Joy & Curiosity #79
Interesting & joyful things from the previous week
Is software turning into a liquid?
It never was a solid, true. Pure thought stuff, as Fred Brooks wrote. But even that pure thought stuff felt more tangible than what software is turning into, did it not? Software had corners and edges: releases and version numbers. This is a piece of software, it’s done, one could say. A long time ago, software even came in boxes. Sometimes it had a printed manual.
Now ChatGPT writes tens or hundreds of lines of Python to resize images, create a PDF, or extract data from a CSV — and then throws it away, without anyone even having seen the code. An agent like OpenClaw will create a little script to check whether I turned off all the lights in the house. Nothing to throw away, because it was never stored in a file.
There is now so much code out there, appearing and disappearing as needed, that putting version numbers on it seems as futile as naming waves in the ocean.
Is this what most software is going to be? Nameless, shapeless? Created just in time?
A good friend of mine works at a company that shoots into and operates things in space. This week he told me that they’re required to record how much torque they use to tighten bolts and screws. There are torque-recording wrenches you can buy, but they cost $25k a pop. Maybe it was $15k, not sure, but it was an outrageous number. So outrageous that someone on his team thought “nuh-uh” and went out and bought Bluetooth-enabled torque wrenches for $1k — far cheaper in this comparison. Then that teammate, who’s not a programmer, used an agent to vibe-code a piece of software to talk to the torque wrenches via Bluetooth and record the data in the spreadsheet he uses. He tested it a few times to make sure it worked as it should and then, well, went to work. Tens of thousands of dollars saved.
Now that was a piece of software, right? One could even put a name on it: TorqueThis v0.0.1, or something. But I said to my friend, one could also imagine that in the future, say in a year, even that won’t be a piece anymore. Doesn’t it seem possible that in a year you can say to your agent: hey, I’m holding this Bluetooth-enabled torque wrench in my hand, I have this spreadsheet open, write some code that records the torque whenever I say “now” and adds it as a new row in column D of that spreadsheet.
And code will appear, do its things while you do your thing, and then it’ll disappear. Drip drip drip, it goes into every nook and cranny and then, job done, it evaporates.
Are you going to be in Boston in July? Let’s meet at Laracon. I’ll be speaking there.
Adapting to AI: Reflections on Productivity. One of the calmest, most balanced, and most pragmatic pieces of writing I’ve seen on this topic. It has more questions than answers, but that feels apt for what we’re going through. I’m skeptical of any opinion about programming these days if it’s made up of more exclamation marks than question marks.
I’d never read anything by C.S. Lewis, but whenever I came across his name I felt like I should have. This week, I finally righted what had long felt like a wrong and read The Inner Ring. And now I want more: “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.”
To the sound of “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody: “European Commission […] announced the creation of a ‘28th regime’ […] The Proposal for an EU Inc. corporate legal framework provides faster (within 48 hours), cheaper (maximum EUR 100) and fully digital company registration, simplified procedures throughout the company life cycle, easier digital share transfers and capital operations, support for modern financing instruments, and the possibility for Member States to allow access to public equity markets. It also introduces fully digital insolvency procedures and automatic transmission of company data to relevant authorities in line with the “once-only principle,” while including safeguards against fraud and abuse.” If this truly, actually, for real happens then something that has died in me through the process of running a company here in Germany will maybe be reborn again.
The always wonderful Craig Mod: “The point of bloviating like this: We watch the LLMs perform these acts — acts that, even five years ago, would have seemed like pure science fiction — and we wrongly (I believe) extrapolate out a kind of intelligence that would be able to make sound decisions on a larger, world-based scale. Which is to say: LLMs’ operating resolution is severely hamstrung. Whereas we, humans — messy, disgusting, goopy, flawed, miraculous humans — are operating at a freakishly high resolution, to which we have a preternatural ability to access subconsciously, and through which we use language to represent — in broad strokes — notions that operate in this higher register.”
This was a delicious mind-bender: CEOs Don’t Steer. It only made my fascination with businesses greater.
The Guardian profiled Stewart Brand and I thought it was lovely. I’ve never before looked through the notion of Maintenance as a lense like this.
Agent-Native Engineering by the The General Intelligence Company Of New York. There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there (although I bet it’s not as applicable as it sounds) but this one here stood out: “Speaking of idea generation, that’s the new problem. Before 2026 engineers had to spend time using their high level of intelligence solving relatively narrow well defined problems. Now, most of those problems are simple or manageable by background agents. Your engineers’ new job is to find more problems to solve. That’s why many are saying its the golden age of the idea guy - it is. If you can narrowly scope a problem then hand it off to an engineer, you might as well just hand it off to a background agent.”
Ghostling: “A minimum viable terminal emulator built on top of the libghostty C API.” Mitchell added: “From empty repo to a functional minimal standalone terminal based on libghostty in 2 hours, presenting Ghostling! ~600 lines of C and you get extremely accurate, performant, and proven terminal emulation.” And someone asked: “Did you use AI? I’m wondering because you pushed this out pretty quickly and there is a large volume of comments... but the code is neat and readable” And he said: “I didn’t write a single line of code. I reviewed it all though and consistently nudged the AI in the right direction. Heavy commenting is my personal style, and its especially good for a demo like this.”
This is pretty neat: Obsidian Web Clipper now comes with a “reader mode” (I don’t know if that’s the official name) that produces pretty good results and is incredibly fast. Lot of fun to press Opt-Shift-R and see what it does.
