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Rejection Letters - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-23T13:52:03.000Z

At my daughter Beatrix’s school, an old money private college prep school, it has become a tradition to hang up college rejection letters in the Senior Commons. Personal details blacked out. Mostly, just the recipients name since these are generally form letters. A whole wall of “We regret to inform you…” and “We had an large number of qualified applicants like yourself but…”

All of the Ivy League schools are represented (Yale, Harvard, etc.). Of course, many of the top State Schools are too (Penn,The Ohio State, etc.). The various Institutes of Science and Technology as well (MIT, RIT, etc.). Basically, these are almost all schools you would have heard the names of. And though almost all of these kids do get many acceptances to and end up attending many prestigious schools, including many of the ones hanging on this wall, not every kid is accepted into every school. These are the ones that got away from them. The moon shots and far reaches or just the wrong boards in a bingo game.

I love this tradition. The kids do too. It is a way of dealing with disappointment and rejection that is healthy, cathartic, and even celebratory.

The school administration tried to stop it this year. I had a hard time discerning from them a clear argument why. They made some general handwaving about it being too negative. Some general Peanuts Adult whah whah about defeatism.

The kids pushed back. The teachers took their side and lobbied with them. The school counsellors (all licensed therapists/phycologists) supported them. They argued that this was an incredibly healthy way to deal with rejection. That it helps normalize for these high achieving kids that you can’t win them all. That sometimes in life, no matter how hard you work, the answer is still no.

The letters went up. A mini-museum of healthy failure.

Hypergrowth - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-22T23:00:00.000Z

This growth is hard to even comprehend.

Anthropic says Claude Code is now growing revenues at a $2.5 billion run-rate, 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 around $30 billion this month. — Software Eats Its Own

Even being prepared for that level of scaling is impressive.

A Dynamic Now Page with Pika - Barry Hess

2026-04-22T05:35:00.000Z

Since building Pika I’ve wanted to incorporate a “now and then” sort of now page with dynamic history. With the recent flurry of updates to Pika variables, I realized that my dream could now be made reality. It turns out that my recent habit of writing Friday posts is effectively me writing what I’m doing/seeing/thinking, well, now(ish).

So now my now page is no longer chronically stale! If you happen to write a “general state of things” post every week or month, you can do the same thing on your own Pika site.

The page is pretty simple. First I wrote “Now” as my title. Then in the page body:

{{ posts_in_stream tag: “Friday” with_excerpts: no limit: 1 }}

### Then

Here’s to now pages past:

{{ posts tag: “Friday” skip: 1 }}

I put the body text above in a code block and wrote it as Markdown to avoid variables rendering on this post here. You may or may not be able to copy-paste the above variables into your Pika editor.

And that’s it. You may notice that my “Then” pages are linked dates without any titles. AI helped me with some wild CSS to modify Pika’s default output to what you see there. If you want something similar, you’re welcome to look at the CSS in my now page’s source to get started. Just look for .post-link in the page source.

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Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-21T16:39:45.000Z

The glass is already broken.

The same is true of us all.

Software Is Liquid - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-21T00:52:27.000Z

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.

Where we are

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.

Getting philosophical: software is becoming liquid

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.

Every paradigm built on “software is expensive” needs re-examination

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.

Managers belong in the code

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.

Rethinking velocity

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.

The change curve, and the rate of change

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.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-20T21:43:30.000Z

Community Letter from Tim – Apple

This is not goodbye. But at this moment of transition, I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you. Not on behalf of the company, this time, though there is a wellspring of gratitude for you that overflows inside our walls. But simply on behalf of me. Tim. A person who grew up in a rural place in a different time and, for these magical moments, got to be the CEO of the greatest company in the world.

Big news at Apple.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-19T21:26:15.000Z

Mac Power Users #845: Intentional Technology with Patrick Rhone – Relay

Patrick Rhone returns. The gang discusses Apple Silicon rewriting the Mac upgrade cycle, the Apple Refurb Store, and minimalist phones.

