12-Apr-2026 Content of Interest

Software

Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI. (Lalit Maganti) "There’s an uncomfortable parallel between using AI coding tools and playing slot machines"
The Building Block Economy (Mitchell Hashimoto) "We have to accept that building blocks and software factories rule everything around us and accept and internalize the consequences of that."
S3 Files and the changing face of S3 (Dr. Werner Vogels) "S3 feature that integrates the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) into S3 and allows any existing S3 data to be accessed directly as a network attached file system."
Bits In, Bits Out (Erik Hoel) "Six years of AI and the world got stupider"
“Good Taste” Is Just Experience (Terrible Software) '“You need reps” tells them keep showing up, and you’ll get there.'
Backstage is dead (Zohar Einy) "Not because it was bad. But because the world moved on."

The Pulse: is GitHub still best for AI-native development? (Gergely Orosz) "GitHub seems unable to keep up with the massive increase in infra load from agents."
Systems Thinking (Rockford Lhotka) "The industry is shifting from writing code to designing systems."
I used AI. It worked. I hated it (Michael Taggart) "I hated writing software this way."
Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents (Joel Andrews) Strong opinion: "LLM-based AI coding agents have no place now, or ever, in generating production code"
Ariane 5’s “Reused Code” Catastrophe (Mike Fisher) "reuse is not free"
New Era for Clojure: Infix Syntax! (Jiri Knesl) Heresy for sure!

Artemis II’s toilet is a moon mission milestone (K. R. Callaway) “the toilet is a ‘mission-critical’ system, so if it breaks down, the whole mission is in jeopardy,”

Software, in a Time of Fear (Ed Lyons) "how to survive inside the AI revolution in software development, without succumbing to the fear that swirls around all of us"
Move GitHub Private Repos to Google Drive in Minutes (Tony Metzidis) No GitHub Actions, but still an interesting alternative for cloud storage.
Working on products people hate (Sean Goedecke) "Working on products people hate forces you to accept how little control individual engineers have over whether people like what they build."
Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code (Sean Goedecke) "Simple software engineering does get rewarded, and on balance will take you further in your career."
Which Design Doc Did a Human Write? (Michael Lynch) Interesting read.
Twitching Before You Sprint (Mike Fisher) I'm not a big fan of analogies, but interesting read nevertheless.
In Defense of Deep Reading (Brad Stulberg) "greater short-form video consumption was associated with significantly lower performance on cognitive tasks, poorer attention, and weaker self-control" Uh oh!

Choose Boring Technology and Innovative Practices (Hillel Wayne) "Tech is slow to change." Really?
Same Old (Robert Glazer) "The technology is new, but the level of disruption is not unprecedented."
From error-handling to structured concurrency (Nelson Elhage) "How do we organize our code to handle error conditions, in the presence of multiple concurrent tasks?"
Markdown Ate The World (Mathew Duggan) Hmmm.. No mention of org-mode! 😀
Understaffing as a form of enshittification (Cory Doctorow) "A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors."
Adapting to AI: Reflections on Productivity (Colin Breck) Good read. "I Can’t Keep Up" - yep!

The 49MB Web Page (Shubham Bose) "And almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of anti-user patterns."

Charity Majors is unhappy (Charity Majors) Thoughtworks Feb Retreat: Observability matters.
Become Builders, Not Coders (Michael Werle) "The era of mostly manual coding has ended. IDEs, in their current form, are no longer necessary."
What OpenClaw Reveals About the Next Phase of AI Agents (Kesha Williams) "OpenClaw nailed three things that previous agent projects missed: proximity, creativity, and extensibility."
Grief and the AI Split (Les Orchard) Old habits die hard and everyone grieves differently.
The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering (Bassim Eledath) "Your output depends more than you'd think on the level of your teammates."

Chicken or the Egg: Should Device Interoperability or QMS Interoperability Come First? (Carl Washburn) "As an integration project matures new QMS Interoperability requirements may arise from new connected device requirements."