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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-18T03:19:33.000Z

It took all four of us about an hour to get the canopy in the boat cover. The wind was borderline and three different time we got it on just to have it blown off. After finally getting it on we gave the boat the best cleaning ever and it is looking really good! <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/17fd0fce84.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt=""><img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/e556867839.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt="">

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-18T03:15:48.000Z

Fabulous show by The New Standards at The Dakota tonight. 🎶 <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/bbc4f9bf29.jpg" width="600" height="337" alt="">

WT348 — Agents as Collaborators - Weekly Thing

2026-05-17T11:00:00.000Z

Welcome to the year nine of the Weekly Thing! Thank you all for joining this journey with me. Also, a big shout out to the bunch of new readers from Dense Discovery! I’m a reader and supporter of that great newsletter and it has become a tradition of mine to place a classified ad for the Weekly Thing on the anniversary.

Since this is the first issue for year nine we also have a new non-profit for the Supporting Membership program. The inaugural year we supported Creative Commons. Last year was the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This year we are supporting the Signal Foundation. I’m a Signal user, and I am really happy that we have a service like Signal. Privacy is so important to me and Signal is at the forefront creating software to make that a reality. I also love that it is backed by a 501c3 non-profit at the same time. Thank you to all the supporting members now and in the future for joining me in support of the Signal Foundation.

Now let’s get to the links from the last week!

Currently #

Listening: The new Noah Kahan album, The Great Divide. I’m really enjoying it. I don’t have all the words memorized yet like the kids do. But I’ll know it well enough for when we see him in concert soon.

Watching: Finished watching Season 3 of Shrinking on Apple TV. Tammy and I have really gotten into this show. The characters are great and the story is well done. Looking forward to next season!

Minnehaha Creek rushing towards the Mississippi River just after the Falls.

May 10, 2026 Minneapolis, MN

The Weekly Thing Team #

I’ve been publishing the Weekly Thing for nine years and automation is one of the things that has made that possible. I shared a while back how I find content, assemble the issues, and my project structure. Without these well defined workflows there is no way I could continue this project.

The structure I have has worked well but it isn’t autonomous. It only runs when I engage with it. It is also brittle and “one way”. I can only easily run it one time. Additionally I think I could use some help getting things collected and reviewing the in process writing.

To this end I decided to create my support team for the Weekly Thing!

My starting points were:

Based on Elixir I know that Discord is a reasonable place for an agent to run.
Based on building Thingy I know that my Weekly Thing archive is a robust knowledge base to build off of.
Based on sending issues that meander and are just too long sometimes I know an editor would be helpful.
Based on my own time crunch that I get into when I’m trying to make a whole issue happen in one Saturday morning I know I could use some help making it more iterative.

This is the genesis of my Workshop and the four agent team that I have now created to assist me.

One thing worth being clear about: I have stated many times that “My words are mine!” and not AI’s and that is still the case. I don’t have any of these agents working to write content for me. They are my support team. The words are still mine. The only case where an LLM is “writing” or engaging with anyone is Thingy, the librarian for the Weekly Thing, and the Supporting Membership program where I have an explicit preference that that be a different voice than mine.

Here is the broad outline of the multi-agent solution that allows me to have dedicated agents that focus on different aspects of publishing the newsletter each week. This allows me to focus more on writing and commentary!

Each of these agents are operating with a full set of tools that include the entire archive of the Weekly Thing. As a result they are much more tuned to the job at hand than a generic LLM.

Eddy is my editor who reviews everything that goes in the newsletter. Eddy assembles a working draft of the current issue of the newsletter every day and then does an editorial review of the content. Eddy shares a status and progress indicator with me in Discord.
Linky is my researcher who assists with assessing the links I flag to go into the issue. Linky does recon to allow me to filter faster. Linky doesn’t ever look at the current issue and is just assisting with curation. Linky shares these in Discord. I’ve made it so I can reply to Linky with my commentary and it sync’s it back to Pinboard. This has allowed me to turn my commentary into a conversation.
Marky focuses on the most recent issue of the Weekly Thing that has been published and raising awareness. I’ve done the least with Marky so far, but the goal is to get the Weekly Thing to new readers.
Patty is the supporting membership manager who helps create call to action to bring new members in and raise money for the nonprofit we have selected. Patty operates on the annual cycle of the membership program and is the only agent that will draft content that does appear (properly sectioned) in the Weekly Thing. Patty understands the goal of the program, the organization that we are focused on this year, and what I have been writing about.

I’m focused mostly on Eddy and Linky right now as they are core to my authoring cycle. I can already see that this is going to allow me to focus on the content more, will be a quality of life improvement to get more incremental content and less scrambling at the end of the publishing cycle, as well as a more readable final email to subscribers.

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 348 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs #

Most folks just think about the cost of turning ideas into software, but the reality is that software lives forever and has a cost to keep it running. I’ve commented many times that companies put software as an “asset” on their balance sheet. Most technologists know that the reality is sofware is a “liability” that must be maintained and your team is the “asset” that you balance against that. So now with agents making software, if we increase materially the rate of software we are making, that maintenance must be dealt with.

The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.

Provocatively I will say that I think agentic coding will result in software that is easier to maintain. Many bugs aren’t resolved because they are just too hard to find and fix. If agents can do that faster, the bugs can get resolved. Plus agents are way better at getting deployments robust. And ultimately agents can babysit software for you. I’ve been building a new Discord agent and for the entire week I’ve had Claude Code not just coding it but running it. It is seeing all the logs, errors, anything on stderr and taking action. This is resulting in more maintainable software.

First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5 #

First known exploit of Apple’s silicon memory protection in the M5 chip.

