Freshly inked

Cognitive Debt and the Future of Programming

Geoffrey Litt recently gave a talk at AI Engineer called “Understanding is the new bottleneck”. Simon Willison boiled its central phrase down to “understand to participate”: if agents are writing more and more of our code, we still need enough understanding of that code to remain active …

July 4, 2026 · 7 minute read · AI & LLMs

Recent essays

May 29, 2026 · AI & LLMs

The tension between local and cloud agents

I’ve grown to strongly prefer agents running locally on my own machine. I was doing so even before the latest crop of features from Anthropic and OpenAI that made it possible to remote-control local agents from their mobile apps — something that has made the …

May 21, 2026 · AI & LLMs

From Emacs to Agents

I used to be a heavy Emacs user. Note the past tense.

May 15, 2026 · AI & LLMs

The Complexity Ratchet

Recently, Jasmine Sun wrote a long op-ed in the New York Times about the notion of a permanent underclass. Everyone at the big AI labs is convinced that AI will eventually replace all human labor — all human knowledge work — and that if we don’t calibrate our …

May 3, 2026 · AI & LLMs

Everything else, year by year

2026 9 essays

2025 26 essays

Dec 24The Birth of a New Platform
Dec 20Unix Was a Love Letter to Agents
Nov 2Coding Agents Are Outliers
Sep 14Narrate Your Work
Sep 13The Assembly Language of Knowledge Work
Sep 7My Video Production Stack (for YouTube)
Aug 16Natlang Code
Aug 6The Mac-vs-PC Story Playing out in CLI Agents
Jul 28AI is a Mirror
Jul 27Plato's Cave of AI Agent Evals
Jul 25Fixing Auth for Personal AI Agents
Jun 7Does AI Make Programming Feel Like Factory Work?
Jun 2The Personal Side of Jevons Paradox in the Age of AI
Apr 26The Programmer's Climb
Apr 11Dijkstra would’ve (incorrectly) HATED vibe-coding
Mar 29The case against local LLMs
Mar 28 "But LLMs are not deterministic!"
Mar 23End-user Abstraction
Feb 28AI coding - From Tactics to Strategy
Feb 23Writing is building, but software is now content
Feb 23Human evals are outsourced vibe checks
Feb 16When Compilers Were the 'AI' That Scared Programmers
Feb 8Spec-driven Vibe-coding
Feb 6Don't credit AI
Jan 30Emacs in the age of AI
Jan 17AI resistance considered harmful (for programmers)

2024 7 essays

Nov 20How I use AI (late 2024)
Sep 27Programming with LLMs: Part 2
Sep 27Programming with LLMs: Part 1
Jun 30Subject-object-verb, or– how we use AI
Jun 9Portability of LLM Prompts
Mar 29The de-nerdification of programming
Mar 15LLMs eat entry-level SWEs

2023 11 essays

Nov 26GPT Monologues
Aug 20Metaphors for thinking about LLMs
Jun 8Re: Why I don't use Copilot
May 21AI doomers will doom us
Mar 19IDEs and CAD
Mar 15LazyPost: Programming in the age of GPT and CoPilot
Feb 26LLMs are compilers
Feb 14A spiritual successor to Emacs
Feb 12Augmenting LLMs with APIs
Jan 25Prompt LLMs for code, not arithmetic
Jan 22Moving off Tumblr

2020 4 essays

Dec 28Hardware Acquisition Hacks
Aug 21Automatically edit out silence (dead air) from videos
Jul 22Remapping arbitrary keys in Mac OS X
May 4How Unix Won

2019 1 essay

Apr 15Manifesto for my channel

2018 1 essay

May 16Laptops with touchscreen keyboards

2017 1 essay

Oct 7Review of Chaos Monkeys

2016 2 essays

Aug 8Airspace
Mar 14Church numerals in ES6

2015 1 essay

Mar 18Treating algorithms fairly

2014 26 essays

Oct 27IDEs in the cage
Oct 6De-skilling
Aug 17How software grows
Jul 22When to do a rewrite
Jul 21Learning your life
Jun 24Garland Words
Jun 23Lurking Smalltalk
Jun 15Heartbeats
May 17Why technologists want to secede
May 3Bleeding buffers
Apr 13You can't run with the machines
Apr 7More on fat vs thin clients
Apr 5Asynchronous Learning is More Inclusive
Mar 16The Automatic Corporation
Mar 13Pebbles and Projects
Mar 12Shedding
Mar 8The tool divergence
Feb 23The Programming Language Consensus
Feb 19Technium
Feb 18Hand-drawn maps
Jan 23Star Trek vs Babylon 5
Jan 20Fat Client, Thin Client
Jan 19The Contours of My Attention
Jan 11Go lang
Jan 8The Human Resolution Threshold
Jan 1The Distraction Addiction

