Crossposted from AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less. A few days back I wrote a piece called “AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.” I have notes on a whole pile of AI-related topics that I’d like to cover in depth: AI mandates,…

Seth Larson @ 2026-06-11 Today I was reviewing a pull request for some Python code when I saw a semicolon in the diff. Screenshot provided below, which as we all know is the best way to share text on the internet: I was just about to leave a comment, but then I scrolled the page a bit and... Ah.…

2026-05-30 "What is my purpose?" Table of contents Last Friday I went to the toy store with my boy, and while he was rummaging through the Spider-Man section, my eyes caught sight of a section with very low-cost toy robots. As I'm playing with agents, LLMs, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech, I…

I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding. Difficult engineering problems solved, backlogs cleared. Rewrites that would have taken a year or more in the beforetimes, now whipped out…

Read the Tea Leaves A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it! But the thing is, LLMs are very flexible. And you can use them just as effectively to…

When I see significant open source documentation work, I often find myself asking: where does the money come from? For example, when Julia Evans announced that she had completed some new documentation for Git, I asked her how the work was funded. The answer didn’t especially surprise me: she donated…

This is a written version of a talk I gave at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach. Slides (PDF), scripts, and datasets are at github.com/andrew/pycon. Of the roughly 864,000 packages PyPI lists, about 387,000 declare a repository URL on GitHub, mapping to 343,000 distinct repositories once you collapse the…

We all indirectly depend on open source software — a public good with a ~$9 trillion value, mainly developed by unpaid volunteers. Without maintenance, it can become dysfunctional or even harmful, and this meme brilliantly outlines the fragility of modern infrastructure. That’s why I find it crucial…

Before starting, I’d like to highlight that I don’t like working with Agile Frameworks™ like Scrum. Like most people in software, I know how to do it. I lead teams working with Scrum and other similar methodologies… there’s a use case, it can work just fine. It’s just not what I personally find the…

You have noticed that the internet is dying. Twitter changed hands, changed names, and changed shape, and the version of it you knew is gone. Reddit went public. Google search now returns generated answers stapled to half a dozen ads. Instagram is bots making content for bots. Discord servers you…

written on May 08, 2026 I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There are…

Pick almost any open source supply chain incident from the past eighteen months and trace it back, and you end up reading a .github/workflows YAML file. Ultralytics shipping a crypto miner to PyPI, the nx packages that turned thousands of developer machines into credential harvesters, tj-actions…

In April 2026, Canonical disclosed 44 CVEs in uutils, the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils that ships by default since 25.10. Most of them came out of an external audit commissioned ahead of the 26.04 LTS. I read through the list and thought there’s a lot to learn from it. What’s notable is…

#111:1337 bash I just had a weird set of python commands found through htop bring my system to a crawl with 11k processes, exec(base64.b64decode('...')) — it seemed to self replicate filling my entire htop with lines like that. I force shutdown my laptop and rebooted. How can I inspect what…

There is a distinct, visceral kind of pain in watching an otherwise brilliant engineer hold down the Backspace key for six continuous seconds to fix a typo at the beginning of a line. We’ve all been there. We learn ls, cd, and grep, and then we sort of… stop. The terminal becomes a place we live…

Credit: Google DeepMind / Unsplash For years, I’ve known intellectually that my best days aren’t my busiest days. That sustainable productivity requires balancing multiple priorities. That beating myself up about not accomplishing “enough” is counterproductive. But knowing something intellectually…

I have always enjoyed the act of typing words and seeing them come up on screen. While my favorite word processor of all time might be WordPerfect (here), I've used almost all of them. These programs were what sold me on the entire value proposition of computers. They were like typewriters, which I…

Click here to subscribe to print for your office or home. Any method for building a startup, once widely known, causes founders to converge on the same answers. If everyone follows the same bestselling startup techniques, everyone ends up building the same company and, with no differentiation, most…

Originally posted Jul 19, 2016 In the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of kicking off lots of new reporting relationships with both engineers and engineering managers. Over time, I’ve learned that getting some particular data during an initial 1:1 can be really helpful, as I can refer back to…

Not long ago, a blog I otherwise like a lot included this passage: Designers have been saying this for years. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Tools don’t make you a better designer. Now the PM world is arriving at the same conclusion. I am not linking to the post because I hear this…

I built a Slack bot. His name is Junior. He lives in Sentry’s Slack workspace and he’s not a generic assistant — he knows what Sentry does, where our offices are, what we ship, and what we care about. He does the stuff that used to require someone to context-switch out of a conversation: searching…

Published on: 06-01-2026 20:35:00 by Stefano Marinelli 4 min read Photo by Lukas Tennie on Unsplash I received an email yesterday morning. It was a thank-you note for one of the open-source tools I created and maintain. The sender explained how useful the software was for their specific needs, and…

Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mode involves overload. There’s a lot of great detail in Humpries’s write-up, and I recommend you read it…

TL;DR: We built a browser-based terminal controller working around 24 hours using Claude Code, named pipes, and Xterm.js. No SSH needed, just open your browser and start typing. Check and command your agents on the go! What happens when three developers lock themselves in a room for around 24 hours…

I’ve been reviewing other people’s code for a while now, more than two decades to be precise. Nowadays, I spend around 50-70% of my time reviewing code in some form or another. It’s what I get paid to do, alongside systems design. Over time, I learned a thing or two about how to review code…

Listen to this post: Good morning, Today’s Stratechery Interview is with Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. Prince took a fascinating path to Silicon Valley — which we explore in this interview — but is most well-known for Cloudflare, which he started at Harvard Business School in 2009.…

I feel like the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Several times in the last few weeks I’ve seen people I respect talk about how they use a generative AI assistant when coding, or criticize those that are critical of generative AI. People who were, themselves, critical of generative AI in recent…

written on July 30, 2025 Using Claude Code and other agentic coding tools has become all the rage. Not only is it getting millions of downloads, but these tools are also gaining features that help streamline workflows. As you know, I got very excited about agentic coding in May, and I’ve tried many…

Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about the cloud, and what it means for Europe. Here I want to pull the various articles together into a coherent story. Note, nothing of what follows is in any way novel or original. While the facts presented in the articles are pretty inconvenient and in…

Open source funding has been a long standing issue, and something that I have been working on for almost 15 years now. Historically the sustainability model that has worked the best is: Publish open source and get a lot of users Put advertising on your website, docs, and other web properties Let…