The latest flagship example is MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement), Apple’s hardware-assisted memory safety system built around ARM’s MTE (Memory Tagging Extension). It was introduced as the marquee security feature for the Apple M5 and A19, specifically designed to stop memory corruption exploits, the vulnerability class behind many of the most sophisticated compromises on iOS and macOS.

Apple spent five years building it. Probably billions of dollars too. According to their research, MIE disrupts every public exploit chain against modern iOS, including the recently leaked Coruna and Darksword exploit kits.

Mythos played a key role here:

We didn’t build the chain alone. Mythos Preview helped identify the bugs and assisted throughout exploit development.

Mythos Preview is powerful: once it has learned how to attack a class of problems, it generalizes to nearly any problem in that class. Mythos discovered the bugs quickly because they belong to known bug classes. But MIE is a new best-in-class mitigation, so autonomously bypassing it can be tricky. This is where human expertise comes in.

Part of our motivation was to test what’s possible when the best models are paired with experts. Landing a kernel memory corruption exploit against the best protections in a week is noteworthy, and says something strong about this pairing.

The bolding is mine. Apple spent five years creating this defensive structure and this small team armed with Mythos found a vulnerability in five days. We can, and probably should, look on the bright side that going forward every company building stuff like this will be using Mythos (or better) on their solutions before they are released. So we should raise the bar materially that solutions are secure.

There has to be a finite number of security vectors. Maybe we end up in a great place after uncovering these issues.

For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work. #

It is hard to explain to people outside of software how profound the changes are in the software world right now. This essay from an engineer explaining how the work has changed hits it well.

I’m sad. I don’t get into that state anymore. I don’t know how to be honest about this without sounding like I am complaining about progress, but I can’t pretend that something hasn’t been taken. The flow state I had for thirty years is not part of my workday now. The creativity that lived inside it is not there either. I do useful things. I do not feel what I used to feel while doing them.

This all lands different for different people. For me personally, I find I can lose all track of time and get extremely engrossed (flow!) working with a number of agents. However, I do note if I have three or four agents in different projects I start to lose track of the context of each one. But either way, this is very different work that putting on your headphones and writing code.

This is what free costs #

This website does a great job of showing you how various data elements are collected from your browser and how fast. You are “digitally fingerprinted” within seconds of visiting a website. You can, and I do, run software to defend against this activity. But this is a great example of why we need privacy legislation.

Journal #

Saturday @ 5:32 PM

My 2006 Deoxys Holon Phantoms 1st Edition PSA 10 card (PSA cert #67755632) has shot up in value in recent weeks. First time listing one of my cards on eBay!

Saturday @ 8:00 PM

Happy (early) Mother’s Day to my Mom and my sister! We had a nice dinner out at my Mom’s favorite Indian restaurant.

Sunday @ 12:00 PM

Mother’s Day bike ride along Minnehaha Creek to Lynette for brunch!

Sunday @ 1:00 PM

Happy Mother’s Day to Tammy!

Sunday @ 5:30 PM

We completed The Vault today (Mother’s Day Escape Room!) which was also the last room we hadn’t done at Puzzleworks. Room 105!

Sunday @ 10:30 PM

Tyler and I got to see the Wolves win at home in the playoffs. As a bonus we got to briefly see my brother-in-law Hector and his kid at the game too!

The Sheep Detective #

Monday @ 9:21 PM

We went to The Sheep Detectives tonight at Willow Creek and thought it was fabulous. Tyler and I were at another movie and saw the preview of this and he thought right away that Tammy would like it so we landed it close to Mother’s Day and brought her Mom with us as well. The premise sounds silly and we were skeptical, until we saw the Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

In reality it is an incredibly touching story, wrapped into a “whodunnit”, with sheep playing many of the principal characters. I think the sheep make the story land even better.

We all loved it. Highly recommended!

Tuesday @ 11:00 AM

Bemis Well Drilling made quick work of digging down about 10 feet to fix our well issue. The electric, natural gas, and fiber connections are all right under the backhoe there. They did a great job and got us back “in water” only about a week after the issue.

Tuesday @ 5:00 PM

I was ecstatic to share with TeamSPS that we now have an enterprise agreement for Claude. It was fun to get to share the stage with Erica Koenig to make the announcement noting the incredible capabilities we are putting into peoples hands. This is just the beginning.

Wednesday @ 9:30 PM

Our first MN United game of the season with the whole family there! Let’s go United! ⚽️

Thursday @ 5:30 PM

A fun thing about having a 3D printer is being able to take something that appears only “on screen” and make it exist “in real life”. I printed some of these Clash Royale Crowns for Tyler and I, as well as some for friends that play the game.

Thursday @ 6:00 PM

So I’m wondering “Is there a way to store hats on a hanger like thing in the closet?” After a quick search on Maker World I printed a Hat Hanger.

Suburbs @ The Parkway #

Thursday @ 10:00 PM

Somewhat even to our surprise Tammy and I hadn’t been to a Suburbs show. Neither of us connected with the band when they were first on the scene. We see Chan play all the time with The New Standards. So we decided it was time to fix that and saw them play at the Parkway. Good show and clearly we were in the midst of a ton of super fans. Seemed like half the audience had the black Suburbs shirts on.

Friday @ 3:18 PM

From a chat with Claude today…

“everything else is scope creep dressed as ambition”

Statistical word model or not, that was an insightful comment.

