Articles

From Emacs to Agents May 21, 2026

The Complexity Ratchet May 15, 2026

A Tale of Two Job Markets May 3, 2026

O Moat, Where Art Thou? Apr 23, 2026

Skills, CLIs, and MCP: What They're Actually For Apr 17, 2026

Human-Agent Interaction Is Becoming the Bottleneck Apr 6, 2026

Meta-Harness: Automating the Benchmaxing Loop Apr 4, 2026

Surprising a model Mar 16, 2026

Your Agent Sessions Are Disappearing Mar 16, 2026

MCP Knife: A CLI Swiss Army Knife for MCP Servers Feb 9, 2026

mcpblox: Transform and Compose MCP Servers with Unix Pipes Feb 3, 2026

The Three Abstractions That Make AI Agents Real Jan 31, 2026

Confessions of an AI Hype-Bro Jan 28, 2026

Subagents, Commands and Skills Are Converging Jan 10, 2026

The Birth of a New Platform Dec 24, 2025

Unix Was a Love Letter to Agents Dec 20, 2025

Coding Agents Are Outliers Nov 2, 2025

Narrate Your Work Sep 14, 2025

The Assembly Language of Knowledge Work Sep 13, 2025

My Video Production Stack (for YouTube) Sep 7, 2025

Natlang Code Aug 16, 2025

The Mac-vs-PC Story Playing out in CLI Agents Aug 6, 2025

AI is a Mirror Jul 28, 2025

Plato's Cave of AI Agent Evals Jul 27, 2025

Fixing Auth for Personal AI Agents Jul 25, 2025

Does AI Make Programming Feel Like Factory Work? Jun 7, 2025

The Personal Side of Jevons Paradox in the Age of AI Jun 2, 2025

The Programmer's Climb Apr 26, 2025

Dijkstra would’ve (incorrectly) HATED vibe-coding Apr 11, 2025

The case against local LLMs Mar 29, 2025

"But LLMs are not deterministic!" Mar 28, 2025

End-user Abstraction Mar 23, 2025

AI coding - From Tactics to Strategy Feb 28, 2025

Human evals are outsourced vibe checks Feb 23, 2025

Writing is building, but software is now content Feb 23, 2025

When Compilers Were the 'AI' That Scared Programmers Feb 16, 2025

Spec-driven Vibe-coding Feb 8, 2025

Don't credit AI Feb 6, 2025

Emacs in the age of AI Jan 30, 2025

AI resistance considered harmful (for programmers) Jan 17, 2025

How I use AI (late 2024) Nov 20, 2024

Programming with LLMs: Part 1 Sep 27, 2024

Programming with LLMs: Part 2 Sep 27, 2024

Subject-object-verb, or– how we use AI Jun 30, 2024

Portability of LLM Prompts Jun 9, 2024

The de-nerdification of programming Mar 29, 2024

LLMs eat entry-level SWEs Mar 15, 2024

GPT Monologues Nov 26, 2023

Metaphors for thinking about LLMs Aug 20, 2023

Re: Why I don't use Copilot Jun 8, 2023

AI doomers will doom us May 21, 2023

IDEs and CAD Mar 19, 2023

LazyPost: Programming in the age of GPT and CoPilot Mar 15, 2023

LLMs are compilers Feb 26, 2023

A spiritual successor to Emacs Feb 14, 2023

Augmenting LLMs with APIs Feb 12, 2023

Prompt LLMs for code, not arithmetic Jan 25, 2023

Moving off Tumblr Jan 22, 2023

Hardware Acquisition Hacks Dec 28, 2020

Automatically edit out silence (dead air) from videos Aug 21, 2020

Remapping arbitrary keys in Mac OS X Jul 22, 2020

How Unix Won May 4, 2020

Manifesto for my channel Apr 15, 2019

Laptops with touchscreen keyboards May 16, 2018

Review of Chaos Monkeys Oct 7, 2017

Airspace Aug 8, 2016

Church numerals in ES6 Mar 14, 2016

Treating algorithms fairly Mar 18, 2015

IDEs in the cage Oct 27, 2014

De-skilling Oct 6, 2014

How software grows Aug 17, 2014

When to do a rewrite Jul 22, 2014

Learning your life Jul 21, 2014

Garland Words Jun 24, 2014

Lurking Smalltalk Jun 23, 2014

Heartbeats Jun 15, 2014

Why technologists want to secede May 17, 2014

Bleeding buffers May 3, 2014

You can't run with the machines Apr 13, 2014

More on fat vs thin clients Apr 7, 2014

Asynchronous Learning is More Inclusive Apr 5, 2014

The Automatic Corporation Mar 16, 2014

Pebbles and Projects Mar 13, 2014

Shedding Mar 12, 2014

The tool divergence Mar 8, 2014

The Programming Language Consensus Feb 23, 2014

Technium Feb 19, 2014

Hand-drawn maps Feb 18, 2014

Star Trek vs Babylon 5 Jan 23, 2014

Fat Client, Thin Client Jan 20, 2014

The Contours of My Attention Jan 19, 2014

Go lang Jan 11, 2014

The Human Resolution Threshold Jan 8, 2014

The Distraction Addiction Jan 1, 2014

Best of 2013 Dec 30, 2013

Generation AD Dec 12, 2013

To tool or not to tool? Dec 10, 2013

