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Weekly Thing 346 / Wuphf, Landsat, Eclipse - Weekly Thing

2026-05-03T13:54:35.000Z

Good morning! ☕️

It has been really nice this morning to get up early, sip on some coffee, go through these links, and get this email to you. There are always interesting niches to explore, rabbit holes to jump into, and things to learn. More so now than ever before. 🕳️🐇

I’ve been making some massive changes to the Weekly Thing website by the way. I’ll share the specifics next week, but if you want to explore early check it out. Hint: have a chat with Thingy. 🤖

How about another sneak peek just for you? Folks probably know that I find the idea of your version number and birthdays thought provoking. I love the idea of a daily incremental improvement. Well, Claude and I whipped up Your Version Number to make that even more fun. Add one or more birthdays, select a theme, voila. All state is in the URL so you can bookmark, send to others, or make it your home page. 🎉

See you next week! Jamie v5.4.120

Docks ready for boats to arrive for the summer.

April 26, 2026 Excelsior, MN

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 346 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

The Other Reasons Why Podcasting is Hot #

I listened to this same Pivot episode that Doc Searls comments on here and it seemed the comment on “people actually listen to the ads” rang a little odd to him too. His assessment of what actually makes podcasts great is spot on and no surprise are the same things that make the open web so great — your in control, it isn’t owned by one company.

I haven’t gotten traction on my Another Thing podcast but it is still there and I’m not giving up. I did recently add the option to listen to issues of the Weekly Thing on the web, which then made a podcast a super simple thing to add. Search your podcast app of choice for Weekly Thing and you should find it.

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports Anthropic #

There were grumbles about Claude Code getting less smart and here Anthropic shares what they changed that caused this and what they did to fix it. It is an interesting read because the three changes span a change in a default, an actual bug, and a reasoning change. When I read this it feels like the kind of thing that agentic engineering teams are going to need to be really good at. It also strikes me as a difference between products and agents. If you build a product and ship it, minus bugs it will behave deterministically. The last item on Claude’s issue was a change in behavior that impacted coding performance. That isn’t a feature change. This is what “performance management” for agents looks like.

Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy #

This is the first “real” use case I’ve seen where agents are given access to payment methods and buying something on their own.

Starting today, agents can provision Cloudflare on behalf of their users. They can create a Cloudflare account, start a paid subscription, register a domain, and get back an API token to deploy code right away. Humans can be in the loop to grant permission and must accept Cloudflare’s terms of service, but no human steps are otherwise required from start to finish.

This is specifically done with Stripe.

This all works via a new protocol that we’ve co-designed with Stripe as part of the launch of Stripe Projects.

There is a not-so-subtle signal here that both Stripe and Cloudflare see agents, particularly coding agents, as their customer. If you fire up Codex or Claude Code and say “build me a thing”, they want the agents to prefer their platforms because the actual end-user probably doesn’t have a strong opinion and the agent is just looking to get the job done. It will likely pick the solution that allows it to do that most completely.

I can’t help but connect this back to crypto too. This solution is fine but it is fully platform lock-in with Stripe enabling it. The better answer, and I nearly guarantee we are going to get here, is giving your agents a crypto wallet and sending digital currency to it to get the job done. No lock in, no worry about the agent having access to your credit card, no risk it overspends, and instant settlement. This is so completely crystal clear and doable today.

Prediction: digital currency will take off with agent proliferation.

wuphf: Slack for AI employees with a shared brain #

This feels like someone was in my brain. I’ve been thinking about messaging between agents a lot lately. It isn’t a big leap to think about five different agents needing to communicate and share messages. However, it is a whole different thing to consider thousands of agents that are the same focusing on different work communicating. Instantly Slack comes to mind, but at a volume and terseness that would be very "agent’, not human. You can clearly imagine organizations where you have an agent discourse system operating in one style and speed, and a person one that is very much like Slack today, with an interop layer between them. This project is that agent system, sort of.

PS: We’ve been re-watching The Office as a family so the name of this app was fresh in my head and made me LOL for real. WUPFH.com!

I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. Here’s Who Showed Up. #

This is a must read post. I love the framing here:

This isn’t someone scanning specifically for my server. This is the background radiation of the internet — a constant, automated, planet-wide sweep of every IP address on every port, all the time, forever. If you’ve ever had a machine with port 22 open, this is what’s been happening to it.

In less than a minute this honeypot registered activity. I absolutely adore the “background radiation” term. it is a perfect fit. There is a constant swarm of bots attempting to gain access to hosts like this. Forever.

The fact that they bots just login, get the name of the OS, cover their tracks, and then leave is creates an incredible picture. The robust multi-layered economy built to find hosts and exploit them is in full effect here. This is literally the “top of the funnel” activity for evil doers.