It was an honor to be on with my old friend David Sparks and new friend Stephen Robles. It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech on a podcast and I hope it came out OK.

The HomePod Can Hear Alarms - Barry Hess

2026-04-19T19:51:42.000Z

Did you know that the Apple HomePod can recognize alarms in your home and alert you about them?

We discovered this a few weeks ago while we were vacationing in Phoenix. While relaxing in the sun, every member of our household received an alert on their phones. I cannot remember exactly what it said, but it was in notification center and said something to the effect of, “An alarm is sounding in your home.”

This certainly got our adrenaline pumping! We quickly checked the other smart device we have in our home: Nest smoke detectors. There were no alerts, neither of the smoke nor carbon monoxide variety, coming from those devices.

I was a bit confused at this point as tapping the notification center alert took me to Apple Home, but I could not see any alerts on the screen it took me to, nor could I find any notifications within the app. Perhaps this is because “The notification remains in the Home app until the alarm sound stops”? That seems like an odd implementation.

We called a neighbor and asked them to pop over and check our house. When she entered she didn’t notice anything obvious going on other than maybe a bit of an odd smell. She went upstairs and when entering one of the bedrooms she noticed a light smell of burning bacon and a haze in the air.

At this point I realized that we had another set of sensor devices in the house: two Awair air quality monitors. I brought up the app on my phone and looked at the graph for our kitchen device. Usually it lists a “score” in the nineties, every once in a while dropping to the eighties while we’re cooking. With no one in the house, we’d expect the nineties (though low temperatures can lower the score). Rather frighteningly, though, at around 11:30 a.m. the score plummeted to the thirties. At a similar time the score for my lower-level office Awair monitor dropped to the sixities, indicating that bad air was probably circulating.

At this point we felt it best to call the non-emergency fire department number. Even though our neighbor did not see anything obviously dangerous happening, we wanted to be sure that there wasn’t something going in the walls of the house. The fire department did a thorough search of the house, including using thermal heat sensors, and they could not find anything obviously amiss.

The appliance in the home that seemed most likely to be at fault was an air purifier in the hallway outside of the bedroom. Our neighbor seemed to think the smell might have been stronger near it. And so we had them move the appliance into the garage, unplugged, and we asked her to unplug the other purifier in our living room.

So! The notification was very helpful, but also more than a little confounding. We still don’t know what device sounded the alarm. Could it have been our air quality sensor? I’m not aware of it having an alarm, but maybe. Could it be our traditional smoke detectors? Maybe, but they weren’t alerting when our neighbor arrived.

When we got home we plugged in the air purifier and it emitted a bunch of white particulate. We’re pretty confident that is what set off whatever alarm was triggered. Or maybe the purifier itself has an alarm? We’re thankful that the Apple HomePod let us know, even if it was a bit finicky once we tapped that alert. If you have a HomePod, I recommend turning the feature on! I imagine Alexa and the like have a similar feature.

In years past I used to go around the house and unplug most of our devices before we left on longer trips. I was a bit more frugal then, and I also felt it was a good thing to do for the environment, though I also understood it probably doesn’t make much of an impact in the grand scheme of things. When it was thunderstorm season I had another reason to unplug things as I’ve seen my fair share of devices destroyed by lightning-strike power surges.

This time I was lazy, though. I don’t think I’ll be lazy again. Avoiding a house fire has now moved to the top of my list of reasons to unplug. (Yes, I realize there is also a tiny chance that a bad device or appliance could do bad things any time we’ve left the house.)

