Eric Case

Essential reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%… us.macmillan.com/books/97803741…

We’re bringing back the technical blog, one nerd-snipe at a time OCI lovers/haters, this one’s for you

Used Claude yest to help me solve my gripe with daily mental maths converting time zones in Slack! Result? Have a custom-built Slack app using @ValDotTown and it's working so well!! Private responses and I can ask it with a simple / tz command (timezone).

Here's what Anthropic pricing updates mean for Conductor users: - You can officially use your Claude sub with Conductor - If you're on a max subscription you get $200 in credits and then can pay at API costs - If you use Big Terminal Mode you won't be affected We're going to keep building the best interface for the best coding agents! Excited to show you what we've been cooking🫡

@charlieholtz Yes. Every time.

OH just now: “I hope that was a cloud agent because I just shut my lid”

Railway for iOS is now available in TestFlight! Get started here: railway.com/mobile

DS4 with M5 optimizations github.com/Swival/ds4-m5

In David Crawshaw’s (@davidcrawshaw ) recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully. Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life. A few thoughts from someone who lived it. Back then, formal code review was not our primary line of defense. Our biggest daily problem wasn’t “is this algorithm theoretically perfect?” It was: Will the full system compile? Will it link? Will it boot? Will it survive stress? Pre-Win2k we used an internal source control system called SLM (“slime”). No branching. Filesystem-based. Extremely brittle. To build a bootable NT system you needed 100+ SLM projects welded into arbitrary places in the tree. Getting a machine synced could take 3+ hours. You literally ran sync in a loop until you got no new files and no errors. Then came the build. In the NT 3.1 timeframe, a full system build on a capable machine might take ~5 hours. By the Win2k era, full builds had stretched into the 14+ hour range — and this was before modern build farms or large-scale distributed compilation. Those build times fundamentally shaped developer behavior. Most developers avoided full-system builds entirely. They worked in tiny enlistments and borrowed objs/binaries from known-good systems because rebuilding the entire world was simply too expensive in both time and productivity. The longer builds became, the more pressure there was to take shortcuts — and those shortcuts created endless opportunities for integration failures and subtle mistakes. A broken build could easily waste days of engineering time. In bad stretches, you could go multiple days without a clean master build. That approach worked… until someone changed a widely shared struct, renamed a field, added a property, tweaked a macro, or silently altered alignment assumptions somewhere deep in the system. Best case: parts of the system no longer compiled. Next best: they compiled but failed to link. Worst case: everything built successfully, but incompatible assumptions between old objs and newly compiled code poisoned the running system in ways that were extremely difficult to diagnose. THIS was our daily battle: not bad style, not missing comments, not minor logic bugs — it was preserving system-wide build and runtime integrity across a massive codebase when most developers could not practically build the entire system locally. Once we had builds that compiled, linked, and booted, the real work started. Stress. Every dev had at least two machines: one for coding, one for testing/stress. We hammered systems continuously with unrealistic randomized load. Deadlocks. Pool corruption. Loader hangs. Resource exhaustion. “Hung, No Ready Threads.” In the early days, the stress build was literally my build. I’d walk office-to-office in the morning checking which machines had died overnight and assign debugging work. No remote debugging yet. If someone needed your machine, you lost your office for hours. Eventually we got remote.exe and centralized build/stress systems, but debugging was still brutal: raw assembly, minimal symbols, hand-reconstructed stacks, careful avoidance of paged-out memory because one wrong move killed the session. That was the real engineering culture: integration, stress, performance, resource correctness, system behavior under extreme load. Most of the failures we chased would never have been caught by lightweight pre-commit review from someone inside your immediate group.

You don’t want to mess with a guy who won international comedy competitions in his youth and then built a giant media empire on cringe dad-joke shows.

I think @antirez ds4.c is important! I wrote down my thoughts on why I built pi-ds4 and why we need to focus our local model efforts stronger than we do currently. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/8/local…

This is absolute 🔥

On May 6, Ukraine marks Infantry Day, honoring those holding the front lines through years of full-scale war. Enduring extreme conditions and long separations from loved ones, they continue fighting to reclaim every meter of Ukrainian land.

New pricing page added to DCFC Tracker. We don't have to deal with the volatility of gas prices, but it's still interesting to see the trends. Data from most major networks included, covering 80%+ of all DC fast charging stalls in the country. dcfctracker.com/ev-pricing

@jyeiguess @FrameworkPuter All part of the @FrameworkPuter circle of life:

@mattyp @NotTuxedoSam "Has the IRGC pwned me" 😅

Every workspace in Conductor takes you to a new city, but how can you visit them all? Cities have unequal probabilities of spawning - legendary cities spawn ~1 in 3,600 workspaces Roughly 12,000 new workspaces gives you a 50% chance of a complete tour, ~27k gives you a 99% chance s/o @NotTuxedoSam for the idea

@conductor_build I am just getting started with Conductor, loving what I'm seeing so far. Wondering if you'd consider using libghostty for your built-in Terminal? On launch, my Starship-driven prompt isn't rendering like it usually does. 😅 mitchellh.com/writing/libgho…

@charlieholtz I am just getting started with Conductor, very excited by what I see so far. Wondering if you’d consider setting up a Bluesky account so that we can chat there?

Wololo! Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition converts to macOS on May 28th! One of the most beloved strategy games of all time comes to Mac next month, in razor-sharp 4K and with over two decades of refinement and additional content. Find out more: feralinteractive.com/games/ageofemp…

i come here today to ask you to turn off the garbage GH copilot review bot in your GH account, so i do not have to see its garbage review on PRs in MY repo anymore. I'm really tired of this. it's always wrong, it clogs up PRs, it's useless.

We donated to @pnpmjs this month as part of our open source donations program. It's the default package manager for many of our frontend engineers. The team behind the 11.0 release did an amazing job of securing pnpm against supply-chain attacks, making it one of the safest package managers out there. That deserves recognition. If, like us, you're a fan of pnpm, sponsor the project: github.com/sponsors/pnpm

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