Adam Keys is Thinking

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:49:14 -0700

🛬Back from Spain. Vermouth de grifo, Hieronymus Bosch and Matisse, old buildings, and public green spaces are pretty great.

📚Still at it with Power Broker and the first six Dune novels. Larry McMurtry essays are making me a little nostalgic for the idea of Texas (but not contemporary Texas itself). Contemplating adding the giant book of all the Montaigne essays to this list.😎

🎥 Hoppers was fun and feels like possibly a return to form for Pixar. Mandolorian and Grogu isn’t the best or worst Star Wars, but it is fun and hits all the expectations.

📺 Rooster is great if you’ve ever fancied becoming a sharp-witted author and visiting professor in New England. Widow’s Bay is great if ever you’ve wondered what being the mayor of an obscure but definitely cursed island in the northeast might look like.

⭐I should call out Hacks here. That is how you end a series, a comedy in particular. I will now enthusiastically recommend this show to everyone as The Ideal Comedy television series. If you haven’t, go watch it. Five seasons, no skips or lulls.

Mon, 25 May 2026 10:47:51 -0700

Fits on a floppy, great idea:

Software has lost its way. Apps that once shipped on a single floppy disk now demand gigabytes of your storage, minutes of your time, and far too much of your patience. We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress.

Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can.

Yep, these criteria make the good stuff:

Launches instantly. Faster startup, nothing unnecessary to load.

Does one thing well. Focused features, fewer bugs, software that lasts.

But, I disagree on some details:

Native only. No dependency bloat, every line of code earns its place.

I usually don’t feel like “native” is crucial these days. Whatever your definition of native is, it’s not a prerequisite for building great software. Even for desktop/mobile platform development using the vendor-intended language and frameworks, the downsides are…a lot, lately.

You can create software that is fast and focused with any language or stack if you’re careful. So, I might replace this one with something about attention to details and care for the craft.

Runs on older systems. Older devices deserve love too.

I love it when this happens. It’s easier to make it work outside native environments, too!

I think the applications are less important than the data. I’d change this one to something about the ability to store one’s own data on a floppy-sized local file instead of in an opaque cloud or a row in a SaaS database somewhere.

Maybe the big idea is that the application and data should fit on the floppy. 🤔

Sun, 24 May 2026 12:23:54 -0700

Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger is underrated. Twenty five years later, still no skips.

Wed, 20 May 2026 08:01:00 -0700

Previously in tech, the joke was that Microsoft’s org chart was a bunch of divisions in a Mexican standoff.

Fast-forward to now, instead of pointing guns at each other, every division at Microsoft is yoked to the other via KPIs and bonus allocations. None can maneuver freely enough to ship excellent software. They all have to prioritize “synergy” (Copilot everything!) and integration instead.

In retrospect, at least the drama of a standoff yielded the turnarounds of distributed systems and open source work in the 2010s.

Tue, 19 May 2026 18:26:58 -0700

Madrid–Barajas and Heathrow, day 10.

Mon, 18 May 2026 16:30:12 -0700

Madrid, day 9.

Thu, 14 May 2026 01:54:10 -0700

Toledo, day 8.

Tue, 12 May 2026 08:01:22 -0700

Toledo, day 7.

Mon, 11 May 2026 07:52:24 -0700

Madrid, day 6.

Sun, 10 May 2026 01:18:52 -0700

Madrid, day 5.

Sat, 09 May 2026 03:55:19 -0700

Madrid, day 4. Museo Prado not pictured at the request of the Museo Prado.

Sat, 09 May 2026 03:50:56 -0700

Madrid, day 3. Sometimes, you gotta sleep in and take a short bus tour.

Wed, 06 May 2026 08:43:23 -0700

Madrid, day 2

Tue, 05 May 2026 07:16:48 -0700

Madrid, day 1

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:16:29 -0700

Examples of The Eponymous Trifecta:

“Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath
“Motörhead” by Motörhead from the album Motörhead
“Iron Maiden” by Iron Maiden from the album Iron Maiden

Hopefully you’re starting to see the pattern. (There’s way more of these out there. Let me know your favorite!)

Let me throw some variety in:

🤷‍♂️ by Metallica from the album Metallica
“Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley from the album Bo Diddley

Ergo: You’re not metal if you don’t have a trifecta. Metallica is not metal. This is probably some kind of paperwork mistake.