Automating software engineering Nov 14, 2013

Sharp tools, dull minds Nov 10, 2013

Malcolm Gladwell and the narrative fallacy Nov 4, 2013

The 1964 origins of responsive design Nov 2, 2013

What changed in 1991 in India? Oct 30, 2013

(A tiny step towards) Automating Web Design Oct 29, 2013

Rules for Computing Happiness Oct 23, 2013

Should I do a PhD? Oct 17, 2013

My review: The Year Without Pants Oct 12, 2013

How will you read your files in a hundred years? Oct 7, 2013

"The Mundanity of Excellence" Oct 1, 2013

Why you should subscribe to my newsletter Sep 23, 2013

Research Roundup: Programming and Remote Teams Sep 16, 2013

Is there a STEM worker shortage? Sep 12, 2013

Rangers Sep 10, 2013

Taking your company completely remote Sep 9, 2013

Long form on the web Sep 6, 2013

We are all remote workers Sep 5, 2013

Talented Beast Aug 28, 2013

Asset allocation is everything Aug 26, 2013

Maintenance is not a bad word Aug 21, 2013

The cost of memory safety Aug 19, 2013

How Hugh MacLeod got my money Aug 15, 2013

The difference between a herd and a crowd Aug 12, 2013

HTTP 2.0 marks the end of an era Aug 9, 2013

The Organic Digital Aug 1, 2013

The Real New Aesthetic Aug 1, 2013

Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption Jul 31, 2013

Native mobile apps are a stopgap Jul 30, 2013

The perils of being a knowledge worker Jul 23, 2013

C++14 Jul 20, 2013

How I do email Jul 17, 2013

Balance Jul 10, 2013

"We don't do email, email does us" Jul 8, 2013

Waiting faster Jul 6, 2013

NPS Jul 2, 2013

The laziness of synchronous work Jun 29, 2013

Mindfulness sells Jun 22, 2013

CPU pipelines and the structure of work Jun 7, 2013

Backup in the age of the cloud Jun 3, 2013

The One Thing May 22, 2013

Games as a hook into CS May 16, 2013

What do you think computer science is? May 15, 2013

Future programming May 6, 2013

Patterns of use Apr 14, 2013

Abolish the "Save" icon Apr 7, 2013

RIP Ebert Apr 5, 2013

Start here Mar 24, 2013

We are all Mad Men Mar 23, 2013

Meetings are mutexes Mar 22, 2013

STEM jobs Mar 20, 2013

Strong opinions, weakly held Mar 17, 2013

Zero Knowledge Mar 14, 2013

Addicted to work Mar 12, 2013

What I work on… Mar 12, 2013

Moving to Chrome OS Mar 7, 2013

From the mouths of babes Feb 28, 2013

Factory machines Feb 26, 2013

The new luxury Feb 21, 2013

Productivity isn't Feb 10, 2013

Colorful geometry Feb 6, 2013

Review: Close to the Machine Feb 5, 2013

Computer Science PhD trends Jan 31, 2013

Tackling tail latency Jan 29, 2013

Blue collar coders Jan 28, 2013

The void Jan 27, 2013

Engineering, Culture and Tools Jan 18, 2013

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Review Jan 13, 2013

Scaling communication: email vs shared documents Jan 8, 2013

The rise of fimperative programming Jan 7, 2013

Grateful for technology? Jan 4, 2013

Best of 2012 Dec 31, 2012

New theme Dec 29, 2012

Good reads of 2012 Dec 26, 2012

Writing on a tablet Dec 21, 2012

Quantum of Work Dec 20, 2012

Testing Redux Dec 12, 2012

Need to remember Dec 1, 2012

Some advice on internships Nov 29, 2012

The new C++ Nov 25, 2012

Treesaver-based copy of this blog Nov 23, 2012

A Programmer's Thanksgiving Nov 22, 2012

Interviews (and whiteboard coding) Nov 21, 2012

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" Nov 16, 2012

MOOCs will eat academia Nov 9, 2012

A rare retrospective on a decade-long research project Nov 4, 2012

Deep Shelling Oct 31, 2012

Why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age) Oct 26, 2012

Coaching and review Oct 21, 2012

How did software get so reliable? Oct 18, 2012

It Might Get Loud Oct 14, 2012

Poor man's DIY little printer Oct 8, 2012

Money in the Valley Oct 7, 2012

Science = Prediction Sep 30, 2012

Datacenter power Sep 23, 2012

Citation Reliability Sep 21, 2012

New frontiers in text editing Sep 20, 2012

English is heavily left-handed Sep 13, 2012

Writing and happiness Sep 11, 2012

Shitty legacy maintenance Sep 4, 2012

Personal Trainers for Software Aug 30, 2012

The levels of agility Aug 27, 2012

A Twitter-based Anagram Game Aug 26, 2012

The Cubicle Dilemma Aug 15, 2012