Briefly #

You should open this article just to scroll down and see the graph of bug fixes by month. This seems like validation that Mythos really is that powerful of a model. → Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview - Mozilla Hacks

I wonder if some embargo was recently released and people are talking about issues identified by Mythos. This one is a bit different than the Firefox report in that it only found one notable issue. Also curl seems like a very hardened code base. → Mythos finds a curl vulnerability | daniel.haxx.se

Vertical AI solutions are the next step for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. In many ways, it is a system prompt turned into a product. → Claude for Legal

“Claude saved my crypto!” → Claude AI recovers an 11 yrs old BTC wallet holding 400k USD

I need to spend some time making Lua with Claude. → Lua as a practical “soft-bedrock” language

My weekly plug on why RSS is so great. You should be using this to “read” the web. → How I restarted using RSS, and actually noticed! – Six Colors

Lovely feature exploration of things that feed readers could do. → Ideas for web readers

Clear semantics on what these actions really can or should mean. → On likes, reposts, and bookmarks

Want an actual social web with real people? Here you go. → Love Letter to IndieWebClub

This is an incredibly detailed exploration through all things WiFi. Radio frequencies, physical layers, more than you probably ever knew existed. → Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/ac/ax/be/bn)

Along with other new things behind-the-scenes with the Weekly Thing I’ve added this area where I can put some stuff at the end of each email.

You’ll note that I’ve switched the subject line for these emails. The new format lands on the shorthand I’m using to reference an issue WT and the number. This is WT348. And then instead of the three words I’ve used we are gonna do something that is a little more of a peak of what is inside.

Simpler. More readable. Shows up better on your phone.

A haiku to leave you with…

Crowns on the printer, kernels falling in a week — Mother’s Day, slow creek.

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

2026-05-17T01:35:44.000Z

Time for s’mores. <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/8407a364e9.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt="">

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-16T23:26:18.000Z

Evening bike ride to Dairy Queen for ice cream! <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/d561dc5eb6.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt="">

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-05-16T23:18:31.000Z

Before the show…

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-16T22:25:03.000Z

First visit to <a href="https://www.pleasantgrovepizzafarm.com">Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm</a> for 2026! Delicious pizza. 🍕 <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/bffdc91707.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt=""><img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/e1dfa9f472.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt="">

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-16T15:54:06.000Z

Mazie and I taking the boat out for the season. Beautiful day! <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/f5aead0b4b.jpg" width="600" height="450" alt="">

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-15T20:18:46.000Z

From a chat with Claude today… “everything else is scope creep dressed as ambition” Statistical word model or not, that was an insightful comment.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-05-13T14:52:56.000Z

A Productive Conversation | Making Space for Grace (PM Talks S3E5)

Patrick Rhone is back, and so is PM Talks — the monthly series where Patrick and I take our time with one idea and actually see where it goes. This is Season 3, Episode 5, and Patrick has just returned from a trip to Greece with his family — a trip built around anniversary celebrations, Mamma Mia filming locations, and the kind of serendipitous moments that only happen when you’re open enough to notice them.

Always a good time.

“most useful technologies tend to be invented quite quickly once they are possible” - Garrick van Buren

2026-05-12T16:54:11.000Z

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/05/ideas-behind-their-time-2.html

The post “most useful technologies tend to be invented quite quickly once they are possible” appeared first on Garrick van Buren.

The Sheep Detective - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-12T02:21:30.000Z

We went to The Sheep Detectives tonight at Willow Creek and thought it was fabulous. Tyler and I were at another movie and saw the preview of this and he thought right away that Tammy would like it so we landed it close to Mother’s Day and brought her Mom with us as well. The premise sounds silly but we were all taken aback by the super high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. In reality it is an incredibly touching story, wrapped into a “whodunnit”, with sheep playing many of the principal characters. I think the sheep make the story land even better. We all loved it. Highly recommended! <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/6f5abf45b6.jpg" width="405" height="600" alt="">

Thoughts About AI and The Known Unknowns - Patrick Rhone

2026-05-11T16:45:04.000Z

A subject that my mind has been unreasonably fascinated (dare I say fixated) on recently is this; no one really knows why we yawn. There are theories, of course — from one’s blood containing increased amounts of carbon dioxide in need of release to a body’s way of controlling brain temperature. Especially elusive is why it seems to be contagious. There are many theories but no definitive answer.

Something as common and basic as yawning is a mystery and I love this. I love such known unknowns. It seems like there should be a simple explanation for such a common benign thing , and yet it alludes even the minds of science.

This is true of many things, especially when it comes to the brain and human behavior. We know more about the depths of the universe than we do the depths of our own mind. This gives me a great comfort. I can’t really explain why. The best explanation is it makes me feel human.

Which leads me to wonder about the limits of artificial intelligence…

Because, as far as I understand it, it can only ever know what we know. Perhaps it can take all the disparate pieces of our knowledge and see connections and come up with new ideas and solutions based on these that we humans would be otherwise limited to. But, those limits of human knowledge correspondingly are the limits of AI. AI may be able to beat us in collective capacity and perhaps even speed of understanding, but its knowledge, or lack there of, is ours.

AI can’t tell me, definitively, scientifically proven and agreed upon, why we yawn. And it won’t be able to until we humans can begin to answer that question ourselves. Until we take all of the theories, do all of the testing, run it through scientific methods, and be able to say, with an overwhelming level of certainty, “We yawn because…”

So, this puny human will continue to obsess over and be delighted by the mysteries of our amazing brain and rest in the comfort that AI doesn’t know any more than we do.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-05-11T14:30:01.000Z

How to Spend Money So It Actually Makes You Happier – YouTube

This video by Daniel Pink is interesting and useful. Everything within backed by scientific research. My own personal experience, where applied, backs it up. Worth the time to watch. Things that make you go, “Hmmm…”

Weekly Thing 347 / Scrum, FilamentHound, DO_NOT_TRACK - Weekly Thing

2026-05-10T12:00:00.000Z

Hello there!