Build with Micro.blog #

I’m a fan of micro.blog but the documentation for their APIs and services has always been lacking. This is a great resource. I pinged Vincent after he shared it that it would be great to make it easier for LLMs to use. He added llms.txt support in a couple of hours. Clearly he’s building with agents. The next day I had Claude Code work up mb-audit using that LLMS.txt endpoint to build a thing I have wanted to exist for micro.blog for a while.

If you want to create something use micro.blog, this makes it super easy.

Lessons on Building MCP Servers #

Great learnings for folks making MCP servers. I particularly like the design checklist at the end. All that is missing is packaging that up as a Claude Skill! There is a ton of art that comes into play when designing these as well as agent tools. Similar domain models. Doing this right is key to getting agents to operate consistently.

Journal #

Apr 24, 2026 at 9:40 PM

Tammy and I went to Michael tonight and I really enjoyed the movie – more than I was expecting. His music was such presence when I was a teenager. Billie Jean is still amazing.

Apr 25, 2026 at 9:05 AM

Refining Elixir’s agent definitions by having Opus review prompts that Sonnet has modified from OpenClaw’s refactor to be used by Haiku. Seems like magic. 🪄

Apr 25, 2026 at 2:30 PM

We started the Dragon’s Keep room at Trapped Puzzle Rooms strong. First 20 minutes or so we just plowed through everything. Smooth! Then it all fell apart in the 2nd half. We completed but were 12m over time! See Dragon’s Keep on Escaping Things for me.

Apr 25, 2026 at 3:33 PM

Beautiful day for MNUFC v LAFC! ⚽️

Apr 26, 2026 at 1:30 PM

A little early still for tulips but always a nice time to explore the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

Apr 26, 2026 at 6:00 PM

It is really important that you store your PLA in a dry environment. Humidity causes problems when printing. One of the cool things about 3D printing stuff is you mostly just print it. I now have ample PLA storage using this Drybox Sterilite 20 Qt project.

Apr 26, 2026 at 6:36 PM

TIL: the most hamburger that Lions Tap has gone through in one day was 580 lbs. Father’s Day drove a big surge.

Apr 26, 2026 at 10:00 PM

We watched Eternity tonight and it was a great movie. A very interesting concept and a touching story. Recommended. 🍿

Apr 30, 2026 at 8:55 PM

Let’s go Wolves! 🏀

Apr 30, 2026 at 11:45 PM

For the 2nd half of the Wolves game I got to sit court side – right next to the scoring table! Incredible experience that close. Those dudes are huge! Bonus to see the Wolves win the series and send the Nuggets home. Plus getting on TV. The Nuggets coach liked to stand in my view though. 🤩🏀

Briefly #

Cool app built on the Morty API that helps you book escape rooms for a trip with defined dates and locations, build the schedule, and even manage logistics across the bookings. → Skeleton Key

I touch on this topic in my Software is Liquid post. Prototyping is now best done in code. → AI Prototyping Is Changing How We Build Products at Uber

Life is not a problem looking for a software solution. My angle: the digital and the organic are different worlds. Sometimes they should work together. Sometimes they should stay in their lanes. → Beware Software Brain | The Verge

This made me smile. → Your Name in Landsat 🛰️

Love for tools that give users power over platforms. Consider this my weekly endorsement of using RSS and a feed reader. → Using the internet like its 1999 - The Universe of Joshua Blais

Bridging databases with streaming interfaces is a powerful feature. My Elixir project could possibly benefit from using this. → honker: SQLite extension + bindings for Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics

This feels like Microsoft responding to how powerful (and good) Claude for PowerPoint and Excel are. → Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint | The Verge

Super handy library if you need to display a directory structure or similar information. → Trees, from Pierre

I’ve talked to a number of parents who are doing some agentic game coding with their kids. I love it! What a great way to expose folks to the power of AI and have fun with your kids. This framework looks interesting to make even better games. → OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games

Hmm, this seems like an obvious thing to look for. We have increasing data that microbiome is very powerful and important. And obviously coffee would affect that. “Behaviourally, coffee drinkers exhibited greater impulsivity and emotional reactivity, whereas non-coffee drinkers demonstrated better memory performance.” Wonder if the probiotic I take is handling my two cups of coffee okay? → Habitual coffee intake shapes the gut microbiome and modifies host physiology and cognition - Nature Communications

I sent this feature request into YNAB years ago. Fun to see it finally land! → Why Don’t You Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer | YNAB

It used to be that Anthropoic and AWS were BFFs. But now AWS has OpenAI models. And Google is getting cozy with Anthropic. Everyone needs the money, and everyone needs access to frontier models. → Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic

Delightful website to learn about Mahjong. It is on my long-list to learn this game. Tammy actually went to a class with her mother to learn it recently. → Mahjong: a Visual Guide

