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nlawalkeron Everybody's Lost Their Minds

I assume that they don’t have time to do that, and are lamenting the fact that exercising those capabilities is no longer on the critical path to getting paid work done.

nlawalkeron OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents

Just wanted to say thanks for this rec, I'll be picking it up. Unaccountability - generally, everywhere in society, the workplace, government etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently.

nlawalkeron The Wormhole Hall of Shame

If you’re inclined to add any more, consider Outer Wilds! “Black holes technology” is a major plot point and shows up as a neat gameplay mechanic in a couple places.

nlawalkeron Ok, but does it scale?

Been a meme for a long time!

Mongo DB is web scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

nlawalkeron A Society of Cheats

Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/ai-use-college-che...

nlawalkeron Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default

>This is attribution.

I think a lot of people interpret it as trying to foist additional burden on reviewers. As in "here's my PR, I would like to take credit for this idea, it's now on you to review. If you find a problem with it, I expect you to call out exactly what my incorrect assumptions were, which you are able to do because they're all buried somewhere in this Claude session. Let me know what they are and I'll paste them into a new session and submit again."

nlawalkeron Bug Blindness

Sounds like credit card sites. Most everything is pretty creaky; “redeem rewards” is broken or offline for maintenance; “pay bill” is greased lightning all the way through.

nlawalkeron Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

I think a bias towards inaction often creates better outcomes for everyone, but a bias towards action creates better career results. Most of these places evaluate performance based on impact, and it's way easier to spin any kind of activity or impact as positive impact than it is to spin inaction as positive impact.

nlawalkeron CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

I see “this matters,” “XYZ matters,” “the last two are what matter” etc. everywhere now in all sorts of workplace documents.

nlawalkeron Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

My favorite is the info icons that show a tooltip on hover, but if you click them, they disappear the tip if it’s showing and never show it if it hasn’t appeared yet.

nlawalkeron Slack Code

I can’t hear what they’re saying, they drop the mic every other sentence!

nlawalkeron Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

It’s the TED Talk playbook: the crafting of a lecture given by an expert to laypeople to maximize attention, engagement and satisfaction. Every piece of prose is built to pack in as many TED Talk mic-drops/expectation-subverting insight bombs as possible.

nlawalkeron Process as a Proxy for Motivation

> Both of these examples demonstrate a process, or a decision made in advance

A decision made in advance is not a process. Unlike all the other real-world examples of committed processes in the article, premade decisions don't require discipline - the actual substitute for motivation - to execute in a meaningful way that ensures actual progress.

nlawalkeron No Meat Proxy

We should have called it smog.

nlawalkeron Don't credit the LLM

It’s #3, it’s a disclaimer, you’re helpful if it’s right and not to blame if it’s wrong.

When I see it, it always makes me want to respond “weird, I asked Claude too and it said <different answer>”.

nlawalkeron Diátaxis

Please post some kind of visible change notification (and something here) when you do!

nlawalkeron The session you cannot take with you

Reasoning, external context, compaction, subagents, etc. are all things that these service providers don't really want you to know about, care about or have any insight into, they want them to be implementation details. It's incredibly inconvenient to them that their customer base is in the business of prying into implementation details and trying to use the individual pieces of what they want to offer as an end-to-end product.

nlawalkeron Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

This is what Windows Explorer does when you cut a file, except it does also place it on the clipboard.

>pressing ctrl+x fades the selected text and makes it inert [...] Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point

>What if you want the original semantics of cut? Ghost cut makes that two keys rather than one: copy to clipboard (control-C or command-C) followed by Backspace to remove it from the original document. I so rarely use cut without paste, that this is a clear win for me.

This is just as "broken" as the existing functionality, just in a way that the author prefers. It's a neat idea though, I like it, makes you wonder what would have happened in other apps if cut/paste was never developed as a system-wide, cross-app capability.

nlawalkeron Why I am not going to buy a computer

Yes, this right here. Generated content that's based on sources that readers already have access to has no value beyond what they can ask an LLM to generate themselves.

Now, if you write it with tender loving care and bake all that stuff into it, then will humans read it directly? Maybe not, but the information that their agents read and then pass on to them at least has a better chance of being correct and useful. If the success criteria for your documentation was "measurable count of human eyeballs" and not "better outcomes", your docs aren't going to be good anyway.

nlawalkeron Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain

My problem with passkeys is that "don't have to" is actually "don't have to, and couldn't if I wanted to".

nlawalkeron There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

> handwriting docs adds less value than writing high quality instructions to your agent

Are the instructions not docs?

nlawalkeron AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found

And that’s a net win for a lot of people in a lot of situations; that’s the part that needs acknowledgment and study, sociologically.

You can’t say it didn’t warn us, it’s on the tin: “AI might be wrong.”

nlawalkeron What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

Software engineering has always been kind of a game for the people who love it; it turns out that making it a game-as-a-service with lootboxes is just as effective for driving engagement as with other kinds of games.

nlawalkeron Accretive Editing

Humans working on documentation who are not set up for success and not incentivized to do the right thing exhibit exactly the same behavior.

nlawalkeron Proof of care in the age of AI

Proving care still leaves the audience to determine if the care is in the message or in attracting attention.

nlawalkeron In defense of not understanding your codebase

The premise of understanding a codebase distracts from the actual issue in the debate about AI in software engineering, which is how well you have to understand the problems you're solving. I think most people who advocate for understanding the codebase actually mean to advocate for understanding the problem, they're just using the codebase as a concrete representation of it.

nlawalkeron Focus

> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.

I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.

nlawalkeron How to Write an Email

I prefer adding the detail; if it's going to turn into a phone call anyway I might as well have a script ready to go.

nlawalkeron AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn

The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.

nlawalkeron It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

I’ve always wondered what the major industry players’ theoretical price would be for offering transferable licenses, and how many people who say they want to be able to resell would pay it. It’s also interesting to me that we got all the way to 2026 and one of them officially going all-digital and we never saw price differentiation for physical copies.