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Weekly Thing 344 / Mythos, Artemis, Signals - Weekly Thing

2026-04-19T12:39:11.000Z

Good morning! ☕️ It’s been a bit. I shared in <a href="https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/343/">WT343</a> that we were going on a trip to Europe for two weeks so I was taking a little break. That trip got off to a rocky start with a blizzard causing a flight cancellation but after that bump we had a wonderful time in Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Mazie joined us in Paris for a quick stint at <a href="https://www.disneylandparis.com/en-usd">Disneyland Paris</a> and then we rejoined here in Barcelona. It was so great to see her on her semester abroad and I’ll point you to <a href="https://mazie.thingelstad.com">her blog</a> where she has been writing regularly. Her most recent update from a weekend in the Azores. You can see our <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/collections/escape-in-europe/">trip logs from Escape in Europe</a> for more. More than any prior trip this one was anchored with escape rooms. Tammy found us twelve amazing escape rooms with the finale being Londium in Barcelona, the 7th ranked room in the world according to <a href="https://terpeca.com/2025/">TERPECA 2025</a>. It was incredible by the way. I took the opportunity with so much escape room activity to make huge changes to our <a href="https://escape.thingelstad.com/">Escaping Things</a> website including a dedicated trip function so you can see our <a href="https://escape.thingelstad.com/trip/escape-in-europe/">Escape in Europe</a> trip showcasing those twelve rooms including commentary from all of us! Back to the timeline. Just two days after Tyler and I got back home I came down with an infection that started in my left ear and then went to the whole left side of my head and down my neck. Within 24 hours I went from totally fine to being at the emergency room, very “out of it”, and getting admitted to the hospital. I blogged a bit about <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/03/facial-cellulitis.html">my bout with facial cellulitis</a>. After two days of IV antibiotics I was feeling much better and able to go back home. Thank you modern medicine. The outcome for a sepsis diagnosis in your head is very bleak without antibiotics. Now I’m back and typing to you here on a Sunday morning. Should we get back right to it with some links? Yes, we should! ✅ <hr> <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/344/cover.jpg" alt=""> The constant crowd of visitors at the <a href="https://www.louvre.fr/en">Louvre</a> looking to get a photo of the Mona Lisa. March 20, 2026 Louvre, Paris <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%20344%22">Weekly Thing 344 tag in r/WeeklyThing</a>. <h3 id="working-with-agents-doesnt-feel-like-flow-bill-de-hra" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#working-with-agents-doesnt-feel-like-flow-bill-de-hra"><a href="https://dehora.net/journal/2026/working-with-agents-doesnt-feel-like-flow">Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra</a></a></h3> I have been working with many agents building and exploring things and I’ve been curious to observe what it feels like. I think that we will find that for people working closely with agents that doing that for 2-3 hours at a time is probably a limit. Maybe a little bit more, but co-creating alongside an agent takes a different kind of energy. This blog post commenting on flow and that feeling was interesting to me. <blockquote> After a stint of deep work, I usually feel the tiredness of having held a line of thought together for a long time via concentration. After a stint with agents, the tiredness feels more like the aftermath, again, of sustained play or competition. The accumulation of lots of small judgments, many state updates, repeated course corrections, constant low-level vigilance. It’s neither better or worse, just different, more like a workout. Last of all, working with agents feels like… fun. Flow is not fun, it’s immensely rewarding yes, but not fun. </blockquote> For me, I have found that I do enter a state of flow working with agents to create and build. I lose track of time and I really “feel” like I’m co-creating with another entity. Collaborating and ideating. A lot of the rest of the comments here I agree with. There is a game like aspect to it. We are still incredibly early in understanding how people and agents will collaborate. <h3 id="the-economics-of-software-teams-why-most-engineering-organizations-are-flying-blind-viktor-cessan" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#the-economics-of-software-teams-why-most-engineering-organizations-are-flying-blind-viktor-cessan"><a href="https://www.viktorcessan.com/the-economics-of-software-teams/">The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Engineering Organizations Are Flying Blind - Viktor Cessan</a></a></h3> This is a great read and the Cessan is spot on that most (none I’ve ever seen) software teams think about the financials this way. Some get close, particularly with engineering teams that make other teams more productive there is a leverage view you have to apply to know if it makes sense. But this is all getting turned upside down with automatic programming and agentic delivery. We are needing to go back to the basics, and this math may be the best place to start. <h3 