On May 13th it will be the nine year anniversary of me sending these emails. Two years ago I introduced the Supporting Membership program and I love the fact that we can do some good together! I just sent a contribution of

$1,164.92

to the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the proceeds from the last year! 👏

This includes all membership as well as sales of the Yearly Thing book!

That also means we have raised…

$1,792.37

in total through this program!

Amazing. Thank you! By the way, check out the Supporting Members section of the website for more information and a super streamlined way to become a member.

Don’t want a recurring charge but you do want to be part of giving back? The members page now has a place where you can make a one-time contribution into the Supporting Members program. Cool huh?

Next week I’ll share more about the non-profit we are supporting for the 9th year. Stay tuned!

Sometimes these emails get long, and this one certainly did. Don’t skip the blog posts for the new Weekly Thing website and my Your Version Number project! Or just skip the blog posts and go right to them…

➡️ Weekly Thing

➡️ Your Version Number

Minnebar t-shirt collection from 20 years of barcamps!

May 02, 2026 Best Buy HQ, Richfield, Minnesota

New Weekly Thing Website #

I’ve commented that agentic coding makes things that were previously on your “list of impossible projects” into things that you can do. I have long had on my “impossible project” list the desire to create a website for the Weekly Thing that let the archive shine in ways that I knew were possible but no solution out there delivered. With 9 years of writing and 345 issues in the archive there is so much to surface.

To do this I knew I would need to build it on my own. I could use the Buttondown API to get the issues and make them accessible. But then I needed a website. I needed a content pipeline. Oh, and that archive has old formats from different platforms that were a mangled mess of HTML.

This was truly on the “impossible list” for me personally. If I wanted to spend tens-of-thousands of dollars, or probably even more, I maybe could have hired someone to build it. A laughable idea really.

So I decided to take my experiences with Claude Code, Claude Design, and Codex and point it at this problem. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the new Weekly Thing website experience.

I just have to say I’m so thrilled with the results that I can barely handle it. Rather than type a novel here I’m just going to list out what the site has. Even better, go there and explore:

https://weekly.thingelstad.com

Here is what the new site has!

1️⃣ Completely reimagined landing page to describe the Weekly Thing. Gone is the basic Buttondown paragraph of text and a signup button. The home page hopefully gives a much better feel for what the Weekly Thing is.

2️⃣ Archive page has full index of every issue back to number 1. This is also now optimized for the Weekly Thing with issue images, link counts, organized by year.

3️⃣ Thingy, the Weekly Thing librarian that has read every issue of the Weekly Thing and is ready to converse with you about all of it. I have wanted to make an agent like this for over a year and it is finally real. I’ve found this fascinating to play with and ask questions of.

You will see this feature requires you to provide your subscriber email address. It is only available to confirmed subscribers of the Weekly Thing.

You may recall in WT311 I shared a custom GPT that was sort of like this. That was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter!

Some prompts that are fun to explore with Thingy:

4️⃣ Search is now super powered. The searching is indexed into the section of the weekly thing. This works way better than before.

5️⃣ On the page for each issue you will see that there is a Table of Contents on the left. It is a little thing, but another example of something I’ve wanted for a long time. The Weekly Thing is long and this gives a way to navigate. Also, each of those items is a hyperlink so you can now send a link to a specific notable link in a specific issue.

6️⃣ Big one – you can now LISTEN to the Weekly Thing. I’ve filled this in for the last 10 issues. On the issue page there is a “Listen” button where it will be read for you.

7️⃣ Podcast? Well if I have an audio file for each issue why not bundle that into a podcast. So I did. You should be able to find the Weekly Thing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It is propagating through other platforms. Should be on Overcast too.

8️⃣ Support for LLMs.txt! This is a bit hidden, but if you want to talk with the LLM of your choice about the Weekly Thing, give the LLM this link:

https://weekly.thingelstad.com/llms.txt

That provides an LLM optimized index of the entire 345 issues, as well as links to LLM optimized versions of every email! This means ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else can dive deep into the content. I have actually used this myself when asking a model to do some research with me.

A quick note about the audio:

This doesn’t replace or remove my actual podcast, Another Thing. There is still just one episode there but I’m not giving up on that.
The audio for the Weekly Thing is text-to-speech using a transformed version of the email text. It announces sections, gives links numbers, announces quotes, and cuts some sections. I’ve listened to a few and think it works reasonably well.
I’ll probably evolve the generated audio, and right now it only exists for the last 10 issues, but I plan to backfill all issues with audio over time.

Take a look. Try out the archive, search, Thingy. Listen to an issue. And let me know what you think… anything not work right? Read wrong? Something missing? Or just that you think it is all cool?

Your Version Number #

In 2018 I wrote about Your Version Number:

I think the version metaphor works. You are a different person in your 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. Your life changes in meaningful ways! MAJOR version! Each year we tend to think of new things and new goals, but we don’t break backwards compatibility. MINOR version! And I think most people try to make each day a bit better than the last. PATCH level!

I’ve had a shortcut that shows my version on my phone for the last year. And now I decided to make this a fun website!