Now, this, this was interesting: We Have Learned Nothing. I mean, they had me at Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (although it felt like they really wanted to throw those names in there even if they didn’t have to), but the Red Queen was the interesting bit: “In 1973, the evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen proposed what he called the Red Queen hypothesis: in any ecosystem, when one species evolves an advantage at the expense of another, the disadvantaged species will evolve to offset that improvement. […] Similarly, when new startup methods are quickly adopted by everyone, no one gains a relative advantage, and success rates stay flat. To win, startups must develop novel, differentiating strategies and build sustainable barriers to imitation before competitors can catch up.”
I consider myself a pretty advanced User of Computers. An experienced Surfer of the Web, so to say. Someone who never, even back in 2000, fell prey to the flashy, blinking, red Download button that would appear on websites to trick you when you were trying to download something real. Pour two drinks into me and I’ll even insist that I never, not once, not a single time in my life, clicked on something I didn’t mean to click on. If I clicked, I meant to click. And I never clicked on a fake link, yes sir. I’m that good with the cursor. But, fucking hell, I think I would’ve fallen for this phishing attack.
The 49MB Web Page. I don’t get people who truly enjoy horror movies. Like, you get a kick out of being scared, of … feeling bad? And yet here I am, reading about 49MB web pages, shivering, shaking my head.
Matteo Collina wrote about why Node.js needs a virtual file system and the two paragraphs that made everyone share this: “What began as a holiday experiment became PR #61478: a node:vfs module for Node.js, with almost 14,000 lines of code across 66 files. Let me be honest: a PR that size would normally take months of full-time work. This one happened because I built it with Claude Code. I pointed the AI at the tedious parts, the stuff that makes a 14k-line PR possible but no human wants to hand-write: implementing every fs method variant (sync, callback, promises), wiring up test coverage, and generating docs. I focused on the architecture, the API design, and reviewing every line. Without AI, this would not have been a holiday side project. It just wouldn’t have happened.”
The Robotic Tortoise & the Robotic Hare. It’s a race between Opus 4.6 and Qwen 35B, the latter running locally and with less, say, smarts. But Qwen won. Because: “With 3x faster responses, I could add an extra cycle : ‘critique the plan and address the critiques.’ In the time the hare was still thinking, the tortoise ran another lap.” Very interesting! I’m torn on this. At some point last year I was also a believer in “if you have a dumb but fast model, it can outrun the smart but slow model” but then, in practice, it turns out that on average the smart but slow model is actually fast, because — on average — it gets to the right results faster. Maybe that’s changing? Maybe the floor has been raised too and “dumb” models are smart enough now?
“A skill file based on the articles written on my personal site. Designed for designers and engineers to help them build better user interfaces.” What a time to be alive! A file as a distillation of one’s own preferences and taste and judgement and experiences, fed to a neural network trained to help you get your work done.
macOS has
/usr/bin/timewhich takes an-largument and can show memory & resource usage of whatever command you’re passing.apenwarr: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower. In some sense, I get it. Yes. Reviews can be the bottleneck. But then: are reviews the same thing they were three years ago? Does a review take the same amount of time, no: should it take the same amount of time as in 2023, even if you can now spin up five parallel models to help you review? (And this one I’m consciously putting in parentheses so you can imagine I whisper this into your ear: I also don’t think that in the near future the code generated by models will need close-up reviews.)
Can’t say I’ve ever been really interested in Banksy, but this was great: In Search of Banksy.
A sufficiently detailed spec is code. I’m not sure what to think here. On one hand: yes, true, if you want to specify everything a piece of software is supposed to do, you might as well write the code. On the other: it also feels like you can specify what software is supposed to do without being 100% precise and, as long as the person (thing) implementing it and you have some shared understanding about what’s left out of the spec, things will be fine. Question is how much shared understanding there is and I think that’s where a lot of people have the wrong estimates.
tigerfs looks very, very interesting: “A filesystem backed by PostgreSQL, and a filesystem interface to PostgreSQL. TigerFS mounts a database as a directory. Every file is a real row. Writes are transactions. Multiple agents and humans can read and write concurrently with full ACID guarantees, locally or across machines. Any tool that works with files works out of the box.” I’ve been hacking on an agent that isn’t really stateless but also doesn’t need a full VM. A filesystem backed by PostgreSQL seems like it sits right in the middle and could be very handy.
Armin: “There’s a feeling that all the things that create friction in your life should be automated away. That human involvement should be replaced by AI-based decision-making. Because it is the friction of the process that is the problem. When in fact many times the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point.”
Pre-ordered this within ten seconds of clicking the link: “Silicon is the element that built modernity. Silicon is a beautiful book about the world of transistors, chips, and the greatest technology revolution of all time.” Of course, right after I caught myself: wait, did you just pre-order an expensive book about… silicon? Yes, I did. Let’s see how it goes.
Talking about Silicon: there’s a new Dwarkesh episode with Dylan Patel out. I love it. Listening to this made me think: is this how people how are into sports feel like every weekend?
Then again, I do know what it’s like to be into sports, don’t I? Yesterday evening I put on this thriller (top comment: “The heavy breathing of two very experienced commentators tells you how special this achievement is!”) and my wife couldn’t make sense of the dichotomy between the quiet click-clacks coming from the TV and me saying “holy shit, holy shit, now he’s going to put the white— wow, incredible.”