id="want-to-understand-the-current-state-of-ai-mit-technology-review" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#want-to-understand-the-current-state-of-ai-mit-technology-review"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/13/1135675/want-to-understand-the-current-state-of-ai-check-out-these-charts/">Want to understand the current state of AI? | MIT Technology Review</a></a></h3> Great overview of the pace of progress on frontier models. The charts here are incredible. <blockquote> Despite predictions that development will plateau, AI models keep getting better and better. By some measures, they now meet or exceed the performance of human experts on tests that aim to measure PhD-level science, math, and language understanding. SWE-bench Verified, a software engineering benchmark for AI models, saw top scores jump from around 60% in 2024 to almost 100% in 2025. In 2025, an AI system produced a weather forecast on its own. </blockquote> The crazy part? We are still in the very beginning of this transformation. <h3 id="browser-run-give-your-agents-a-browser" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#browser-run-give-your-agents-a-browser"><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/browser-run-for-ai-agents/">Browser Run: give your agents a browser</a></a></h3> It is surprisingly difficult to give an AI Agent a browser to use the web with. The web is inherently very visual and there is a lot of complexity in the interfaces for agents to navigate. It seems very clear that agents running Chrome is fine for testing a website, but it is NOT what an agent would prefer. Cloudflare making a cloud-hosted agent-first browser makes a ton of sense. Notice how unique the features are too. It is very obvious we are going to be building a lot of software for agents. <h3 id="evals-are-the-new-prd-elezea" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#evals-are-the-new-prd-elezea"><a href="https://elezea.com/2026/04/evals-are-the-new-prd/">Evals Are the New PRD — Elezea</a></a></h3> Agents aren’t just helping us write software, and they aren’t just end user features, they are actually helping evaluate and build the software too. Without too much effort you can create agentic loops that evaluate how your product is performing and automatically works to improve the experiences that get negative scores. This is almost a standard operating practice now in part because there is so much data you can’t possibly do it any other way. <h3 id="building-a-cli-for-all-of-cloudflare" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#building-a-cli-for-all-of-cloudflare"><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/cf-cli-local-explorer/">Building a CLI for all of Cloudflare</a></a></h3> When I saw this article I wondered if the focus was really “making a CLI for agents” and that is exactly spot on. They start out plainly: <blockquote> Increasingly, agents are the primary customer of our APIs. Developers bring their coding agents to build and deploy applications, agents, and platforms to Cloudflare, configure their account, and query our APIs for analytics and logs. </blockquote> For a service like Cloudflare they have to pivot their entire product offering to be agent native. That means rethinking how agents can learn, use, and manage their software. Agent first means something totally different here. And if your service is hard for agents, they will just divert around you to another solution. This space of creating products that are actually for agents and not for people is pretty interesting. I have my own agent product I’ve been working on, <a href="https://github.com/jthingelstad/mb">mb</a>, a micro.blog client built for agents. <h3 id="the-human-cost-of-10x-ai-productivity-denis-stetskov" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#the-human-cost-of-10x-ai-productivity-denis-stetskov"><a href="https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-human-cost-of-10x-how-ai-is-physically">The Human Cost of 10x AI Productivity - Denis Stetskov</a></a></h3> This article to me reads as the real issue with the human-in-the-loop answer to agentic transformation. It sounds good and makes folks feel better — oh good, there is a person looking at all that. However, to agnatically transform something you are usually looking to get “machine speed” and that becomes much more difficult with a human-in-the-loop. Right now there are a lot of senior engineers being asked to do this ill defined task. We need to learn quickly how to move our systems to safer environments to minimize this before we burn out tons of people. Safety of systems is the place to focus to make this better. <h3 id="our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities-aisi-work" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities-aisi-work"><a href="https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities">Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities | AISI Work</a></a></h3> It is predictable that coding agents are going to find vulnerabilities, and they are moving along very quickly. It seems we are now in race to use agents to secure systems at the same time others are using them to attack systems. The reality is that the vulnerabilities Mythos has found are nearly impossible for people to find. All this makes me wonder if there will be a time when we believe that coding is just too hard for people to do and to do it safely agents should do it. Driving a car could end up in the same place. <h3 