Now available…

Your Version Number #

Super simple single-page app that allows you to add one or more birthdays and see the version number. The magic here is all the data is held in the URL so you can bookmark, set as your homepage, or share with others. And sure it is fun seeing you and your friends daily versions, but it is even more fun with all the custom themes!

dark – Minimalist dark mode with violet accents.
family – Warm cream + handwritten Caveat, family-album feel.
pastel – Soft gradient haze with pastel cards.
birthday – Confetti, balloons, and party-hat pink.
nature – Scattered leaves on linen, earthy serif.
ocean – Wavy gradients with a tiny shoreline wave.
galaxy – Deep-space gradient with neon numerals.
zen – Quiet cream with a vermillion first-letter.
weather – Sky-blue card with a sun/cloud per row.
polaroid – Taped Polaroid grid with a slight tilt.
tarot – Purple stars and Fool / Priestess / Empress cards.
newspaper – Broadsheet typography with section rules.
subway – Black NYC subway map with route bullets.
receipt – Thermal-printer monospace with QTY 1.
steampunk – Sepia gear-and-cog ledger.
brutalist – Yellow + red + black, oversized type.
comic – Comic panels with POW / ZAP / BOOM stickers.
memphis – 80s squiggles, triangles, and dots.
vinyl – Spinning 33⅓ records.
terminal – Green-on-black CLI prompt.
arcade – Pixel-fonted hi-score CRT cabinet.
vaporwave – Pink/cyan grid with a palm-tree sunset.
y2k – Frosted-glass chrome and blur.
pixel – Eight-bit pixel font on a dark green field.
gameboy – Classic GB DMG palette and cart silhouette.

Wait though, there is more.

Your Version Number: Work Edition #

I decided to bring the same version number semantics to your job! Here we have YEARS.QUARTERS.BUSINESS_DAYS! Add your whole team in and share the URL with everyone.

And of course the Work Edition has work themes!

boardroom – Board-update slide with KPI rail (ARR, NPS, payback).
slack – Slack channel feed with reactions and avatars.
slidedeck – Confidential business-review slide with three bullets.
earnings – Live stock-ticker on a black trading screen.
github – GitHub PR list with avatars, labels, and the Open pill.
whiteboard – Sticky-note grid in primary colors.
inbox – Gmail-style inbox with subject lines and senders.
okr – Q-scorecard with progress bar and ON-TRACK pill.
cubicle – Manila-folder corporate newsletter.
kanban – Jira-style cards in an In-Progress column.
standup – Daily-standup card with Yesterday / Today / Blockers.
invite – Calendar invite with Accepted check.
confluence – Wiki page with breadcrumbs and comment counts.
zoom – Gallery-view tiles with reactions.
spreadsheet – Excel grid with row numbers.
pomodoro – Tomato-timer Deep Work card.
ooo – Out-of-office auto-reply with handwritten signature.

A fun little project made possible with Claude Code and I. 🤩

Notable #

You can discuss any of these links at the Weekly Thing 347 tag in r/WeeklyThing.

Redis array type: short story of a long development - #

I love that antirez (author of Redis) is sharing so much about his use of agentic coding. We need more stories from experts like this that provide mission-critical software. Also, software written in difficult environments like C!

Thanks to AI, the specification evolved a lot, via back and forth of feedback, intellectual challenges about what was the best design, what was the right compromise, what was too engineered and what not.

The iterations at the specification level have to be a huge unlock. For an expert to be able to explore different approaches in rapid succession allows you to innovate much faster.

You know what was the biggest realization of all that? For high quality system programming tasks you have to still be fully involved, but I ventured to a level of complexity that I would have otherwise skipped. AI provided the safety net for two things: certain massive tasks that are very tiring (like the 32 bit support that was added and tested later), and at the same time the virtual work force required to make sure there are no obvious bugs in complicated algorithms. To write the initial huge specification was the key to the successive work, as it was the key to review each single line of sparsearray.c and t_array.c and modifying everything was not a good fit.

He took a bigger bet, went for a bigger slice of functionality, and had a bigger outcome by using agentic coding tools.

When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing #

Getting AI tools to your company and getting individual use out of them is not the hard thing, it is figuring out how your organization learns and improves with this capability. I’m seeing this right now because people are bringing a typical enterprise mindset to token consumption. Buying AI tools isn’t expensive, but tokens are. And if you approach that with a desire to minimize token usage, you are going to destroy your potential. The question should not be token consumption, but instead value creation over token consumption.

I’m quoting at length here because I think this is so important.

I keep coming back to three capabilities companies will need in the messy middle.

Agent Operations: which agents and AI tools are running, what systems they can touch, which data they can see, which actions require approval, where identity, audit, permissions, and runtime visibility live. This is the control side, and it matters because agentic work eventually touches real systems.

Loop Intelligence: which AI-assisted (or fully agentic) loops actually produce learning, which ones stay open, which ones decay, where agents create leverage, where they sprawl into side quests, which teams are stuck in tight supervision because they lack tests, context, or intuition. Which teams are ready for looser delegation.

Agent Capabilities: how useful capabilities get distributed across the organization without pretending that three monolithic agents can do everyone’s work. AI is starting to behave more like a fluid base technology than a single application category. It does not fit cleanly into one “HR agent,” one “engineering agent,” one “sales agent,” each sitting somewhere in the enterprise zoo. The better question is how capabilities flow into the places where work happens: employee harnesses, background agents, product teams, platform services, local skills, MCP servers, evaluation suites, runbooks, examples, and domain-specific procedures.

This is where the platform question gets interesting. Who owns these capabilities? How does a useful agent skill discovered in one team become available to others without turning into a dead template? How do you enrich a developer’s harness differently from a product person’s harness, a support team’s background agent, or a compliance workflow? Which capabilities belong close to the team, which belong in a platform layer, and which should never be generalized because the local context is the whole point?

How you operationalize this in a company is not solved at this time. I’m seeing it myself and seeing others wrestle with it. I like the foundational elements that this article puts forward.