Software supply chain issues are growing. It would be a help to the whole industry if Github put some guardrails in GitHub Actions to help people not be so insecure by default. → GitHub Actions is the weakest link

Great way to plan out eclipse trips! → Solar Eclipse Map

I like that we are getting more “backup your cloud stuff” tools. It is all fine for us to have cloud capabilities but I don’t like the fact that I don’t have my own copy. Having a dozen terabytes of local storage with software constantly mirroring your cloud activity locally is the right answer. → Parachute Backup - Backup Utility for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos

A haiku to leave you with…

Coffee stirs the gut While AI dreams in the night Both keep us awake

Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the Weekly Thing on Reddit. 👋

👨‍💻

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-03T11:06:28.000Z

Up and writing at 6am for the next Weekly Thing!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-03T00:08:04.000Z

PLA run to Microcenter.

Spent this morning at Minnebar... - Barry Hess

2026-05-02T21:41:58.000Z

Spent this morning at Minnebar. This year was the 20th anniversary. I’ve had several posts about Minnebar on this blog through the years. I’ve only been able to go a couple times over the past ten years and it was good to see many familiar faces. (Even some Minnesota expats. 👋, Luke!)

I called TRUNCATE on a Postgres database table in production for the first time. That was nerve wracking!

I did some wood work for the first time in a while. I’m working on a loft for Emma. I don’t know whether it’s time away from woodworking or just the type of project, but this felt a lot more like work and a lot less like hobby. Part of it might also be because it’s such a physically big project and that is a lot for my older body.

I’m way behind, but I just learned that Songkick was purchased by Suno. Did I know what Suno was before I learned that? No, but it sounds pretty ick. From their own home page:

Make any song you can imagine
Start with a simple prompt or dive into our pro editing tools, your next track is just a step away.

Yeah, ick. Time to migrate to Bandsintown? Something else? Give up?

I just finished the excellent Fela Kuti: Fear No Man podcast by Jad Abumrad and team. Highly recommended.

I think I might become an Onion paper subscriber. Anyone else going back to paper?

Discovered NOT A HOTEL. A man can dream.

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-02T18:34:37.000Z

Great TeamSPS group at Minnebar 20!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-02T14:41:06.000Z

Amazing collection of Minnebar t-shirts over the years!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-02T13:54:54.000Z

I’m very happy that SPS Commerce continues to be a decade-plus sponsor of Minnestar and the amazing tech community in the Twin Cities.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-02T13:38:09.000Z

So great to connect with Minnebar OG’s this morning. Awesome to have Ben and Luke here to celebrate Minnebar 20!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-01T16:13:59.000Z

Had second Shingrex shot yesterday and so far feel okay. First shot gave me shivers but it was a lot colder then. Hoping for the best and good to avoid shingles. 💉

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-05-01T15:43:57.000Z

My wife wishes a happy Commitment Day to all who are celebrating (or already have).

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-01T01:55:29.000Z

Let’s go Wolves! 🏀

What if you could rent out your own library shelf? | Rebecca Toh | TEDxSingapore - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-28T17:10:36.000Z

We do have the power to come to together to build what we think is missing in our world.

Rebecca Toh on the power in building a small, volunteer run, library.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-28T03:19:49.000Z

Mike Carson bought Friendster for $30KM – Boing Boing

Carson’s pitch is a social network that doesn’t work without face-to-face contact. To add someone as a friend on the new Friendster iOS app, the two of you have to physically tap your phones together.

A truly social network. Fascinating. May have to give it a spin (and find a friend who wants to as well).

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-26T23:36:52.000Z

TIL: the most hamburger that Lions Tap has gone through in one day was 580 lbs. Father’s Day drove a big surge.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-26T15:18:08.000Z

Part of my Circus Rigging duties include “spotting”, which in many cases means simply making sure that if a performer does fall, they do so safely and land on a mat.

Here I am spotting Beatrix on Static Trapeze last night.