id="openai-unveils-codex-superapp-update-with-computer-use-automations-built-in-browser-and-more-macstories" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#openai-unveils-codex-superapp-update-with-computer-use-automations-built-in-browser-and-more-macstories"><a href="https://www.macstories.net/news/openai-unveils-codex-superapp-update-with-computer-use-automations-built-in-browser-and-more/">OpenAI Unveils Codex “Superapp” Update with Computer Use, Automations, Built-In Browser, and More - MacStories</a></a></h3> Codex just got a ton of new capabilities. <blockquote> On the productivity side of things, the update allows Codex to operate your desktop apps, interacting with interface elements and inputting text, for example. We’ve seen computer use from other AI companies before, but one thing that sets Codex apart is its ability to work in your apps in the background so they don’t steal the focus from whatever app you’re already using. </blockquote> These systems are moving so fast it is impossible to keep up. <h3 id="saying-goodbye-to-agile" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#saying-goodbye-to-agile"><a href="https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/260414.html">Saying Goodbye to Agile</a></a></h3> Working in technology teams to build things I’ve practiced Agile delivery for decades. The arrival of automatic programming capabilities is throwing everything up in the air. <blockquote> One unambiguously positive development that’s followed is that software professionals are writing specs again. LLMs - like many of us - do not perform well with ambiguity, and specifying problems is proving to be an effective tool for generating correct code. Agile told us “Working software over comprehensive documentation”. Spec-Driven Development is telling us “Comprehensive documentation creates working software”. </blockquote> I’ve been building a bunch of things with agentic coding tools and this is how you do it. By the way, almost everyone also uses agents to help in creating that specification. The part that everyone misses in this though is the “why” we should make this change. The fundamental issue is less about spec driven development, and more about the fact that making a mistake is 10x less expensive than it was before. You can ask the agent to refactor it and you are on your way pretty quickly. That one issue, what is the impact of something being wrong, is the single most important thing that needs to go into figuring out how you do the work. And automatic programming is changing that in dramatic ways. It was changes to programming languages and moving into more interpreted and dynamic development environments that enabled agile. What is it that automatic programming is enabling? <h3 id="cybersecurity-looks-like-proof-of-work-now" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#cybersecurity-looks-like-proof-of-work-now"><a href="https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/cybersecurity-is-proof-of-work-now.html">Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now</a></a></h3> This is an interesting read of the impact AI is having on securing and exploiting systems. <blockquote> If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them. </blockquote> In a way this isn’t completely surprising since to exploit something you need to find one path but to secure it you need multiple paths? But either way the economics here are concerning. <hr> {% if subscriber.subscriber_type == ‘premium’ %} Thank you so much for being a Supporting Member! 🎉 Because of your generosity, our little community of 23 members has already raised $899.26 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) this year, and in just 3 weeks we’ll be sending every single dollar straight to support their incredible work protecting digital rights. 💻✨ Knowing that all of the money goes directly to the EFF makes each contribution even more meaningful, and we couldn’t do it without you. Here’s to making a real impact together—thank you for being such an important part of this mission! 🙌 {% elif subscriber.subscriber_type == ‘regular’ %} ✨ Join the fun and make a difference! We’re just three weeks away from sending our yearly contribution to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and thanks to our amazing 23 Supporting Members, we’ve already raised $899.26—every single dollar goes straight to EFF to protect digital rights. Becoming a Supporting Member means you’re part of this mission, helping us push that total even higher before the deadline. 💪 Let’s rally together, grow our community, and make this year’s impact one to remember! <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> {% endif %} <hr> <h2 id="journal" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#journal">Journal</a></h2> <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/11/dock-is-in.html">Apr 11, 2026 at 3:02 PM</a> Dock is in! <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/344/journal/94edcbd456.jpg" alt=""> <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/12/we-saw-project-hail-mary.html">Apr 12, 2026 at 7:53 PM</a> We saw Project Hail Mary today and it was every bit as good as everyone that has seen it has told me. I read the Martian and loved that book but had no idea about this book until it hit the theater. Just a great movie with incredible characters. Definitely one to go to the theater for! <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/344/journal/611a9883f5.jpg" alt=""> <a href="https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/04/12/my-first-meaningful-print-with.html">Apr 12, 2026 at 