com/nearestnabor... Enjoy :)

Heh. Vercel is really into this "agents replacing the browser" idea. Though... I haven't seen them participating in WebMCP, local AI (Prompt API). Makes sense because their business model is hosting

Does anyone know why we're using human stem cells to build artificial brains instead of virtually any other animal? Even birds have better neurons for this. Seems less ethically disastrous for an anthropocentric civilization

Engineering: making a handcrafted chair Developer experience: making said chair ergonomic Harness engineering: finding out why the person doesn't sit in the chair and retooling the entire room to ensure best long-term posture for sedentary activities is assumed each time

Harness engineering will be a big part of what replaces developer experience engineering. As a person who is good at docs, thinking in systems, and assembling an ergonomic home from an IKEA catalog, a lot of what I've been doing already has been harness engineering open.substack.com/pub/generati...

If I shared a repo that has a tutorial and some boilerplate for setting up a Ralph Wiggum loop, will that be helpful? I've gone through some iterations to get it to a place I like, but I feel like this might be common knowledge/promotable by now?

DX is now AX

I can never tell if something I'm trying with AI is foolish/mid or noteworthy. Most of the time, I'm pretty sure "well, someone has to have tried this before, it's pretty obvious, right?" Then 4 months later something similar is BREAKING NEWS. Half the time I'm out here rubbing two sticks together

Please please don't suck. Please don't suck

Vercel's Chat SDK really drives home that chatbots are the hello world of agentic/AI development the same way blogs were the hello world of the web. Not saying that everyone NEEDS a chatbot, but it's the toy project most people will build first

Like: part of being functionally illiterate is *not being able to perceive that things may be biased*. Not understanding that someone might be lying, or wrong. Half the US stock market is now tied to LLM's, which only appear impressive if you are functionally illiterate.

I've been missing for a bit! I made a slew of content for web.dev, including this introduction to agents for web devs: web.dev/articles/ai-... I've also done a lot of collaborating with arcade.dev on MCP tools, which you can see rolling out on their blog and channel: www.arcade.dev/blog/authors...

By popular demand, I'm building a documentation pipeline that smoothly integrates documentation with engineering workflows. HMU if you want to partner. Need some test subjects!

I'm thinking about getting a new MacBook Pro. Which chip do y'all recommend for someone who runs models locally?

It's time

A lot of craftsman engineers feel like they're looking down the barrel of a gun right now with AI code. Been there. It happened to CSS + HTML. All we were left with was maintaining design systems and enforcing accessibility while JS developers gleefully slapped Tailwind classes on nests of divs.

Running my first Ralph Wiggum loop today. I've been hustling wrapping projects for clients this past week. Next week I'm hacking on my own projects, so this weekend, I'm taking a moment to invest in scalable techniques. (And yes, that means finally setting up OpenClaw in a metaphorical bucket)

Saturday Hacking: Did you know that you can use the Prompt API with Electron & a local model using @electron/llm? github.com/electron/llm Oh the ideas :)

LAST DAY to submit to AI Engineer Europe's CFP! www.accelevents.com/e/ai-enginee...

The hardest part of delayed launches: you can have the most productive sprint of your life, then everything goes quiet. The lack of reaction feels like failure, the silence like it never happened. Then it finally ships and everyone loves it, but you've already moved on and the win doesn't register

Is DX becoming AX (Agent Experience)? (Yes.) I got to interview @asjes.dev from ElevenLabs on how he is adapting his team's approach to dev rel in a world where agents do the coding for developers (would that make him an Agent Advocate?) www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPJZ...

One of the signs a company is trying to pull out of an open source project is when they donate it to the Linux foundation and hire a TPM or such to "lead" it. But look closely... if there isn't a team to go with that hire, it almost certainly going to slow to a halt. (I have been that TPM)

Every time I set out to build an agent, I end up with just an app or an automation or a pipeline that uses inference at some point. Am I doning it right?

[email protected] built a self-organizing personal organizer with a prompt, some CRUD scripts, and a folder. This feels like the future of OSes... aifoc.us/prompt-is-th...

I'm taking next week to hack on a docs automation tool I've been using with clients that improves your docs with every PR. No lift and shift to a new platform. Just switch it on where your docs PRs go. Got a few design partners. Will be fun!

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the only FPS I've played where the only melee option is a shot gun

Music to hole up with your coding agents with: open.spotify.com/playlist/31R...

In France the Thames Water stuff would have caused an actual revolution

Apple shipped MCP for agentic hacking in XCode: 9to5mac.com/2026/02/03/a...

When I dated again after divorce, the most surprising thing I noticed was how many men live under a sort of constant anxiety that they won't be ok, that they aren't enough. I suppose a woman always has a place in a community, but men live in dread of lacking a purpose or utility, being pushed out

Since LLMs have made it easy to churn out copy without content designers, I've noticed Product Marketing Managers and PSEO agencies leaning into "spray and pray" content machine strategies. That's... not working in the agentic era because...

Alas, none of my proposals made it into MCP Dev Summit NYC this year 😢 You'll just have to catch me at Future of Frontend in Finland and keynoting Pydata in London!