Slow thoughts on fast tech.
AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?
Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for non-tech friends and family on what AI is starting to change.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
Track, control, and optimize for AI agents and bots | Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors)
Use Known Agents to turn the rising wave of AI agents, LLM assistants, and other bots crawling your website into a new growth channel for your business
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.
Is AI causing a repeat of Frontend’s Lost Decade? | Mastro Blog
AI is doing to programming what framework-brain did to the frontend before. Deskilling, or just working at a higher level of abstraction?
Karpathy says developers have 'AI Psychosis.' Everyone else is next.
Anthropic’s Mythos, Gen Z’s backlash, and Meta’s token binge all point to the same shift: developers are feeling AI first, but not for long.
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
What happens when AI replaces the parts of work people love?
We’re using AI to move faster. I’m not yet convinced we’re using it to work better.
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale
On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code
Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.
AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.
