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Creator of Datasette and Lanyrd, co-creator of the Django Web Framework.
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Launching Interop 2026

2026-02-15 12:33:22

Launching Interop 2026

Jake Archibald reports on Interop 2026, the initiative between Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla to collaborate on ensuring a targeted set of web platform features reach cross-browser parity over the course of the year.

I hadn't realized how influential and successful the Interop series has been. It started back in 2021 as Compat 2021 before being rebranded to Interop in 2022.

The dashboards for each year can be seen here, and they demonstrate how wildly effective the program has been: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026.

Here's the progress chart for 2025, which shows every browser vendor racing towards a 95%+ score by the end of the year:

Line chart showing Interop 2025 browser compatibility scores over the year (Jan–Dec) for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Interop. Y-axis ranges from 0% to 100%. Chrome (yellow) and Edge (green) lead, starting around 80% and reaching near 100% by Dec. Firefox (orange) starts around 48% and climbs to ~98%. Safari (blue) starts around 45% and reaches ~96%. The Interop line (dark green/black) starts lowest around 29% and rises to ~95% by Dec. All browsers converge near 95–100% by year's end.

The feature I'm most excited about in 2026 is Cross-document View Transitions, building on the successful 2025 target of Same-Document View Transitions. This will provide fancy SPA-style transitions between pages on websites with no JavaScript at all.

As a keen WebAssembly tinkerer I'm also intrigued by this one:

JavaScript Promise Integration for Wasm allows WebAssembly to asynchronously 'suspend', waiting on the result of an external promise. This simplifies the compilation of languages like C/C++ which expect APIs to run synchronously.

Tags: browsers, css, web-standards, webassembly, jake-archibald

Quoting Boris Cherny

2026-02-15 07:59:09

Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next. Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever.

Boris Cherny, Claude Code creator, on why Anthropic are still hiring developers

Tags: careers, anthropic, ai, claude-code, llms, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

Quoting Thoughtworks

2026-02-14 12:54:41

The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.

The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.

Thoughtworks, findings from a retreat concerning "the future of software engineering", conducted under Chatham House rules

Tags: ai-assisted-programming, careers, ai

Anthropic's public benefit mission

2026-02-14 07:59:51

Someone asked if there was an Anthropic equivalent to OpenAI's IRS mission statements over time.

Anthropic are a "public benefit corporation" but not a non-profit, so they don't have the same requirements to file public documents with the IRS every year.

But when I asked Claude it ran a search and dug up this Google Drive folder where Zach Stein-Perlman shared Certificate of Incorporation documents he obtained from the State of Delaware!

Anthropic's are much less interesting that OpenAI's. The earliest document from 2021 states:

The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced Al for the cultural, social and technological improvement of humanity.

Every subsequent document up to 2024 uses an updated version which says:

The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long term benefit of humanity.

Tags: ai-ethics, anthropic, ai

The evolution of OpenAI's mission statement

2026-02-14 07:38:29

As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to "Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities" - this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use it to evaluate if the organization is sticking to its mission and deserves to maintain its non-profit tax-exempt status.

You can browse OpenAI's tax filings by year on ProPublica's excellent Nonprofit Explorer.

I went through and extracted that mission statement for 2016 through 2024, then had Claude Code help me fake the commit dates to turn it into a git repository and share that as a Gist - which means that Gist's revisions page shows every edit they've made since they started filing their taxes!

It's really interesting seeing what they've changed over time.

The original 2016 mission reads as follows (and yes, the apostrophe in "OpenAIs" is missing in the original):

OpenAIs goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. We think that artificial intelligence technology will help shape the 21st century, and we want to help the world build safe AI technology and ensure that AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Were trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way.

In 2018 they dropped the part about "trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way."

Git diff showing the 2018 revision deleting the final two sentences: "Were trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way."

In 2020 they dropped the words "as a whole" from "benefit humanity as a whole". They're still "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return" though.

Git diff showing the 2020 revision dropping "as a whole" from "benefit humanity as a whole" and changing "We think" to "OpenAI believes"

Some interesting changes in 2021. They're still unconstrained by a need to generate financial return, but here we have the first reference to "general-purpose artificial intelligence" (replacing "digital intelligence"). They're more confident too: it's not "most likely to benefit humanity", it's just "benefits humanity".

They previously wanted to "help the world build safe AI technology", but now they're going to do that themselves: "the companys goal is to develop and responsibly deploy safe AI technology".

Git diff showing the 2021 revision replacing "goal is to advance digital intelligence" with "mission is to build general-purpose artificial intelligence", changing "most likely to benefit" to just "benefits", and replacing "help the world build safe AI technology" with "the companys goal is to develop and responsibly deploy safe AI technology"

2022 only changed one significant word: they added "safely" to "build ... (AI) that safely benefits humanity". They're still unconstrained by those financial returns!

Git diff showing the 2022 revision adding "(AI)" and the word "safely" so it now reads "that safely benefits humanity", and changing "the companys" to "our"

No changes in 2023... but then in 2024 they deleted almost the entire thing, reducing it to simply:

OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

They've expanded "humanity" to "all of humanity", but there's no mention of safety any more and I guess they can finally start focusing on that need to generate financial returns!

Git diff showing the 2024 revision deleting the entire multi-sentence mission statement and replacing it with just "OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

Update: I found loosely equivalent but much less interesting documents from Anthropic.

Tags: ai, openai, ai-ethics, propublica

Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

2026-02-13 05:16:07

Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

OpenAI announced a partnership with Cerebras on January 14th. Four weeks later they're already launching the first integration, "an ultra-fast model for real-time coding in Codex".

Despite being named GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark it's not purely an accelerated alternative to GPT-5.3-Codex - the blog post calls it "a smaller version of GPT‑5.3-Codex" and clarifies that "at launch, Codex-Spark has a 128k context window and is text-only."

I had some preview access to this model and I can confirm that it's significantly faster than their other models.

Here's what that speed looks like running in Codex CLI:

That was the "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt - here's the rendered result:

Whimsical flat illustration of an orange duck merged with a bicycle, where the duck's body forms the seat and frame area while its head extends forward over the handlebars, set against a simple light blue sky and green grass background.

Compare that to the speed of regular GPT-5.3 Codex medium:

Significantly slower, but the pelican is a lot better:

Whimsical flat illustration of a white pelican riding a dark blue bicycle at speed, with motion lines behind it, its long orange beak streaming back in the wind, set against a light blue sky and green grass background.

What's interesting about this model isn't the quality though, it's the speed. When a model responds this fast you can stay in flow state and iterate with the model much more productively.

I showed a demo of Cerebras running Llama 3.1 70 B at 2,000 tokens/second against Val Town back in October 2024. OpenAI claim 1,000 tokens/second for their new model, and I expect it will prove to be a ferociously useful partner for hands-on iterative coding sessions.

It's not yet clear what the pricing will look like for this new model.

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, cerebras, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, codex-cli