34 posts
- Space to be human
A week of new school routines and a storm and flood, and what I needed was space to be human.
- Hugging Bay builds a BitTorrent backup for open AI models as Nvidia buys Hugging Face
A volunteer-built BitTorrent index for open AI models went online in July, weeks before Nvidia's $12.93 billion Hugging Face deal. Its design is credible. Its network is still too small to matter.
- Why I left the Mac for Omarchy after 25 years
After 25 years with Macs, I moved my daily work to Omarchy. The switch showed me why openness and control matter more to me now.
- How developers organise and maintain agent skills
An Ask HN discussion describes skills as repeatable workflows, with shared repositories, human review, behavioural tests and updates across coding tools.
- Handing off the 60%
Planning is 40% of a task; execution is the 60% that eats your week. Plus vibe sourcing — finding the open-source tool instead of generating one.
- Perplexity brings hybrid frontier and local AI to your Mac
Hybrid compute runs a classifier on your Mac to decide what reaches the cloud. The admin rules and the record of what left are Enterprise features.
- The File That Fixes Your AI's Code Style
Fabien Sanglard wrote down the code-style corrections he kept repeating to his AI coding agent, and put them in the file the tool loads at startup. The value isn't the trick — it's how specific each rule is.
- What a Climbing Harness Tells You About AI Agents
The word "harness" has been used in AI tooling for months without a clear definition. Earendil finally gives one — and the ownership argument underneath it is the part worth reading.
- GCC Drew the AI Line at Fifteen Lines
The GCC steering committee will decline any legally significant contribution containing LLM-generated code — and put a number on 'significant'. The interesting part is what they deliberately left permitted.
- The open-source argument I'd been missing
In June I wrote about Banco Santander open-sourcing its AI tooling — the bank published the code that tests whether its own models discriminate…
- From Custom Code to Conversational Prompts
Who's allowed to build software has changed hands three or four times in a decade. Grok Build is the latest handoff — and the security data on what it produces is not subtle.
- The Donkey Work Doesn't Need a Genius
A $500 fine-tune of a 9B open model beat every frontier model on a catalogue-review task. I haven't trained anything — but the underlying bet is the one I've been running on a MacBook Air for months.
- Kimi K3 Is Open. I Still Can't Run It.
2.8 trillion parameters, 1.4 terabytes of memory to run it. Open weights existing and open weights being usable by an ordinary person have stopped being the same claim.
- Open Knowledge Format
This week Google Cloud released the Open Knowledge Format. It’s plain markdown files with a short labelled header — a few fields like type, tags and…
- You Feel Faster. Are You?
A randomized controlled study found AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower. They thought they'd been sped up by 20%.
- Your Code Review Process Isn't Built for This Volume
AI-generated code is hitting production faster than review processes can absorb it — that's a supervision problem, not an AI problem.
- Codex Plugins Are a Confession About Who's Winning
OpenAI launched 20 plugins to push Codex beyond coding. The move tells you everything about where the developer ecosystem actually lives.
- The Government Just Told You to Stop Vibe Coding Without Guardrails
The UK's NCSC warns that AI-generated code is creating security risks faster than teams can catch them. The fix isn't stopping — it's checking.
- Your AI Just Learned to Approve Its Own Actions
Claude Code's new auto mode sits between handholding and chaos. It's the first honest attempt at solving the autonomy problem in developer tools.
- Mozilla Built Stack Overflow for Agents. I Built It by Hand.
Mozilla's cq gives AI coding agents dynamic, evolving context — formalizing what power users already figured out through trial and error.
- Anthropic Built MCP, Got Everyone to Use It, Then Gave It Away
MCP just moved from Anthropic's project to shared industry infrastructure — and that changes the risk calculation for anyone building on it.
- The Productivity Numbers Are Real. The Quality Question Isn't Settled.
700 companies, doubled output, 'little quality drop' — but what counts as quality depends on when you're measuring.
- GitHub Added Secret Scanning to Its MCP Server. This Is What Good Security Integration Looks Like.
GitHub's MCP server now lets AI coding agents scan code for secrets through the same protocol they're already using. No extra tooling. No separate workflow.
- DeepSeek Didn't Just Train Better—They Changed How Transformers Think
The mHC architecture isn't about scaling harder. It's about thinking smarter.
- SoN 34: What Will You Vibe Code Next Year?
December 23rd, 2025 Dear Reader, What Will You Vibe Code Next Year? Back in July, I wrote about vibe coding and the beginner’s mind — that Zen…
- SoN 28: How (and Why) to Build A Voice Agent
November 12th, 2025 Dear Reader, I took a gamble this week and decided to put my AI Writing Field Guide up on Product Hunt today. If you'd like to…
- You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Start Making Things with AI
July 4th, 2025 Dear Reader, In a tech world obsessed with frameworks, best practices, and shipping at scale, it’s easy to forget that sometimes…
- Digital Resilience: From Concept to Award-Winner in 48 Hours
May 23rd, 2025 Dear Reader, This week I’ve been immersed in the exhilarating chaos of Hack the Future – a 48-hour climate resilience hackathon in…
- Boost Your Creative Writing with Local AI Models
The AI Download #019 April 11th, 2025 Dear Reader, Creative writing is experiencing a significant transformation thanks to advancements in Artificial…
- Why Local AI Models Deserve a Closer Look
The Download #013 February 21st, 2025 Dear Reader, With more countries blocking access to DeepSeek, an AI model linked to ByteDance, the conversation…
- 💾 The Download #011: Notes on DeepSeek, revisiting Make.com automations and more.
The Download #011 February 7th, 2025 Dear Reader, This week: Notes on DeepSeek, revisiting Make.com automations and more. In the last few weeks,…
- 💾 The Download #010: Photorealistic images in MidJourney, creative AI predictions for the next 5 years, AI tool of the week and more.
The Download #010 January 24th, 2025 Dear Reader, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling globally fatigued since the start of this week. Despite all…
- 💾 The Download #007: Data vis in Claude, new service launch, what AI is saying about you and more.
#007 Hello Reader, it's good to see you. The holidays are fast approaching, and hopefully you will be able to plan some down time and a reset. When I…
- 💾 The Download #006: Content ownership, BlueSky, critical thinking, voice cloning and more.
#006 I hope this newsletter finds you, Reader, and that it finds you well. This week has flown by, though I managed to spend some time working on the…