The systems that matter will not be the ones that can keep going. They all can.
The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
On reward functions, dopamine, and what it actually feels like when the code starts writing itself
108 PRs in eight days: Accidentally discovering loop engineering | Brittany Ellich | Offprint
How I shipped 108 PRs in eight days with an agent working my task board: the loop engineering setup, constraints, and lessons that made it work.
</> htmx ~ Working With AI: A Concrete Example
In this essay, Carson Gross walks through a concrete bug fix in hyperscript to show where AI helped, where it fell short, and why keeping a knowledgeable human in the loop is what kept complexity in check.
Background Coding Agents: Predictable Results Through Strong Feedback Loops (Part 3) | Spotify Engineering
This is part 3 in our series about Spotify's journey with background coding agents and the future of large-scale software maintenance. See also and .
Europe 2031 — What getting AI wrong means for us
A five-year scenario about AI and Europe's impending slide into irrelevance, with a 2034 epilogue that describes how the collapse of the European model could have been prevented.
I work, I think? - Annotated
How AI may quietly dismantle the feedback loop that turns inexperienced people into competent ones, and why my work matters to me.
physics as a game loop. part 1: objects and waves - underreacted
Creative limitation
Creative limitation is the concept of how purposely limiting oneself can actually drive creativity. At a 2013 TED conference, artist Phil Hansen made several remarks concerning the value of limitations, among them that "We need to first be limited in order to become limitless,” and “If you treat the problems as possibilities, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing ways.”[TED.com 1]
Requisite Variety - gordonbrander.com
If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.
Holdfast 0: Situating
This post introduces the written version of some optimistic and constructive thinking on knowledge in networks that I’ve been wrestling with since the end of last year.
Pluralistic: Model collapse (12 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
Serpentine software
I don’t usually write hot takes. But StrongDM’s Software Factory post is worth it, so here goes. Their post is elegant, short, and well-written, so I’m going to just go through a bunch of pull quotes. Compounding correctness long-horizon agentic coding workflows [now] compound correctness rather than error This is a big, empirical claim. I’m already convinced by my own experiences that agents, suitably scaffolded, can form a Brownian ratchet, such that pouring on more compute helps, on balance.
The Bazaar of Scientific Knowledge | shishyko!
What if we didn't collapse all the knowledge from the scientific process into one paper?
The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us
The massive chasm between AI hype and reality is finally reaching the breaking point.