2013 74 essays

Dec 30Best of 2013
Dec 12Generation AD
Dec 10To tool or not to tool?
Nov 14Automating software engineering
Nov 10Sharp tools, dull minds
Nov 4Malcolm Gladwell and the narrative fallacy
Nov 2The 1964 origins of responsive design
Oct 30What changed in 1991 in India?
Oct 29(A tiny step towards) Automating Web Design
Oct 23Rules for Computing Happiness
Oct 17Should I do a PhD?
Oct 12My review: The Year Without Pants
Oct 7How will you read your files in a hundred years?
Oct 1 "The Mundanity of Excellence"
Sep 23Why you should subscribe to my newsletter
Sep 16Research Roundup: Programming and Remote Teams
Sep 12Is there a STEM worker shortage?
Sep 10Rangers
Sep 9Taking your company completely remote
Sep 6Long form on the web
Sep 5We are all remote workers
Aug 28Talented Beast
Aug 26Asset allocation is everything
Aug 21Maintenance is not a bad word
Aug 19The cost of memory safety
Aug 15How Hugh MacLeod got my money
Aug 12The difference between a herd and a crowd
Aug 9HTTP 2.0 marks the end of an era
Aug 1The Real New Aesthetic
Aug 1The Organic Digital
Jul 31Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption
Jul 30Native mobile apps are a stopgap
Jul 23The perils of being a knowledge worker
Jul 20C++14
Jul 17How I do email
Jul 10Balance
Jul 8 "We don't do email, email does us"
Jul 6Waiting faster
Jul 2NPS
Jun 29The laziness of synchronous work
Jun 22Mindfulness sells
Jun 7CPU pipelines and the structure of work
Jun 3Backup in the age of the cloud
May 22The One Thing
May 16Games as a hook into CS
May 15What do you think computer science is?
May 6Future programming
Apr 14Patterns of use
Apr 7 Abolish the "Save" icon
Apr 5RIP Ebert
Mar 24Start here
Mar 23We are all Mad Men
Mar 22Meetings are mutexes
Mar 20STEM jobs
Mar 17Strong opinions, weakly held
Mar 14Zero Knowledge
Mar 12What I work on…
Mar 12Addicted to work
Mar 7Moving to Chrome OS
Feb 28From the mouths of babes
Feb 26Factory machines
Feb 21The new luxury
Feb 10Productivity isn't
Feb 6Colorful geometry
Feb 5Review: Close to the Machine
Jan 31Computer Science PhD trends
Jan 29Tackling tail latency
Jan 28Blue collar coders
Jan 27The void
Jan 18Engineering, Culture and Tools
Jan 13So Good They Can't Ignore You: Review
Jan 8Scaling communication: email vs shared documents
Jan 7The rise of fimperative programming
Jan 4Grateful for technology?

2012 86 essays

Dec 31Best of 2012
Dec 29New theme
Dec 26Good reads of 2012
Dec 21Writing on a tablet
Dec 20Quantum of Work
Dec 12Testing Redux
Dec 1Need to remember
Nov 29Some advice on internships
Nov 25The new C++
Nov 23Treesaver-based copy of this blog
Nov 22A Programmer's Thanksgiving
Nov 21Interviews (and whiteboard coding)
Nov 16 "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
Nov 9MOOCs will eat academia
Nov 4A rare retrospective on a decade-long research project
Oct 31Deep Shelling
Oct 26Why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age)
Oct 21Coaching and review
Oct 18How did software get so reliable?
Oct 14It Might Get Loud
Oct 8Poor man's DIY little printer
Oct 7Money in the Valley
Sep 30Science = Prediction
Sep 23Datacenter power
Sep 21Citation Reliability
Sep 20New frontiers in text editing
Sep 13English is heavily left-handed
Sep 11Writing and happiness
Sep 4Shitty legacy maintenance
Aug 30Personal Trainers for Software
Aug 27The levels of agility
Aug 26A Twitter-based Anagram Game
Aug 15The Cubicle Dilemma
Aug 12What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry?
Aug 10The lure of work
Aug 6Review: The Computer Boys Take Over
Jul 31Productivity porn
Jul 27What mobile development taught me
Jul 24Is C/C++ worth it?
Jul 17On Vagueness
Jul 15Teaching data structures with real-world examples
Jul 14How I read now
Jul 9Management models
Jul 5The Nostalgia Trap
Jul 1Working asynchronously
Jun 27Recent updates to old posts
Jun 26Social Engineering for Programming Languages
Jun 19The Interested Minority
Jun 14Advice to (prospective) grad students
May 29Operations should be in the computer science curriculum
May 20Executable Thought
May 17The need for Easter eggs
May 16The 7 stages of debugging
May 13My setup
May 7Big science funding
May 2Bug finding and static analysis in the real world
Apr 21Church numerals in Python
Apr 17The carrier-messenger wars
Apr 16The components of a university
Apr 15Mediated Concert
Apr 10Reproducing papers
Apr 9If you see a stylus, they blew it. Not.
Apr 1Code review. Just do it.
Mar 28Jonah Lehrer
Mar 24Computational thinking
Mar 20Themes: Language
Mar 19Themes: The Economics of Programming
Mar 19Showing it
Mar 18Themes: Modern Work
Mar 16Blue Java
Mar 15Innovator's dilemma in programming languages
Mar 12T-shirts are currency
Mar 9The intimacy of imperfect technologies
Mar 4Whither programming language research?
Mar 3Taylorist Science
Feb 29Team Science
Feb 21How to debate
Feb 20Hookah
Feb 17Rational Equivalence
Feb 15Why I blog
Feb 14Carr and Kelly
Feb 12Guru moment
Jan 21Repositories of science
Jan 18Computation in the wild
Jan 10The CS assignment I wish I had
Jan 4Iteration