Another model that I’ve considered is the transition from capital with servers to ephemeral infrastructure in the cloud. In a way capital is a lot like your team. It is hard to move around, hard to acquire, hard to change, but also incredibly powerful for the right things. The cloud made a part of that very flexible and just-in-time. We are already using different LLM models to bring just the right amount of intelligence to a task. And like the cloud we know that required a certain cost in tokens which is easy to know.

This morning I was doing a weekly review on one of my agents and Claude Code used the logging I have to show me five different skills the agent has and, to the penny, how much each of those cost me over the last week. That visibility applied to other tasks allows us to get much smarter.

Agentic Coding is a Trap | Lars Faye #

This is a balanced article from an engineer seeing all sides of agentic coding. I found myself reading this and thinking that I agree and disagree based on the thing you are making. Not all code is equal. Some code deserves additional effort and oversight, and other stuff does not. I think folks don’t consider that enough. For some solutions I think the process that is described here is spot on. For others, I would not agree.

I do think the issue that everyone is seeing but nobody knows the answer to is how junior engineers learn the hard things. I don’t claim to know the answer, but I do know that just like so many other things there was a time when engineers needed to know assembly and for sure the “grey beards” of the time thought it was insane that a modern developer couldn’t add some assembly in the midst of their solution.

The abstractions keep growing. Prompts are a new abstraction. Claude generated plans are an abstraction. I think the leap for us is to consider them as much part of the code base as the actual code that the computer runs.

The assertion of Vendor Lock-in though I would disagree with. This line:

You know how much your employees cost; you have no idea how much your token costs will be day to day, month to month, year to year. If your entire team is using agentic coding as the default, your expense account will need to remain highly nimble.

To me the giant challenge in front of us is figuring out how you measure value creation over token usage.

Appearing Productive in The Workplace — No One’s Happy #

LLM capabilities are pouring into many professions and on the whole I’m bullish about this and think it will be transformational. However, there are disconnects that we need to become culturally attuned to. This article highlights one that we need to gain skill on first.

In any previous era, the quality of a piece of work was a more or less reliable signal of the competence of the person who produced it. A novice essay read like a novice essay; novice code crashed in novice ways. AI has severed that relationship. A novice now produces work that does not betray the novice, because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all. It is the system’s. The person, in the transaction, becomes a kind of conduit, capable of routing the output to a recipient and incapable of evaluating it on the way through.

As a recipient of information we need to now perceive that you can have expertise-signal with novice-capability. This was previously not possible. The signal actually looks a bit like a student cheating and handing in someone else’s work. That isn’t the right framing though since it is common to do this while performing a job. People routinely engage with expertise without the domain details. But as a recipient of information we now need to ask two questions: is the information presented of the quality it deserves, and is the person or system providing it actually capable of the assertion.

The article goes on to define how we can test that capability.

Generative AI does well on tasks where feedback is fast, where being approximately right is good enough, where the human remains the final arbiter. Drafting a memo, generating examples, summarizing material the reader could verify if they cared to. The University of Illinois Generative AI guidance [7] and the PLOS Computational Biology “Ten Simple Rules” paper on AI in research [8], among the more careful documents now circulating, list much of this explicitly: brainstorming, copyediting, reformulating one’s own ideas, pattern detection in data one already understands.

Read broadly I think it is critical that we know when we are “playing tennis without a net” as it were. If you are using AI for a task that is not testable, you need to treat that different than one that is testable. Testability of the assertion is key to knowing where you can get leverage. This is the magic unlock with software, because code is testable within limits. And the place where automatic programming still needs expert engineers is the untestable bits.

How do you apply this testability to other domains? And then how do you calibrate expertise into the system? Ideally expertise determines ways to make things testable that appear not to be. That is where I find real leverage. The LLM itself can be used to make the untestable output testable.

Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS - David Smith, Independent iOS Developer #

Lovely essay emphasizing the artisanal effort put into making a feature work in the best way possible. I had to re-read when I hit the line “So… I commissioned a custom map.” What? The extreme number of iterations put into making this user experience delightful is impressive and a good peek into what goes into making a truly remarkable experience a reality.

How people ask Claude for personal guidance — Anthropic #

Interesting article including actual data. It is super interesting to me that “Health / Wellness” and “Professional / Career” are 27 and 26% respectively. Then a 50% drop-off to the next two, followed by another 50% drop-off to everything else. When I saw this it was like a giant blinking sign saying “COACH”. Both of those areas are places where people get coaches if they can afford it and have a big enough need. AI coaches has always been an area I think we will see a ton of specialization in. Opening access to coaching feels incredibly powerful. It is also interesting that these two areas have lower rates of sycophancy.

The other take away is how the sycophancy rates are dropping with each model. That proves this is a problem solvable by training.

The Death of Scrum — An Interactive Essay #

This article (worksheet?) hits on many of the topics I referenced in my Software Is Liquid post from last week. When constraints, inputs, and outputs change it is necessary to review the system you are operating to see what changes are needed. That is what brought Scrum into existence and it is the thing that should make us question its utility going forward. The challenge to me is if not this, then what. There are four options suggested here: Shape Up, The Linear Method, Continuous Flow, and Agent-First Development. It will be interesting to see if we are able to move, as an industry, to something that is more focused on the particular aspects of the outcome we are shooting for, as opposed to the limitations and constraints of the system we have to work in.

Journal #

May 1, 2026 at 11:13 AM

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. 💉

May 1, 2026 at 4:00 PM

Unwelcome surprise to have water ponding around the well head at the cabin. This isn’t good. 😬

May 2, 2026 at 8:38 AM

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

May 2, 2026 at 3:00 PM

Tyler led his first session at Minnebar today! He did an amazing job talking about AI in Schools and what is good, bad, and how schools should adapt. 👏

May 2, 2026 at 5:00 PM

Tyler and I were lucky enough to be interviewed for the Minnebar 20 special video today.