Weekly Thing 345 / Codex, Headless, Wikiwise - Weekly Thing

2026-04-26T12:00:00.000Z

Good morning! ☕️ I hope your weekend is off to a great start! This week was filled with big tech stuff: Apple CEO transition, GPT 5.5, Claude Design. The pace is just moving faster and faster. I have a long blog post in this issue that is a talk I gave turned into a post that hits on speed and how fast things are changing. But today we have more important things. Today is Tammy’s birthday and we are going to be making the most of it! 🎉 Enjoy the links and have a great day! <hr> <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/345/cover.jpg" alt=""> Incredible light coming into Sagrada Familia. (I’m still using photos from our trip to Europe a few weeks ago.) March 25, 2026 Barcelona, Spain <hr> <h2 id="notable" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#notable">Notable</a></h2> You can discuss any of these links at the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/weeklything/?f=flair_name%3A%22Weekly%20Thing%20345%22">Weekly Thing 345 tag in r/WeeklyThing</a>. <h3 id="openais-new-codex-app-has-the-best-computer-use-feature-ive-ever-tested-macstories" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#openais-new-codex-app-has-the-best-computer-use-feature-ive-ever-tested-macstories"><a href="https://www.macstories.net/notes/openais-new-codex-app-has-the-best-computer-use-feature-ive-ever-tested/">OpenAI’s New Codex App Has the Best ‘Computer Use’ Feature I’ve Ever Tested - MacStories</a></a></h3> Add this to the long list of things I need to directly play with. I will share that I’ve been incredibly frustrated with OpenClaw and am about to give up on it. The continued progression of Claude Cowork and now Codex computer-use features seem like they are much more mature and reliable to get work done. <h3 id="cloudflare-email-service-now-in-public-beta-ready-for-your-agents" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#cloudflare-email-service-now-in-public-beta-ready-for-your-agents"><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-for-agents/">Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents</a></a></h3> There are a lot of email services but not many that are fully designed for agents. Agents are going to want email as a core service just like we do, but they are going to want their email inbox to work differently. This is going to happen with many, many services. I have to share that I have some flashbacks here to the period when we were making “social everything”. Social media was the focus and we thought Social ERP and Social HRIS would be a potential tidal wave that would dislodge established players. That was a complete mirage. I think this time is very different. <h3 id="headless-everything-for-personal-ai" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#headless-everything-for-personal-ai"><a href="https://interconnected.org/home/2026/04/18/headless">Headless everything for personal AI</a></a></h3> This “headless” term is pure marketing and I sure hope it blows by, but the concept I agree with completely. Matter of fact I’m already playing here with my <a href="https://github.com/jthingelstad/mb">mb</a> project. I’ve been working on a lot of agent building and thinking about how agentic systems compare with typical product building that has been the focus of most things I’ve done for my career. Products are designed for people and our huge context windows, visual preferences, and a desire to enable the user to do whatever they want at any time with buttons and events. Agents have a limited context window, much prefer text interfaces that are easy to parse, and thrive on non-blocking command line calls. There is overlap between these but less than you might think. Part of the reason that building agentic systems is moving so quickly is removing some extremely expensive and time consuming things that products need. You need a concept, some visual system. You need user testing. You need to consider a whole event model. With agents you don’t need any of that. And on top of that, you can just ask the agent how it is working. You can ask another LLM to generate interactive test data. You can move so much faster. <h3 id="introducing-claude-design-by-anthropic-labs" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#introducing-claude-design-by-anthropic-labs"><a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs">Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs</a></a></h3> Anthropic’s newest major capability for Claude is Claude Design. I wanted to get my hands dirty with it so I pointed it at the <a href="https://poapkings.com">POAP KINGS</a> website which was entirely created with Claude Code, including the design. I thought the design was okay but I had just added a blog feature and it was getting unruly. I pointed Claude Design at the Github repo and it went to work. I answered a number of questions about what I was hoping for and over the course of several prompts it provided a very solid iteration forward. The most helpful thing in Claude Design is that you can select a specific element and make a very pointed design comment. It is hard to do that in Claude Code. Overall it was very good at understanding the visual language. And in the end I just hit Share and sent the design to Claude Code which then dutifully updated the site with the new look. Impressive, particularly for a beta, and the connectedness with Claude Code is very powerful. <h3 id="dad-brains-how-fatherhood-rewires-the-male-mind" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#dad-brains-how-fatherhood-rewires-the-male-mind"><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-fatherhood-how-the-male-brain-and-body-prepare-for-childcare">Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind</a></a></h3> Interesting read filled with what seems like a decent amount of common sense. <blockquote> Their findings are not unique. Other teams have also found that <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0018506X16301015?via%3Dihub">drops in testosterone</a> during their partner’s pregnancy are also linked with higher investment, commitment and satisfaction after birth, and that this hormone’s level was even <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0018506X02918404">linked to the men’s reactions to baby cries</a>: it made them more alert and responsive. In 2018, a team in Gettler’s lab also concluded that fathers with lower levels of testosterone tend to be <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0018506X18301703?via%3Dihub">more involved in caring</a> for babies and toddlers. </blockquote> Tons of podcasts and newsletters for men are focusing on keeping your testosterone high and that it is a problem for men as they age. Data also shows that being in a good relationship and having kids drops testosterone levels. We shouldn’t ignore either to the disadvantage of the other, but it is also important to not just look at one thing in isolation. <h3 id="introducing-chatgpt-images-20-openai" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#introducing-chatgpt-images-20-openai"><a href="https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-images-2-0/">Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.0 | OpenAI</a></a></h3> Incredible example images created by the newest