7:55 PM</a> My first meaningful print with the new Bambu P2S is a Gridfinity setup for my office desk. The grid is down and now I’m populating with various bins. There are so many options and the Bambu P2S prints things effortlessly. This may be showing up in more drawers soon. <img src="https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/344/journal/17cfcaa137.jpg" alt=""> <hr> <h2 id="briefly" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#briefly">Briefly</a></h2> Beautiful images from NASA’s Artemis mission to adorn your phone with. → <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-ii-mobile-wallpapers/">Artemis II Mobile Wallpapers - NASA</a> I’ve been using SQLite in some of my agentic apps and it is just a wonderful piece of software. → <a href="https://sqlite.org/releaselog/3_53_0.html">SQLite Release 3.53.0</a> Interesting and short read on how folks are making agentic systems even more capable. → <a href="https://elezea.com/2026/03/from-assistant-to-collaborator-how-my-ai-second-brain-grew-up/">From Assistant to Collaborator: How My AI Second Brain Grew Up — Elezea</a> The title on this is so clickbait I feel gross even including it, but I find these articles compelling to read anyway to expand thinking and see what folks are doing that are pushing agentic capabilities. → <a href="https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-companies-on-a-20month-tech-stack">How I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack | Steve Hanov’s Blog</a> Good primer on getting more out of Claude Cowork. I’m close to dumping OpenClaw and instead just running Cowork with Claude Dispatch on my phone. → <a href="https://ruben.substack.com/p/claude-cowork-20">Cowork - How to AI</a> Bitcoin intentionally drops miner rewards over time. The math is sensible. In the early days miners should be compensated through direct mining activity, but over time Bitcoin should transition to fees paid for transactions. That transition is still in front of the Bitcoin ecosystem and given that Bitcoin has landed more as digital gold than cash, the transaction fees may be hard to get profitable? → <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/03/22/bitcoin-miners-are-losing-usd19-000-on-every-btc-produced-as-difficulty-drops-7-8">Bitcoin miners are losing $19,000 on every BTC produced as difficulty drops 7.8%</a> Delightful trip with the awesome Nintendo DS platform. → <a href="https://www.patater.com/files/projects/manual/manual.html">Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming</a> This shortcut is one of the more powerful that exist, and really highlights how you can make some incredible solutions in Shortcuts. → <a href="https://www.macstories.net/stories/introducing-apple-frames-4-a-revamped-shortcut-support-for-frame-colors-proportional-scaling-and-the-apple-frames-cli-for-developers/">Introducing Apple Frames 4 - MacStories</a> WordPress Plugins are a security nightmare, but this strategy can be applied to many software pipelines. → <a href="https://anchor.host/someone-bought-30-wordpress-plugins-and-planted-a-backdoor-in-all-of-them/">Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them</a> Time to read up on <a href="https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/42130">neurosymbolic</a> AI! → <a href="https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-biggest-advance-in-ai-since-the">The biggest advance in AI since the LLM - Gary Marcus</a> Beads was one of the first products I remember reading about that was specifically made for an agent as a user. I find this category of software fascinating. → <a href="https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v1-0-c239d9a407ec">Gas Town: from Clown Show to v1.0 | Steve Yegge</a> I’ve tried using Obsidian multiple times and concluded every time that it is a rabbit hole that productive time sinks into. However, having your agent use it to store knowledge? That is rather interesting. Maybe Obsidian should have never been used by people. I can mostly agree with that. → <a href="https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills">obsidian-skills: Agent skills for Obsidian</a> I recently bought a Bambu Lab P2S and have been loving it. This article comparing their strategy to what DJI did with drones seems spot on, and was part of why I felt good buying one of their printers! → <a href="https://www.fabbaloo.com/news/bambu-lab-x2d-signals-potential-shift-toward-consumer-focused-3d-printing-market">Bambu Lab X2D Signals Potential Shift Toward Consumer-Focused 3D Printing Market « Fabbaloo</a> Everyone is all AI all the time but I believe that crypto tech, particularly Ethereum, will continue to slowly grow in importance and ENS is continuing to incrementally improve. Great stuff. → <a href="https://ens.domains/blog/post/ens-app-deep-dive">A Deeper Look at the ENS App | ENS Blog</a> Interesting project to see how far an AI can run something on its own. → <a href="https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-market-launch">We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in SF and asked it to make a profit | Andon Labs</a> <hr> A haiku to leave you with… Clouds of data drift ☁️ Agents browse, whisper ideas — Profit hides in code. 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>. 👋 Want to share this issue with others? The link is… 👨‍💻 {% if medium == ‘email’ %} <img src="https://tinylytics.app/pixel/a2YQr3ZMqkySNYSwz4uF.gif?path=/email/344/" alt="" style="width:1px;height:1px;border:0;" /> {% endif %}