2011 48 essays

Dec 28Best of 2011
Dec 26How to make your new programming language successful
Dec 6The 0.1x developer
Dec 5The monk tax
Nov 23The programming assembly-line
Nov 14The abstraction-optimization tradeoff
Nov 8The origins of Silicon Valley
Nov 7Jumping to analysis
Oct 27The empirical science of happiness
Oct 17Flash Crisis
Oct 2Why developers should learn the economics of code
Oct 2Deft with descriptive filenames
Sep 25Size is the best predictor of code quality
Sep 12Smeed's Law for Programming
Sep 6The Poisonous Long Tail
Aug 28How things grow
Aug 26Reading Happiness
Aug 15GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression
Aug 9The Upside of Complexity
Aug 1Do you have an RSI prevention plan?
Jul 28An ergonomic keyboard and mouse configuration
Jul 11Media Meta Argument
Jun 27Large Computer Systems are Organic
Jun 7Emacs as a login shell
May 21Comments on Stallman's Dystopia
May 20Stallman's Dystopia
May 16The Perils of Closed Worlds
May 9More machines, more reliability
May 5Teaching as performance
Apr 27Side effects of PhD programs
Apr 21dotEmacs Extract: Interactively change font size
Apr 11Sun Ray
Apr 11OOP = FP?
Mar 26The Shy Scientist
Mar 21The levels of Emacs proficiency
Mar 19Cracks in Minimalism
Mar 15tldr summary: The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance
Mar 8In Aggregate
Mar 3Turn your blog into an online magazine - a blogmag
Feb 26Michael Crichton
Feb 20Alone Together
Feb 17The Cognitive Style of Unix
Jan 28How the first Gulf War brought modernity to India
Jan 19How to Write a Twitter Bot in Python
Jan 13Englsh Wtht Vwls
Jan 8Presentism
Jan 5Stephenson on Emacs
Jan 4Text Input: The Next Frontier

2010 33 essays

Dec 31More on and or
Dec 31Best of 2010
Dec 30Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy
Dec 28 Parsing "and/or"
Dec 6Use Accessibility Technologies Before You Have To
Nov 22Ode to the Album
Nov 22Editing Google Docs in Emacs
Nov 20Posting to Tumblr from Emacs
Oct 4Coding blind
Sep 29My favorite Chrome extensions
Aug 28The 18th Century Origins of Lolcat-speak
Aug 20To jump or not to jump?
Aug 16Deresiewicz: Essays about the Internet
Aug 9Listening to your reading
Jul 26Engineering is all about failure
Jul 14Accessing Google's RESTful APIs from Google Apps Script
Jul 6The Internet is making us smarter, but is it making me dumber?
Jun 30Taylorism in the modern tech industry
Jun 21Checking into Internet rehab - and sneaking out
Jun 17What can Kanye and U2 teach you about teamwork?
May 7Nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns
May 4Upsight
May 2Medium Shear
May 1English Words Lifted from Hindi
Apr 25Dilli
Apr 3Text to speech in MacOS X - automatically
Mar 30Collecting Needles
Mar 18Gabriel vs Brooks
Mar 15Software processes are software too
Mar 11Why James Cameron did not win the Academy award for best director for Avatar
Mar 9No ||
Mar 5Google Apps Script + Spreadsheets = Mashup Hub
Mar 1Connecting my blog to Buzz