image models from OpenAI. I know everyone, including me, is all focused on Anthropic right now but GPT-5.5 and this are pretty impressive. <h3 id="mac-power-users-845-intentional-technology-with-patrick-rhone-relay" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#mac-power-users-845-intentional-technology-with-patrick-rhone-relay"><a href="https://www.relay.fm/mpu/845">Mac Power Users #845: Intentional Technology with Patrick Rhone - Relay</a></a></h3> Was great to see the Twin Cities own <a href="https://patrickrhone.com">Patrick Rhone</a> on the latest episode of Mac Power Users! <h3 id="an-mcp-server-for-fastmail-national-email-day" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#an-mcp-server-for-fastmail-national-email-day"><a href="https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/">An MCP server for Fastmail — National Email Day</a></a></h3> This might be the first MCP server that becomes my BFF. I’ve been a Fastmail user for many years and when I saw this I instantly went into Claude and added the connection. It was super-simple and then I asked Claude if it could see my email and there it was. I’ve not done anything all that advanced with it but I’m very happy with how seamless and easy it is. It is also great that it connects to my Claude account and instantly was available on all of my Claude interfaces. Oh how I wish I had a similar MCP for OmniFocus. <h3 id="is-your-site-agent-ready" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#is-your-site-agent-ready"><a href="https://isitagentready.com/">Is Your Site Agent-Ready?</a></a></h3> Tool that inspects a website to see what AI capabilities it is advertising. Useful if you wish to make your site as useful for agents as possible. I’m surprised thought that it didn’t look for <a href="https://llmstxt.org">llms.txt</a> support. <h3 id="introducing-gpt-55-openai" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#introducing-gpt-55-openai"><a href="https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/">Introducing GPT-5.5 | OpenAI</a></a></h3> Most of the highlights here are about coding. I fired up <code>codex</code> on <a href="https://poapkings.com/elixir/">Elixir</a>’s code and asked it to do a review and assessment. It came forward with strong suggestions and quickly understood everything. The model seemed notably fast to me. Just overall it is still mind-blowing how this is all evolving. <hr> {% if subscriber.subscriber_type == ‘premium’ %} Thank you so much for being a Supporting Member! 🎉 Because of amazing folks like you, we’ve raised $941.07 this year for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—and in just two weeks, every single dollar (yep, 100% of it!) will head straight to EFF to support their vital work defending digital rights. With a community of 23 awesome Supporting Members, you’re part of something small but mighty, and we couldn’t be more grateful to have you in the mix. Here’s to making a real impact together—thank you for helping keep the internet free, open, and fun! 🚀 {% elif subscriber.subscriber_type == ‘regular’ %} Join the fun and make an impact! The Weekly Thing community has already raised $941.07 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and in just 2 weeks we’ll send every dollar straight to support their incredible work—because 100% of what we raise goes directly to EFF. With 23 amazing Supporting Members already on board, now’s the perfect time to jump in, amplify our collective contribution, and help us finish strong. Be part of something meaningful, fuel digital freedom, and let’s see how high we can take this together! <table role="presentation" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tr><td width="50%" valign="top" style="padding:10px; text-align:center; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold;"> <buttondown-button href="https://buy.stripe.com/3cs7w5eX6aXBbhm144?prefilled_email={{ subscriber.email | urlencode }}">$4 monthly</buttondown-button> </td><td width="50%" valign="top" style="padding:10px; text-align:center; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold;"> <buttondown-button href="https://buy.stripe.com/eVa3fP2ak3v91GMdQR?prefilled_email={{ subscriber.email | urlencode }}">$40 yearly</buttondown-button> </td></tr></table> {% else %} Enjoying the Weekly Thing? {{ subscribe_form }} {% endif %} <hr> <h2 id="journal" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#journal">Journal</a></h2> <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/17/tyler-and-i-are-going.html">Apr 17, 2026 at 7:47 PM</a> <a href="https://tyler.thingelstad.com">Tyler</a> and I are going to do a <a href="https://minnestar.org/minnebar/">Minnebar</a> session this year – <a href="https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2094">Elixir: Creating An Ai Agent For Our Clash Royale Clan</a>. This will be a lot of fun to share with everyone and tell some of the <a href="https://poapkings.com/">POAP KINGS</a> and <a href="https://poapkings.com/elixir/">Elixir</a> story. <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/18/there-is-a-fox-that.html">Apr 18, 2026 at 4:01 PM</a> There is a fox that has been mostly living at our cabin property for a couple of years now. This year she had pups and they sure are cute to see scamper around. <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/18/it-is-still-such-a.html">Apr 18, 2026 at 4:02 PM</a> It is still such a “wow” when you hit print and go downstairs a few hours later to grab something useful. Tyler and I are having a great time with the Bambu Labs P2S. <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/345/journal/842eccba9e.jpg" alt=""> <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/18/cold-april-night-for-mnufc.html">Apr 18, 2026 at 8:30 PM</a> Cold April night for MNUFC v Portland match. ⚽️🥶 <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/345/journal/d42242ee72.jpg" alt=""> <h3 id="software-is-liquid" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#software-is-liquid"><a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/20/software-is-liquid.html">Software Is Liquid</a></a></h3> Apr 20, 2026 at 7:52 PM This started as a talk I gave internally to a group of technology leaders. I’ve adapted it here, stripping out the company-specific material, because the core ideas apply well beyond any one organization. I want to throw out some ideas about what I think is changing in our industry. What I’m going to describe is one of the most rapidly evolving, most dynamic changes I have ever seen in a twenty-plus-year career in technology. I believe there are things changing right now that will fundamentally redefine how we practice our craft. <h4 id="where-we-are" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#where-we-are">Where we are</a></h4> Let’s bookmark where we are. Agents are real. I’ve watched one go from nothing – zero, no code, no design – to a working alpha with real users making real decisions on it, in about five weeks. A year ago, this was an idea. Now there are production agents running. Agentification is the next major milestone our industry is going through. I’m old enough to say this: there was a time before the web and a time after. A time before mobile and after. A time before the cloud and after. And now, a time before AI and agents and after. I think this