May 2, 2026 at 1:34 PM

Great TeamSPS group at Minnebar 20!

May 2, 2026 at 7:08 PM

PLA run to Microcenter.

May 3, 2026 at 12:11 PM

PLA storage organized and ready to go!

May 3, 2026 at 6:06 AM

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

While I’m doing that I’ve got Claude Code backfilling audio versions of the Weekly Thing, and another Claude Code instance doing some incremental work on Elixir.

May 3, 2026 at 12:12 PM

Tyler and I are at Fat Pants Brewing for the last-minute rescheduled Miami GP! Go Ferrari! Go Red Bull!

May 3, 2026 at 4:29 PM

Pokémon afternoon at Minnesota Card Show!

May 6, 2026 at 9:26 PM

Prompt I gave Claude Code on a recent project.

I would like to iterate faster. I would like you to use the ANTHROPIC API key and ask Haiku to generate 20 questions for each agent persona that Jamie (me) would reasonably ask. Then run those questions to each agent and see how they respond. Adjust based on that and keep iterating until all 4 agents respond to the 20 questions okay. Make sense?

Worked well.

May 6, 2026 at 5:07 PM

Mazie is home from her semester abroad! 🥳

May 6, 2026 at 9:24 PM

We are all into Noah Kahan, and Mazie is maybe infatuated with his music. We had a nice night on the couch with her back home and the incredible Out of Body documentary about his rise. It is incredible how quickly Kahan’s popularity exploded and the movie chronicles the journey.

Briefly #

It is incredible what you can make a font do. This seems perfect for a variety of inline data visualizations. → Datatype — variable font that turns text into charts

Delightful bit creating QR codes with pencil and paper. (Bonus, local Minneapolis blogger I wasn’t following!) → Hand‑drawn QR codes — Seth Larson

I went to “3D Printing: One step closer to the home replicator?” at Minnebar 20. The presenter shared that he had created this website to help people get good deals. It was a great session. → FilamentHound — Best Prices on 3D Printing Filament

Ansible without the YAML. → pyinfra - Fast Python Infrastructure Automation & Configuration Management Tool

I’ve commented about platforms making command-line interfaces to allow agents to use them, and shifting to agents as their customer. MCP is an evolution and secondary channel to do that. → The AWS MCP Server is now generally available | AWS News Blog

ENS continuing to improve blockchain accessibility, but also showing the state of the art in how blockchain native applications work. It is funny to me that the massively decentralized ENS is learning delegation from the centralized DNS system. → Names Are No Longer Single Objects | ENS Blog

Web browsers added a “do not track” feature years ago. Don’t take too much solace in it though, since it is not enforceable, just a way of sharing a preference. It is also the case that a lot of other tools send tracking information, so this environment preference is an attempt to create a similar mechanism. → DO_NOT_TRACK

Interesting data on the evolving roles of Dads in the household. → How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were

Some good news! 🎉 → Meta lost 20 million users last quarter | The Verge

To all the Moms out there I want to wish you a Happy Mother’s Day! Y’all are amazing. Particularly all the Moms I know. Nothing but delightful and wonderful women in that group. Our kids have been blessed to have an incredible Mom, and both Tammy and I are the wonderful results of great Moms. Love you Mom! Love you dear! 🥰

A haiku to leave you with…

Hand‑drawn QR dreams, Redis arrays tell stories — Dads learn to listen

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

2026-05-09T22:32:17.000Z

My 2006 Deoxys Holon Phantoms 1st Edition PSA 10 card (<a href="https://www.psacard.com/cert/67755632/psa">67755632</a>) has shot up in value in recent weeks. First time <a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/287322355567">listing one of my cards on eBay</a>! <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/890/2026/428e3db12e.jpg" width="363" height="600" alt="">

Why am I thinking about dipping back into... - Barry Hess

2026-05-09T01:16:00.000Z

Why am I thinking about dipping back into Mastodon and Bluesky? I’ve been away for six or seven (!) months and it’s been good. I feel a bit like I’d like I’m curious if I could do it in a way that would only be a fifteen-minute commitment each week. I have doubts, but I suppose then I could just eject again.

Hmm…I think I’ll resist a bit more.

How Everest Has Changed Since Into Thin Air (archive):

When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was only the 621st person to arrive there since the mountain was first summited, in May 1953. During the 30 years following my ascent, Everest was climbed approximately 13,000 times.

Sometimes a political cartoon hits so hard and direct that it brings a tear to your eye in more ways than one.

We were about to launch Pika Pulse this week. We had a lengthy meeting to talk about what we'd do in this or that situation. We decided that we needed to keep iterating on our guardrails and language for setting expectations.

We have some time off and life things coming up, so we also don't want to push things out right before those events happen. This means Pulse is probably somewhere around six weeks away from being released. It's going to be interesting if all this care and concern ends up not really helping. Or if it ends up being unnecessary. It'll probably be somewhere, hopefully sanely, in the middle.

Cora and I have been frequenting Clues by Sam. Recommended for a bit of a brain stretch on the daily.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be more.

