Technology Commentary

You have to understand architecture in order to teach agents about it

Anthropic's head of product explains why eval suites replaced PRDs, how coding became a strategic priority, and what small teams can unlock at the AI frontier.

Since it took us years to get into the cloud in the first place, I originally imagined it would take us years to get out as well. But all that work to containerize our applications and prepare them for the cloud actually turned out to make it relatively easy to exit. And now, after six months of effort, it's done. We're out. The last a...

Hey guess what? My employer of 15 years (and my company of 18 months) is joining forces with the worker-owned cooperative, Igalia! To be honest, I’m going to miss working at and on Bocoup. There are very few1 institutions to which I’ve belonged for so long. This one’s given me many unforgettable memories, and while most are positive, they’re all important to me. For better and for worse, Bocoup has been a part of who I am for all these years.

AI-driven incident correlation helps SRE and DevOps teams reduce alert noise and improve MTTR by connecting related metrics, logs and traces.

Last week I ran into an old pal at a party who asked me what I thought of the “SaaSpocalypse” – the AI-driven correction that hit nearly all software stocks over the past few quar…

Today Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus of multi-billionaires who feel compelled to issue periodic manifestos about the impact of AI on society. Unlike Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who …

Earlier this week I posted something of a coda for the open web, but today news broke of a small victory for “how things used to be.” The backstory: For decades, Google has been …

Every so often the tech world appropriates a perfectly pedestrian word and imbues it with meaning well beyond its settled definition. For centuries “computer” was an obscure term refere…

I’ve always loved writing, and took to this form – the “thinking out loud” version of blogging – more than 20 years ago. I started Searchblog after I sold my first boo…

[For over a decade I have been talking about protopia, but I have never written out my description of it. What follows is my best case for this idea, which I first coined in 2011.] Protopia is a plausible, desirable … Continue reading →

In January 2019 I wrote out scores of prompts for thinking long term that I felt should inform the foundation I was later co-chair of, The Long Now Foundation. These axioms were only shared internally, but I feel they would … Continue reading →

The next stage in the development of AIs is to give them spatial intelligence. Our current, smartest AIs are masters of words. They have been trained on zillions of words. Their education consists of the knowledge we have written down … Continue reading →

Back in January, I received a note from a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley. He described himself as an AI skeptic who became converted ... Read more

As AI companies move beyond one-model strategies, routing requests to the right model has become a product category of its own.

How generative AI is reshaping education, student learning, critical thinking, and academic assessment, and where assistance becomes substitution.

Namtao Productions produces No Boilerplate, Lost Terminal, Modem Prometheus, and The Phosphene Catalogue

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

The story of how I became Radicle-ized.

If you are an Emacs user with a keen eye, you will have noticed that in Emacs Lisp, code is data. After all, 'Lisp' is shorthand for 'List Processing'. One of E...

JSON looks like a faithful representation of JavaScript data, but JSON.stringify and JSON.parse can silently alter or discard information at system boundaries.

Why recurring cross-team meetings reveal hidden system invariants, and when coordination should move into architecture instead.

What recent data reveals about the role of managers in the age of flattening orgs.

Programming language drama ensues as tech bros oversell the end of software engineering.

Earie Salmon explains why soldering skills are only the start

The age of personalized software is here.

The file-sharing app launched 25 years ago and unleashed a wave of piracy that would shake Hollywood to its core.