is going to be the most transformative of all of those. You have to acknowledge one paradox of where we are: we are building the best practices before they exist. We’ve been here before. Those of us who lived through the cloud transformation remember being ahead of the industry, figuring out how this ephemeral compute stuff works, how to make it all function. There weren’t patterns the industry had settled on. That’s where we are today. There are no clear patterns for how agentification happens. We’re going to build those patterns and learn alongside the industry. That’s okay. Just be aware of where you are. It’s fine to be out ahead of the curve; you just have to always know when you’re there, because it’s a risky spot. You don’t want to be too far out. <h4 id="getting-philosophical-software-is-becoming-liquid" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#getting-philosophical-software-is-becoming-liquid">Getting philosophical: software is becoming liquid</a></h4> I want to get a little philosophical. For the last two months, I’ve pushed myself into a level of AI engagement that is probably unhealthy long-term, honestly. If you ask my family, they would agree. But what I’ve been trying to do is really wrap my head around the core concepts that I think change how we do what we do. Connect this back to other transformations. When we adopted a mobile world, we all knew we needed to be mobile users to lead it. Can anybody build a great mobile app if they’ve never used a mobile phone? Obviously not. So to lead through AI agentification, we have to be really close to it. I’ve been pushing myself hard to do that, because as you build experience, it gets harder to refactor how you think. Here’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about: what is the cost of being wrong? And how do we fold that into how we create things? Step back for a moment and think about how we do our craft. Say we’re building software. We spend time on discovery. We create stories. We have designers go off and make wireframes. We do all kinds of things to make sure that, when we actually get to the point of building, we know we’re doing the right thing. Why? Because the act of building software has been incredibly expensive. The last twenty years of my career have been about figuring out how to effectively turn ideas into working software and how to make sure that, when we do, we’re not wrong – that we’re producing valuable capability. That’s what technology teams around the world have been focused on. The teams that do it well do these things better than the teams that don’t. Here’s how I’ve come to think about it: software has historically been a solid. It’s chiseling something out of granite. We have our ideas, we sit down, it’s hard work, it’s challenging, and we chisel it out of granite. I think that’s changing. I first heard this from somebody online and it didn’t land for me at first – I thought, that doesn’t make sense. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was spot on. The assertion was: software is becoming liquid. We’ve operated for two decades in a world where software is an incredibly difficult solid to shape. With AI and agentic development – automatic programming – software is becoming malleable. If you’ve worked with agents on software, you’ve had the experience of thinking: I can refactor this code faster than it would have taken me to do all the guardrail work to make sure I didn’t make the wrong decision in the first place. When the economics of what you do change that profoundly, you have to question everything. <h4 id="every-paradigm-built-on-software-is-expensive-needs-re-examination" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#every-paradigm-built-on-software-is-expensive-needs-re-examination">Every paradigm built on “software is expensive” needs re-examination</a></h4> Go back further. Most of us spent the early parts of our careers in agile flows. Before that, everybody did waterfall. Why? Were they just not as smart? No – they were operating under a different set of assertions. If you made a mistake writing C code, it was really difficult to unwind. You’d take months to refactor a mistake in your domain model that showed up in C code. Then we got Python, PHP, interpreted environments, continuous integration. The paradigm changed. Suddenly: what if I’m wrong? Fine, I’ll refactor. Refactoring Python is cheaper than refactoring C. That’s just a fact. So here comes agile. We can do this differently. We can be more responsive. The cloud is the second part of that story. The cloud says we can do the same thing with hardware – we don’t have to worry about where we put the server. The cost of being wrong, if I put a server in the wrong data center, is not easy to undo. But in the cloud, that’s a couple of commands. We are in that same spot again. AI is transforming the cost of creating software in a way that should make us question every single process we have that is fundamentally built on the assertion that creating software is expensive. I’d argue that maybe proof of concept doesn’t make sense anymore. What we used to call a proof of concept is now discovery. And how do you do discovery? I think you do it in code. Your discovery process is entirely in code. Do you then throw the code away? No. Why would I? It’s liquid. I bend it, move it around, get it where I want it. The act of discovering through creating changes things pretty fundamentally. That paradigm is going to take us a while to absorb. I really want you to think about what you have in your world that makes assertions that building this stuff is extremely expensive. And when I say “cost,” don’t just think dollars – think organizational cost. That’s assertion one: software is becoming liquid. <h4 id="managers-belong-in-the-code" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#managers-belong-in-the-code">Managers belong in the code</a></h4> Here’s my second assertion. If you’re a people leader, this one is for you. I used to have a very firm belief. When I saw a people leader – a director or a manager – in code, that was a warning sign. Almost always, when I saw a director or manager in code, they were probably avoiding something harder that they were supposed to be doing. “Oh, you’re working on the actual software? I bet you have a personnel problem you’re not dealing with.” I don’t think that’s true anymore. Agentic engineering changes that fundamentally. The issue historically was a simple one of context window. As a manager, you couldn’t truly know the codebase because it was too complicated. It was a solid asset your craftspeople were working on. You had to focus on the people systems. You just couldn’t hold both of those things in your head and be effective. Agents change that paradigm entirely. There is no reason, as a director or a manager, why you shouldn’t be talking to an agent and asking about the quality of the asset you’re accountable for. And as a people leader, you are accountable for the assets your people create. So why aren’t you having that conversation? Why would I ever start a conversation with an engineer with, “how long do you think that’ll take?” I should have had that conversation with Claude Code first – looked at the source, asked: is this a big refactor? If we went this direction, how would that look? This flips even