2026-01-05 07:21:42
It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point - one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up.
Tags: anthropic, claude, openai, ai, llms, gpt-5, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, claude-4
2026-01-05 00:40:39
With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.
This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.
Design your deprecations as migrations with time, tooling, and empathy. Most “API design” is actually “API retirement.”
— Addy Osmani, 21 lessons from 14 years at Google
Tags: api-design, addy-osmani, careers, google
2026-01-04 23:43:23
Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents.
AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up anymore.
If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things really effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents - communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context. Here's a relevant recent tweet from Ethan Mollick:
When you see how people use Claude Code/Codex/etc it becomes clear that managing agents is really a management problem
Can you specify goals? Can you provide context? Can you divide up tasks? Can you give feedback?
These are teachable skills. Also UIs need to support management
This note started as a comment.
Tags: careers, ai-agents, ai, llms, ethan-mollick, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, generative-ai
2026-01-04 11:03:20
I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.
It's not perfect and I'm iterating on it but this is where we are right now. If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain you are already an expert of. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts.
[...] It wasn't a very detailed prompt and it contained no real details given I cannot share anything propriety. I was building a toy version on top of some of the existing ideas to evaluate Claude Code. It was a three paragraph description.
— Jaana Dogan, Principal Engineer at Google
Tags: anthropic, claude, ai, claude-code, llms, ai-assisted-programming, google, generative-ai
2026-01-03 13:57:07
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Depending on how you measure it, the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger appears to be 123.45 beats per minute.This is one of those things that's so cool I'm just going to accept it as true.
(I only today learned from the Hacker News comments that Veridis Quo is "Very Disco", and if you flip the order of those words you get Discovery, the name of the album.)
Via Kottke
Tags: music
2026-01-03 03:57:37
My experience is that real AI adoption on real problems is a complex blend of: domain context on the problem, domain experience with AI tooling, and old-fashioned IT issues. I’m deeply skeptical of any initiative for internal AI adoption that doesn’t anchor on all three of those. This is an advantage of earlier stage companies, because you can often find aspects of all three of those in a single person, or at least across two people. In larger companies, you need three different organizations doing this work together, this is just objectively hard
— Will Larson, Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint
Tags: leadership, llms, ai, will-larson
