Joy & Curiosity #65

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

When we started working on Amp in February, ten months ago, I couldn’t have predicted this. Nor could I have in May, when we released Amp to the world. Nor in the weeks following that. But in the last few months, it began to cross our minds.

Then, suddenly, it changed from a Maybe to an Inevitable, from something that might be a good idea to something we had to do to give it the chance it deserves, the chance it demands.

On Tuesday, we announced that Amp is becoming its own company: Amp, Inc.

I’m part of the founding team, one of twenty cofounders of this newly formed research lab that has one big goal: to let software builders harness the full power of artificial intelligence.

A year ago, when I left Zed, I couldn’t have imagined that rejoining Sourcegraph would turn into a new product and a new company.

But, of course, I also couldn’t have imagined how much AI would still change the practice of software development - three years after ChatGPT. Today I’m more convinced than ever that what we’re going through is only in its opening movement.

I’m also more excited than ever to figure out where this will lead. And Amp, Inc. is the vehicle we’re building with which to explore that frontier.

• Bun is joining Anthropic. I was honestly surprised that people were surprised by this and I don’t mean this in a humble-braggy “what, you haven’t figured out the twist of the movie in the first 5min, like I have?” way. I think the kicker is in this line: “But there’s a bigger question behind that: what does software engineering even look like in two to three years?” What does software engineering look like in the future? Well, what I do know is that even right now it already looks completely different than it did in 2022 when Bun was first released to the world. Now, ask yourself: in 2026, with agents being on the trajectory they are on, would you start to work on a framework, in the classic sense, to improve developer productivity? Or are there bigger levers? I’ve been thinking about these questions for the last year and when I saw the news, it wasn’t surprise I felt.

• Maybe related: Brendan Gregg is leaving Intel and “accepted a new opportunity.” He writes: “It’s still early days for AI flame graphs. […] I think as GPU code becomes more complex, with more layers, the need for AI flame graphs will keep increasing.”

• Daniel Lemire: “The tidy, linear model of scientific progress—professors thinking deep thoughts in ivory towers, then handing blueprints to engineers—is indefensible. Fast ships and fast trains are not just consequences of scientific discovery; they are also wellsprings of it. Real progress is messy, iterative, and deeply intertwined with the tools we build. Large language models are the latest, most dramatic example of that truth.” Hard to pick a quote, the whole thing is great and thought-provoking. As is this yes-and reply to it: “we often first see something that works, then we understand it”

• Jimmy Miller with the “easiest way to build a type checker”. I’ve done exactly this with Monkey before, it’s a lot of fun.

• A Senior Staff Engineer at Google on “Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer”: “The tech industry loves to tell you to move fast. But there is another path. It is a path where leverage comes from depth, patience, and the quiet satisfaction of building the foundation that others stand on. You don’t have to chase the spotlight to have a meaningful, high-impact career at a big company. Sometimes, the most ambitious thing you can do is stay put, dig in, and build something that lasts. To sit with a problem space for years until you understand it well enough to build a Bigtrace.” I read the whole thing with one eyebrow raised kept thinking of the distinction between cost centers and profit centers.

• A black hole in 125 bytes of JavaScript.

• “Are you here because you are looking, like I was, for advice? Unfortunately—this is, in a way, the problem—whatever I could say about parenting is trapped in the soundproof box of cliché. Everything you have heard about having kids, good or bad, is true. Children are blessings and bring blessings. They are exhausting and raise the stakes of all your limitations and flaws to vertiginous heights. Love for children is Love, the romantic kind, the song kind, the ordinary kind. Parenting resembles religious practice in the way it links the broad sweep of the sacred to the smallest of everyday tasks.” As so often: I don’t know how I ended up reading this, but I’m glad I did.

• Lot of talk about CVE-2025-55182 this week, the “critical-severity vulnerability in React Server Components”. I’m usually not that interested in vulnerabilities (modulo how I’m affected), but I really enjoyed reading through this proof-of-concept by Moritz Sanft. Excellent technical writing and explanations. Also: jesus.

• “But during that stretch, a friend and colleague kept repeating one line to me: ‘All it takes is for one to work out.’ He’d say it every time I spiraled. And as much as it made me smile, a big part of me didn’t fully believe it. Still, it became a little maxim between us. And eventually, he was right – that one did work out. And it changed my life.”

• When I first heard that Haribo, the gummy bear company, now sell power banks and that they’re apparently really good, I couldn’t believe it. Haribo? Power banks? Non-gummy, actual, usable, very good power banks? What? Turns out there’s issues with it: “The Haribo power bank weighs roughly 286g and has a capacity of 20,000 mAh. That ratio drew attention because it implied efficient cell packaging. Our scans show that the structure inside the pouch has bigger problems than sheer capacity.” And that’s the way the gummy melts, I suppose.

• Tim Ferriss on the value of aggression: “The above video clip is from Dan Gable – Competitor Supreme, which my mom bought for me when I was 15. It changed my life. I watched it almost every day in high school, and it kept me fighting through all the various losses in life. Didn’t finish the SAT in time? Watch Dan Gable. Have a guidance counselor laugh while telling me I don’t stand a chance of getting into Princeton? More Dan Gable. Lost my first important judo match in 7 seconds? Watch the Iowa Hawkeyes…again and again and again. Then, return to the same tournament six months later and win. In life, there are dog fights. You must learn to enjoy them. Few people look forward to banging heads (literally or metaphorically), and therein lies the golden opportunity.”

• Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation. Man, I got sweaty hands and flashbacks reading this.

• Very entertaining: The “Mad Men” in 4K on HBO Max Debacle. I love Mad Men, but this was also a great read because it’s Classic Internet in some sense: someone, somewhere, sits down with enough motivation to pull all those screengrabs together and then posts them on the Internet.

• Matt Godbolt (the Matt Godbolt) is currently writing Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025 and from what I’ve read (Why xor eax, eax? and Addressing the adding situation) it’s very good.

• Another guide on how to prompt Nano Banana Pro. Nothing groundbreaking, but the prompts are good and, man, Nano Banana Pro is just really good and I like reading more about it.

• This PDF here, by OpenAI, is about how to build “an AI-native engineering team” and, in my opinion, the most interesting and most telling thing in the whole file is that each section has these two headers: “How coding agents help” and “What engineers do instead”. What engineers do instead, indeed.

• Murat Demirbas telling us to optimize for momentum: “So the trick is to design your workflow around staying in motion. Don’t wait for the perfect idea or the right mood. Act first. Clarity comes after. If a task feels intimidating, cut it down until it becomes trivial. Open the file. Draft one paragraph. Try freewriting. Run one experiment. Or sketch one figure. You want the smallest possible task that gets the wheel turning. Completion, even on tiny tasks, builds momentum and creates the energy to do the next thing. The goal is to get traction and stop getting blocked on an empty page.” Yes, yes, yes, yes. Momentum is everything. I’d take momentum and mistakes and breakage over slow perfectionism every day.

• The first time I saw the sunshine map at the top here something in me broke: wait, you’re telling me, all of the US gets more sun than I do? Including Boston? Boston, the-lake-sometimes-freezes Boston? And freaking Seattle, the place that’s always portrayed as if Drizzle had been a better name for it? And New York? That New York that’s also movie New York where the steam comes out of the manhole covers? That place gets more sun than I do? You’re telling me when they shoot a movie there and it’s blue skies, they didn’t get lucky and picked the one day in the month it’s clear skies, but that they often have blue skies? It’s been at least four years since I first saw that map and I bring it up a lot (a lot, sorry). This week, while in Estonia, I brought it up again, of course, and while trying to find that map, I found that page that I linked to here, the one that starts with “I’ve always thought these sunshine maps were a little suspicious.” That sentence made me flinch — uh, oh, did I talk about a hoax all these years? Turns out I didn’t. The map is real. It’s all real. And if you scroll down to the solar power irradiance maps you’ll find that even freaking goddamn Ottawa gets as much sun as northern Italy.

• Deep, deep dive into how prompt caching works.

• This was good and a great reminder: ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor. “In fact we can’t help but prioritize, even if mindlessly. Since we can only do one thing at a time, whatever we’re doing now is definitionally our ‘highest priority.’ Reading this sentence is currently your highest priority.” I once worked in a company that tried to set up a weekly company meeting. One team was always absent. “We just don’t have the time to make it to this meeting,” they said. I ranted about that team to my team lead and he said, “well, everyone has the same amount of time. They chose to prioritize it differently. If the CEO would say that everybody who doesn’t show up gets fired, they would have the time to make the meeting.” And the pupil was enlightened, as they say.

• “many large firms are making massive capital commitments behind ai services this year with the hope of lowering cost, increasing scale, and (unsaid) shaving off some of the exuberant hiring of the zirp years. my suggestion is that these firms will see almost zero roi from this spend. why? because you can instrument capabilities, not competence. […] remember: most firms got the internet in the 90s; most did not use it to its full economic potential until 2020. the gap between 1999 and 2020 was not a lack of fiber optic cable. it took thirty years for the ‘competence’ of remote work and digital commerce to catch up to the ‘capability’ of executives can buy all the compute they want. they can instrument the capability until their dashboards overflow. but until they do the messy, un-instrumentable work of rewiring entire organizations to trust and utilize these tools, the long march will drag on.”

• Bouke van der Bijl built a Rust program that can do rootless pings. One of the first programs I attempted to write as a teenager was a ping clone in Python, so when I saw that post fly past, I hopped on. The intro, though, made me pause: “The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the ping rootless. I couldn’t find any simple examples of this online and LLMs are surprisingly bad at this (probably because of the lack of examples).” LLMs are surprisingly bad at this? At writing a ping? Really? Let’s see. So I asked Amp to build a ping without requiring root. And it did it, with one prompt from my side. Then I thought: maybe the challenge is that it must use UDP, like Bouke wrote there? So I asked Amp to do it again, this time using UDP. It did it again and concludes: “It works! The trick is using socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_ICMP) instead of SOCK_RAW. This creates an unprivileged ICMP socket that the kernel handles specially - no root required.” And that’s exactly what a HackerNews commenter also writes, criticizing the “trick is to use UDP” line: “This is wrong, despite the Rust library in question’s naming convention. You’re not creating a UDP socket. You’re creating an IP (AF_INET), datagram socket (SOCK_DGRAM), using protocol ICMP (IPPROTO_ICMP). The issue is that the rust library apparently conflates datagram and UDP, when they’re not the same thing.” LLMs are surprisingly something, but not bad at this.

• This is beautiful: Bootstrapping Computing.

• Stripe City is impressive. This behind-the-scenes series of posts is too: “@bits_by_brandon not only built this interaction, he drove the train and recorded every sound.”