further on its head when we think about agentification, because increasingly we’re going to be creating software not for people to use, but for agents to use. Think about how that works. You work with an agent to create the software. Another agent uses it. The agent using it gives you feedback on how it’s working. You take that feedback back to the coding agent and ask it to iterate. What are you in that loop? I don’t know – a product manager, I guess. I’m doing this today on multiple projects at home – using agents to give each other feedback. This speed and paradigm shift is foundational to how we have to adjust our thinking. <h4 id="rethinking-velocity" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#rethinking-velocity">Rethinking velocity</a></h4> The last thing I want you to really think about: as an industry, we need a step-function change in how we think about velocity. How long is something going to take? I’d argue every paradigm you have for answering that question is broken now. The cost understanding is broken. The complexity understanding is broken. It’s all broken. The only way to truly gauge it is through the second thing I mentioned – getting closer to the asset you’re accountable for, getting closer to the code and the product. Just like mobile – where you couldn’t understand how to build an app until you’d experienced one – you can’t understand agentic transformation until you’ve experienced it firsthand. Don’t be scared to go close to the code. Don’t be scared to ask your team, “Hey, how do I get that code out of Git? I’d like to look at it and do some analysis.” These are superpowers. Every single one of us can put a cape on. You didn’t have these before. I think it’s amazing. And the whole industry is going to go through this transformation. <h4 id="the-change-curve-and-the-rate-of-change" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#the-change-curve-and-the-rate-of-change">The change curve, and the rate of change</a></h4> I want to close with something about change itself. There’s a model called the Satir change curve. Every one of us sits at a different point on it right now. But just like every transformation before it, your progress is gated by your own engagement – by your own willingness to rethink the craft you have and to let go of things that may have been important for the last two decades but aren’t important anymore. I invite you to come down this path. Personally, it’s not easy. And what’s not easy is the rate. Think about it: we had two or three or four years to figure out mobile. We had half a decade for cloud. The web took an eternity – it was the first one. Here, we’re trying to do this in about a year. Why? Because it’s enabled by all the other capability we’ve built, and because the potential is so big. The return on investment, once we identify things, is measured in weeks or months – not years. That’s a completely different thing than any of these previous transformations. I hope you heard something here that grounds you. Software is liquid. The fundamental economic paradigms have changed. You are able to lead through this. <h3 id="hypergrowth" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#hypergrowth"><a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/22/hypergrowth.html">Hypergrowth</a></a></h3> Apr 22, 2026 at 6:00 PM This growth is hard to even comprehend. <blockquote> Anthropic says Claude Code is now <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-series-g-funding-380-billion-post-money-valuation">growing revenues at a $2.5 billion run-rate</a>, a number that has doubled since January 1. Claude Code was launched in May 2025. Six months later it was at $1 billion. Its sales are growing faster than a 1980s F1 monster, pulling the whole company along with it. Anthropic hit $14 billion in ARR in February, $19 billion in March, and <a href="https://www.saastr.com/anthropic-just-passed-openai-in-revenue-while-spending-4x-less-to-train-their-models/">around $30 billion this month</a>. – <a href="https://om.co/2026/04/22/software-eats-its-own/">Software Eats Its Own</a> </blockquote> Even being prepared for that level of scaling is impressive. <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/23/we-had-a-great-presence.html">Apr 23, 2026 at 9:00 PM</a> We had a great presence from TeamSPS at the Aspirations in Computing awards event tonight and welcomed three of the four high-school interns that will be working with us this summer! <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/345/journal/1dfc52c8d7.jpg" alt=""> <hr> <h2 id="briefly" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#briefly">Briefly</a></h2> Long article but I like these kind of deep-dives into languages. This one makes the case that Ada was well ahead of its time in many ways. → <a href="https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html">On Ada, Its Design, and the Language That Built the Languages</a> I am a fan of wikis but getting them integrated into your knowledge system isn’t easy. Using a wiki to collaborate with an agent seems like a solid path. → <a href="https://wiki-wise.com/">Wikiwise — Build your own Wikipedia</a> It is super interesting to see the changes that AI models get between releases. → <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/18/opus-system-prompt/#atom-everything">Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7</a> I’ll miss Tim Cook being at the helm of Apple. I’ve got a ton of respect for what he has built and how he has led Apple (with a couple of recent exceptions). → <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/20/cook-community-letter">Daring Fireball: ‘Community Letter From Tim’</a> We have tickets to go see <a href="https://noahkahan.com">Noah Kahan</a> in Minneapolis this summer. Our whole family is really into his music. → <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/04/21/g-s1-111850/noah-kahan-tiny-desk-concert">Noah Kahan: Tiny Desk Concert : NPR</a> Nothing much to add. 😬 → <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/21/trump-on-tim-apple">Daring Fireball: Trump on Tim Apple</a> John Gruber commenting on the CEO transition at Apple. Gruber is my go to for deep Apple insights. → <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/another_day_has_come">Daring Fireball: Another Day Has Come</a> This brought me back! I remember being so excited when I got my Zip drive back in the day. It seemed so fast and could hold so much! → <a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/zip-drives-dominated-90s-vanished-almost-overnight/">Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight</a> As a fan of Ferrari and specifically Ferrari Formula 1 I greatly enjoyed this episode of Acquired. → <a href="https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/ferrari">Ferrari: The Prancing Horse and the Business of Desire — Acquired</a> <hr> A haiku to leave you with… Wiki of my own, Clouds of email drift in play — Agents sip the sky. Would you like to discuss the topics in the Weekly Thing further? Check out the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/weeklything/">Weekly Thing on Reddit</a>. 👋 👨‍💻 {% if medium == ‘email’ %} <img src="https://tinylytics.app/pixel/a2YQr3ZMqkySNYSwz4uF.gif?path=/email/345/" alt="" style="width:1px;height:1px;border:0;" /> {% endif %}

