How Hyper-Personalized Software Challenges Open Source
AI makes it cheap to build software for exactly one person's workflow. The idea is twenty years old, but suddenly feasible. And it breaks an assumption at the heart of open source collaboration.
When AI Writes the Code, Specifications Need an Exit Strategy
AI coding teams need small change briefs, native engineering artifacts, and enough judgment to stop Markdown specifications becoming a second codebase.
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission.Technical debt lives in
Drew Breunig is one of the smartest voices writing about AI today. He's the CEO and co-founder of cmpnd.ai, and a long-time hacker with a depth of experience
The 24-hour experiment that helped Anthropic find its identity
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.
John Battelle's Search Blog AI Is Just (Currently Bad) Software
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…
John Battelle's Search Blog The Valley Is Terrified of AI
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 …
John Battelle's Search Blog Who Owns Search Results?
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 …
John Battelle's Search Blog Who Controls the Tokens?
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…
John Battelle's Search Blog I’ll Be Framing My AI Check
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
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.