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-19T04:40:40.000Z

Timelapse video of 3D printing is pretty cool.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-19T01:30:25.000Z

Cold April night for MNUFC v Portland match. ⚽️🥶

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-18T21:02:24.000Z

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.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-18T21:01:09.000Z

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.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-18T13:54:41.000Z

A little surreal to remember that this was almost two years ago. The first of our official tour of colleges. Now, we are making preparations for her to attend in the fall.

Life is strange.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-18T13:34:35.000Z

Inside the Supreme Court’s Risky New Way of Doing Business – The New York Times

Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power.

This is important.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-18T00:47:45.000Z

Tyler and I are going to do a Minnebar session this year — Elixir: Creating An Ai Agent For Our Clash Royale Clan. This will be a lot of fun to share with everyone and tell some of the POAP KINGS and Elixir story.

It’s a weird state to be in with my work feeling like... - Barry Hess

2026-04-17T19:42:00.000Z

It’s a weird state to be in with my work feeling like a vocation. I love doing it, I love making progress on Pika, and I’m super grateful to be in this position. Yet there are some things I enjoy in life that I can’t seem to find time to do these days. I see movies, but not as many as I’d like. I’d like to spin some records and just listen. Ironically I’m having trouble finding time to blog. Etc.

I wonder if I should start a blogging series about watching all of, say, the AFI 100 movies or maybe Ebert’s The Great Movies since I have his first book on my shelf? But…the idea of such a blogging series makes me want to build an integrated movie posting/collection feature into Pika. 🤔

Try to deliver your tech-job application in person, I dare you!

Could you leave your application at the loading bay? Behind the building, where the trucks bring things... because that's where physical things go...

Earth, amirite?

I’m no big Boss fan, but I don’t dislike Springsteen. This year he’s really stepped up for Minnesota, and that’s appreciated. I’ve never seen him in concert and I was disappointed to be out of town when he kicked off his current tour in Minneapolis. Friends have let me know that, indeed, it was an unforgettable night.

The solos by Nils Lofgren and Tom Morello are pure icing on the cake.

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Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-14T12:38:15.000Z

Daring Fireball: Steven Soderbergh Twice Pitched James Bond Projects

No use crying over what could have been… But, jeepers, what a lost opportunity.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-13T00:55:59.000Z

My first meaningful print with the new Bambu P2S is a Gridfinity setup for my office desk. The grid is down and now I’m populating with various bins. There are so many options and the Bambu P2S prints things effortlessly. This may be showing up in more drawers soon.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-13T00:53:54.000Z

We saw Project Hail Mary today and it was every bit as good as everyone that has seen it has told me. I read the Martian and loved that book but had no idea about this book until it hit the theater. Just a great movie with incredible characters. Definitely one to go to the theater for!