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-25T20:33:51.000Z

Beautiful day for MNUFC v LAFC! ⚽️

This is a fun brainstorm about snail mail sign-ups... - Barry Hess

2026-04-25T16:20:00.000Z

This is a fun brainstorm about snail mail sign-ups. I’ve been trying some snail mail things to thank a handful of Pika customers. Unfortunately it hasn’t been very effective. There’s been almost a complete lack of response. I’m not even entirely sure if most people received my mail. So I think snail mail sign-up would effectively be no sign-up. Still this could be fun for a personal project or an art project experiment.

We’ve been working hard on Pika Pulse for a number of weeks. We keep hitting blockers, many in the form of our own lack of confidence in what we’ve built. With most things I’m a ship-fast-and-adjust sort of person, but this is one that really has us being cautious. This is not due to concerns about the specifics of anything, but more the general shape of Pulse. Being completely honest, we are also very aware of the possible lasting impact Pulse could have on the day-to-day working experience of our team of two.

We are at Drake Relays for our first (and last?) time. Ava lives in a house right by campus, she’ll be moving out at the end of May, and that means it’s our last chance for sweet parking at the event. Our youngest does high jump and hurdles in high school, and it’s been fun for her (and all of us) to check out. Great weather, so lots of records!

I really should watch more historical Carol Burnett.

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-25T14:05:16.000Z

Refining Elixir’s agent definitions by having Opus review prompts that Sonnet has modified from OpenClaw’s refactor to be used by Haiku. Seems like magic. 🪄

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-25T02:40:39.000Z

Tammy and I went to Michael tonight and I really enjoyed the movie — more than I was expecting. His music was such presence when I was a teenager. Billie Jean is still amazing.