What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry? Aug 12, 2012

The lure of work Aug 10, 2012

Review: The Computer Boys Take Over Aug 6, 2012

Productivity porn Jul 31, 2012

What mobile development taught me Jul 27, 2012

Is C/C++ worth it? Jul 24, 2012

On Vagueness Jul 17, 2012

Teaching data structures with real-world examples Jul 15, 2012

How I read now Jul 14, 2012

Management models Jul 9, 2012

The Nostalgia Trap Jul 5, 2012

Working asynchronously Jul 1, 2012

Recent updates to old posts Jun 27, 2012

Social Engineering for Programming Languages Jun 26, 2012

The Interested Minority Jun 19, 2012

Advice to (prospective) grad students Jun 14, 2012

Operations should be in the computer science curriculum May 29, 2012

Executable Thought May 20, 2012

The need for Easter eggs May 17, 2012

The 7 stages of debugging May 16, 2012

My setup May 13, 2012

Big science funding May 7, 2012

Bug finding and static analysis in the real world May 2, 2012

Church numerals in Python Apr 21, 2012

The carrier-messenger wars Apr 17, 2012

The components of a university Apr 16, 2012

Mediated Concert Apr 15, 2012

Reproducing papers Apr 10, 2012

If you see a stylus, they blew it. Not. Apr 9, 2012

Code review. Just do it. Apr 1, 2012

Jonah Lehrer Mar 28, 2012

Computational thinking Mar 24, 2012

Themes: Language Mar 20, 2012

Showing it Mar 19, 2012

Themes: The Economics of Programming Mar 19, 2012

Themes: Modern Work Mar 18, 2012

Blue Java Mar 16, 2012

Innovator's dilemma in programming languages Mar 15, 2012

T-shirts are currency Mar 12, 2012

The intimacy of imperfect technologies Mar 9, 2012

Whither programming language research? Mar 4, 2012

Taylorist Science Mar 3, 2012

Team Science Feb 29, 2012

How to debate Feb 21, 2012

Hookah Feb 20, 2012

Rational Equivalence Feb 17, 2012

Why I blog Feb 15, 2012

Carr and Kelly Feb 14, 2012

Guru moment Feb 12, 2012

Repositories of science Jan 21, 2012

Computation in the wild Jan 18, 2012

The CS assignment I wish I had Jan 10, 2012

Iteration Jan 4, 2012

Best of 2011 Dec 28, 2011

How to make your new programming language successful Dec 26, 2011

The 0.1x developer Dec 6, 2011

The monk tax Dec 5, 2011

The programming assembly-line Nov 23, 2011

The abstraction-optimization tradeoff Nov 14, 2011

The origins of Silicon Valley Nov 8, 2011

Jumping to analysis Nov 7, 2011

The empirical science of happiness Oct 27, 2011

Flash Crisis Oct 17, 2011

Deft with descriptive filenames Oct 2, 2011

Why developers should learn the economics of code Oct 2, 2011

Size is the best predictor of code quality Sep 25, 2011

Smeed's Law for Programming Sep 12, 2011

The Poisonous Long Tail Sep 6, 2011

How things grow Aug 28, 2011

Reading Happiness Aug 26, 2011

GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression Aug 15, 2011

The Upside of Complexity Aug 9, 2011

Do you have an RSI prevention plan? Aug 1, 2011

An ergonomic keyboard and mouse configuration Jul 28, 2011

Media Meta Argument Jul 11, 2011

Large Computer Systems are Organic Jun 27, 2011

Emacs as a login shell Jun 7, 2011

Comments on Stallman's Dystopia May 21, 2011

Stallman's Dystopia May 20, 2011

The Perils of Closed Worlds May 16, 2011

More machines, more reliability May 9, 2011

Teaching as performance May 5, 2011

Side effects of PhD programs Apr 27, 2011

dotEmacs Extract: Interactively change font size Apr 21, 2011

OOP = FP? Apr 11, 2011

Sun Ray Apr 11, 2011

The Shy Scientist Mar 26, 2011

The levels of Emacs proficiency Mar 21, 2011

Cracks in Minimalism Mar 19, 2011

tldr summary: The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance Mar 15, 2011

In Aggregate Mar 8, 2011

Turn your blog into an online magazine - a blogmag Mar 3, 2011

Michael Crichton Feb 26, 2011

Alone Together Feb 20, 2011

The Cognitive Style of Unix Feb 17, 2011

How the first Gulf War brought modernity to India Jan 28, 2011

How to Write a Twitter Bot in Python Jan 19, 2011

Englsh Wtht Vwls Jan 13, 2011

Presentism Jan 8, 2011

Stephenson on Emacs Jan 5, 2011

Text Input: The Next Frontier Jan 4, 2011

Best of 2010 Dec 31, 2010