Reply by email

Massive Weekly Thing Website Build - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-05-08T03:00:00.000Z

I’ve commented that agentic coding makes things that were previously on your “list of impossible projects” into things that you can do. I have long had on my “impossible project” list the desire to create a website for the Weekly Thing that let the archive shine in ways that I knew were possible but no solution out there delivered. With 9 years of writing and 345 issues in the archive there is so much to surface. To do this I knew I would need to build it on my own. I could use the Buttondown API to get the issues and make them accessible. But then I needed a website. I needed a content pipeline. Oh, and that archive has old formats from different platforms that were a mangled mess of HTML. This was truly on the “impossible list” for me personally. If I wanted to spend tens-of-thousands of dollars, or probably even more, I maybe could have hired someone to build it. A laughable idea really. So I decided to take my experiences with Claude Code, Claude Design, and Codex and point it at this problem. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the new Weekly Thing website experience. I just have to say I’m so thrilled with the results that I can barely handle it. Rather than type a novel here I’m just going to list out what the site has. Even better, go there and explore: <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/">https://weekly.thingelstad.com</a> Here is what the new site has! 1️⃣ Completely reimagined landing page to describe the Weekly Thing. Gone is the basic Buttondown paragraph of text and a signup button. The home page hopefully gives a much better feel for what the Weekly Thing is. 2️⃣ <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/">Archive</a> page has full index of every issue back to number 1. This is also now optimized for the Weekly Thing with issue images, link counts, organized by year. 3️⃣ <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/thingy/">Thingy</a>, the Weekly Thing librarian that has read every issue of the Weekly Thing and is ready to converse with you about all of it. I have wanted to make an agent like this for over a year and it is finally real. I’ve found this fascinating to play with and ask questions of. You will see this feature requires you to provide your subscriber email address. It is only available to confirmed subscribers of the Weekly Thing. You may recall in <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/311/">WT311</a> I shared a custom GPT that was sort of like this. That was grade school level. Thingy is much smarter! Some prompts that are fun to explore with Thingy: <ul> <li><a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/thingy/?prompt=How+has+the+arc+of+AI+evolved+in+the+Weekly+Thing%3F">How has the arc of AI evolved in the Weekly Thing?</a></li> <li><a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/thingy/?prompt=Compare+Tik+Tok%2C+Facebook%2C+and+X+from+the+archive.">Compare Tik Tok, Facebook, and X from the archive.</a></li> <li><a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/thingy/?prompt=Explain+to+me+how+Jamie+connects+Indie+Web+and+Crypto%3F+They+seem+very+opposite+to+me.">Explain to me how Jamie connects Indie Web and Crypto? They seem very opposite to me.</a></li> </ul> 4️⃣ <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/search/">Search</a> is now super powered. The searching is indexed into the section of the weekly thing. This works way better than before. 5️⃣ On the page for each issue you will see that there is a Table of Contents on the left. It is a little thing, but another example of something I’ve wanted for a long time. The Weekly Thing is long and this gives a way to navigate. Also, each of those items is a hyperlink so you can now send a link to a specific notable link in a specific issue. 6️⃣ Big one – you can now LISTEN to the Weekly Thing. I’ve filled this in for the last 10 issues. On the issue page there is a “Listen” button where it will be read for you. 7️⃣ Podcast? Well if I have an audio file for each issue why not bundle that into a podcast. So I did. You should be able to find the Weekly Thing on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/weekly-thing/id1895865769">Apple Podcasts</a> and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/43A9fytZDKaZhrkp3qbukh">Spotify</a>. It is propagating through other platforms. Should be on <a href="https://overcast.fm/itunes1895865769/weekly-thing">Overcast</a> too. 8️⃣ Support for LLMs.txt! This is a bit hidden, but if you want to talk with the LLM of your choice about the Weekly Thing, give the LLM this link: <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/llms.txt">https://weekly.thingelstad.com/llms.txt</a> That provides an LLM optimized index of the entire 345 issues, as well as links to LLM optimized versions of every email! This means ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else can dive deep into the content. I have actually used this myself when asking a model to do some research with me. A quick note about the audio: <ul> <li>This doesn’t replace or remove my actual podcast, <a href="https://another.thingelstad.com/">Another Thing</a>. There is still just one episode there but I’m not giving up on that.</li> <li>The audio for the Weekly Thing is text-to-speech using a transformed version of the email text. It announces sections, gives links numbers, announces quotes, and cuts some sections. I’ve listened to a few and think it works reasonably well.</li> <li>I’ll probably evolve the generated audio, and right now it only exists for the last 10 issues, but I plan to backfill all issues with audio over time.</li> </ul> Take a look. Try out the archive, search, Thingy. Listen to an issue. And let me know what you think… anything not work right? Read wrong? Something missing? Or just that you think it is all cool?

INSIDE VOICE #11: Our Remains - Garrick van Buren

2026-05-08T00:52:55.000Z

Earthset, by Christina Koch aboard the Integrity capsule of Artemis II, 2026

A thin lit edge of a pale blue dot against vast nothingness.

The same picture Apollo 8 took in 1968.

Updated for 2026.

To remind us, all of us:

Everything and everyone we have ever touched is somewhere on this planet.

Still.

In 1983, Atari buried 14 tons of unsold E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. In 2014, a documentary crew dug them up and redistributed them;

New Mexico Museum of Space History,

Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England,

880 auctioned off to individual buyers.

Shipping container knocked off in a storm, now lodged in fissure along the shoreline.

Thousands of Garfield phones washed up on French beaches for the next thirty years.

The ocean continuing to redistribute them.

All the phones are still here, somewhere.

Silas and Margaret met in Pennsylvania.

Silas insisted they move to Des Moines for land and opportunity.

Margaret hated Iowa.

Eventually,

Silas relented.

They moved to Texas.

https://gustavobarroso.com/last-weeks-laundry-ii

“…there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” – Carl Sagan

The kids didn’t unload the dishwasher this morning.

The post INSIDE VOICE #11: Our Remains appeared first on Garrick van Buren.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-05-07T04:18:05.000Z

Geography is four-dimensional | Derek Sivers

When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place – only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when.

Interesting insight. Derek nails it (yet again).