Michael Hood

My ISP @CoxComm has a planned upgrade event in the middle of the day today. Might be more tomorrow, they don't publish advance notice. This is why broadband competition is important.

@DancygDancyg Quality is the only thing that matters. And reading comprehension skills

Few people consciously realize this, but a resume is just a predictor of performance. If you can skip straight to performance, you don't need the predictor.

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

@bcherny @MikeKhristo I started changing to dark mode before sharing my screen. Not because I was embarrassed, but because everyone taking turns commenting on it was derailing meetings lol.

@MikeKhristo Engineers literally stop by my desk to make fun of me

I'm Boris and I created Claude Code. Lots of people have asked how I use Claude Code, so I wanted to show off my setup a bit. My setup might be surprisingly vanilla! Claude Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. There is no one correct way to use Claude Code: we intentionally build it in a way that you can use it, customize it, and hack it however you like. Each person on the Claude Code team uses it very differently. So, here goes.

@DanielLockyer @chef_jiggy Those two sides: react developers, everyone else.

@chef_jiggy Too high or low? I've had many responses on both sides

I just vibecoded a little Chrome extension which tells me if the page I'm on is using a high amount of RAM Usually an indicator of performance issues

@perspectvortex @shaig If the rider cancels on the driver, I don't think you can leave a rating. Uber surely is tracking rider-initiated cancelation rates per-driver, though, and *should* be doing something with this data.

@shaig I don’t understand how they get away with it because otherwise I think it’s pretty easy to get fired as a driver if you’re rating dips. So after playing this game two or three times how does that not cost them their ability to drive on the platform

@MatthewBerman An encouraging analog is in our lifetimes we have seen the change of “a computer could never beat the best human chess player” to “of course no human can beat a chess engine.” And yet chess is more popular now than ever. & so I hope this just scales up enthusiasm & productivity.

Every company needs a DM POC - someone high up who you can just DM the most obvious things and who shortcuts the PM hierarchy.

@aggressa @mitchellh It's a disassembler called Hopper.

@mitchellh Which hex editor/decompiler is that?

Everything is open source if you try hard enough. (Trying to find the source of a pathological performance issue stemming from AppKit only on macOS 26. I'm pretty sure it's a macOS 26 bug but given this is shipping, I need to find a workaround). I really wish Apple would just make the source of their frameworks available (even under a non-OSS license that doesn't allow any reuse), just so that app developers can understand how certain logic interacts with the system.

AI has a product problem. Not a model problem. Models are making capability leaps every few weeks but AI-native product innovation hasn’t kept up. Most products are forcing AI into existing UX patterns rather than rethinking an AI-native experience from first principles. Parallels to early mobile (2007-2010) - for years, mobile meant shrinking your website into your phone until Uber reimagined transportation.

@tqbf 👀 thanks for the recommendation, I've nearly finished* the NYT archive (goes back to late 1993 in the app).

My plan to replace the NYT Crossword with 1-3 MathAcademy blocks per night: HUGELY successful. If you're considering paying the $$$ for MathAcademy for that reason: I strongly recommend it.

MathAcademy update (yes, by implication, M.A. started me off at times tables): my first actual "whoah" moment, in Foundations III, with implicit differentiation. Differentiation never seemed so possible!

Say hello to Layers - Marketing for Developers. Layers is your technical CMO, built directly into your IDE or favorite vibe coding tool. We’re solving the problem of distribution for builders. See layers in action then sign up at the link below 👇

I have also run this fun thought experiment! More of the world than many might imagine could run on outdated hardware if software optimization was truly a priority, and market price signals on scarce compute would make it happen. Rebuild all the interpreted microservice based products into monolithic native codebases! Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course.

@DidGinn @jarredsumner "those margins" -- There are nits to pick about the applicability of this benchmark.. but the margins shown here are *17x*.

@jarredsumner What problem are you solving where those margins matter?

TIL there are large performance differences between PostgreSQL and MySQL

@louzell_ @bztree @jarredsumner Noo, don't spoil it.. so many people in here that can't read sysbench output repeating what they overheard about MySQL/PG.

@bztree @jarredsumner Take a second look at the screenshots

@josevalerio @anOrdoLiberal @jarredsumner I keep waiting for community notes to show up but nothing lol

@anOrdoLiberal @jarredsumner You can just say anything on here that’s incredible

@wangbin579 The number of people in your replies who didn't (or don't know how to) read the sysbench results, and just assumed the results reinforced their beliefs about their favorite database team...

Comparing the read-only performance of MySQL and PostgreSQL with the same 128 hash partitions.

I continue to think this is one of the most important cartoons of recent years. @marketoonist

“When the FAIR Plan runs out of money to pay claims, it’s allowed to split its remaining costs amongst all of the licensed insurers in the state, with costs allocated according to each company’s market share.” This is why insurance companies were non-renewing customers that were living far away from fire zones. It’s because they didn’t want the FAIR exposure.

oh my god I cannot believe I made all these people and now I have to pay for their airline tickets