Technology Commentary

Posted on Saturday 30 May 2026. 1,624 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.

NanoClaw founder Gavriel Cohen on why OpenClaw's half-million lines of code doomed it, and how containers and security drove his rebuild.

Plus AI security, the compute arms race, and why eventually there may no longer be an internet for humans

Securing access isn’t enough. As agents begin calling other agents, enterprises need to secure delegation too.

A senior engineer’s job is mostly the parts that don’t show up in the diff. Specs. Tests. Reviews. Scope discipline. Refusing to ship what can’t be verified. AI coding agents skip those parts by default. Agent Skills is my attempt to make them not optional.

How to keep agents and skills from losing track mid-workflow

When open strategy meets private tactics

My old friend Jeff was always vocally upset that he didn’t come up with the idea of a string trimmer, commonly known as a Weed Eater or Weed Whacker. On the one hand, the idea is totally simp…

With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But…

When it comes to connectors, cables, and interfaces, Apple has always been different. See which are the most common Apple connectors and how to use them.

A lot has changed since the first Macintosh. Apple no longer uses a phone connector for its keyboard or DE-9 serial ports for its mouse, printer, and modem. As others have recently pointed out, the only connector still in use from 1984 through today is the analog headphone jack. Macs have always had some form […]

Project Headroom could save you big money, too

Mobile didn't beat the web on capability. It beat the web on the channel. A platform-war retrospective on distribution, store lock-in, and update friction.

All aboard ha ha ha ha ha ha ha AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI! – Crazy Train, Ozzy Osborne (with slight modifications) *** If you can remember the early web, when the tech was novel and b…

Part 1: A practitioner's walkthrough of univariate, multivariate, covariate-informed, and cold-start forecasting.

The system is technically up, effectively down.

No Shit Software — Spite-Driven Development. No bloat solutions for everyday problems.

Network proxy framework for Apache Kafka

Every good benchmarking story starts with a hunch. Mine was that Kroxylicious is cheap to run — I’d stake my career on it, in fact — but it turns out that “trust me, I wrote it” is not a widely accepted unit of measurement. People want proof. Sensibly.

If your reply is a wall of unedited LLM junk, you are the problem.

A new architecture for B2B SaaS where every interaction is predictive by default. Three open-source demos: accounting, ERP, e-commerce.

For years, people have tried hard to get websites to build accessibility affordances. Now developers are willingly building them for AI.

Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, an

I’m a betting man; I just enjoy making bets, even when there are no stakes at all. Examples of my enjoyment of betting And when you talk about bets, you end up talking about odds. It turns ou…

We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. – Matthew Prince, How I Choose…

At this point, you have no doubt heard about GitHub’s availability woes over the past several months. In April, Mitchell Hashimoto (of Hashicorp fame) wrote a post about how he is moving his …