But, Bo Diddley is metal. Just listen to the music, I think you’ll agree.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:09:32 -0700

git-spice – stacked diffs, but without another (SaaS) tool to provision and pay for. Excellent ergonomics, if you’re comfortable with the git CLI as-is. I’ve tried this for one project so far, things went as hoped. Moving between commit ‘stacks’ is easy, and rebasing changes from the main branch is straightforward. This is the quality of tool I’d hope to see in git in the first place. But maybe that’s a 2026 expectation. 😇

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:13:14 -0700

When you’re stuck or uninspired, reach for your spark file:

This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy–just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

Steven Johnson, The Spark File

It’s a productive trick that doesn’t have an ecosystem of applications, courseware, and influencers wrapped around it. I dig that.

Adjacent: swipe files and commonplace books.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:37:51 -0700

If you were wondering, “could anyone make OAuth2 an even more involved, jargon-filled process?”, the answer is yes. AT Protocol and Bluesky sure did. 🙃

RIP my vim muscle memory

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:07:02 -0700

I bet a lot of the grumbling about coding agents is really about losing out on the joy of moving quickly through code via a deeply learned text editor. I’m feeling it too, but I’m not so great at vim that my whole coding identity is wrapped up in it.

As goes the complaint about the decline of manual transmissions, even in sports cars, so goes the decline of emacs/vi/etc. “No connection”, “not enough focus”. Not wrong, but the toothpaste is out of the tube here.

That said, there’s a legitimate complaint to make here about software slowing down! We were almost getting to the point that raw latency was a virtue in software. And then we got uncanny, but not fast, intelligence. 🤷

It strikes me that my text editor is now, effectively, a quasi-natural language interface onto bulk and sometimes quite intelligent text operations. Well, sometimes entirely not what I want. But still, bulk and natural language.

Lately, I try Cursor every several weeks. Mostly to see if the grass is greener. But it’s not for me. Jetbrains-flavored tools are more holistic and more right for me. Regardless of the grass.

I think Cursor is an intriguing team and a good product. The best version of VS Code you could possibly use, the easiest possible onramp to coding with agents. Nonetheless, I want to be using Zed for everything. However, I think the writing is on the wall for pure, even principled, text editors. Typing in code is no longer the bottleneck. Memorizing keystroke optimizations is doubling down on a sunk cost.

Looking at the functionality of an integrated environment like RubyMine or PyCharm, I think the value of its git integration has gone up by a lot. This is essentially why I went back to PyCharm from Cursor. I can’t be bothered with simplistic, non-excellent git interfaces. (I wonder if Sublime Merge sales will start to exceed Sublime Text sales. 🤔)

VS Code, and Cursor by literal extension, seem like the keybindings were invented by 3 different people ten years apart. Which they probably were, literally. I can’t abide this.

The other thing that brought me back to PyCharm is browsing/discovering data alongside code alongside revision changes. It stands to reason that if writing code is less critical in the future, understanding the data will grow in importance. Even better, understanding your code and data in the same tool, with sensible affordances to jump between the two. This is why I’m betting on IDEs gaining ground.

Let’s not mention the part where now we’re paying for code, from our new-found editors, by the line. I’m surprised I’m not more salty about this.😬

The future of code is understanding the whole system, not constructing each part in exquisite detail. The IDE of the future probably looks more like code review alongside a debugger, than a code editor with version control and data management attached as sidecars. A bunch of Slacks and GitHubs mashed together.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:42:46 -0700

Yeah, I’ve locked in to a few writing and coding sessions with The Social Network soundtrack. But, have you ever tried locking in to something you can move your hips to?

Related: currently compiling a list of Soundtracks That Didn’t Have To Go So Hard, and Prince’s Batman is way up there.

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:40:56 -0700

Wrapping up lil’ document editor “research”, starting to write more on it. In short: cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem is possible, but tricky once you get into third-party libraries. Agent coding makes a lot possible, but doesn’t make anything trivial. Prototypes without a plan for using it regularly, at least in the process of building the thing, are not going to generate useful insight.

False spring has passed in Portland, real spring is coming up soon. Our yard is starting to bloom. I’m fine with trading off an hour of sleep tomorrow for later sunsets.

📚 Iberia / James Michener, Liberation Day / George Saunders

🎧 Jill Scott, To Whom This May Concern. First album of hers I’ve listened to, it is excellent.

📺 Wonder Man, Ponies. The latter is great but somehow over-complicated the season finale.

🎮 Marathon, somewhat surprising to me. But, I’ve played a lot of Halo and entirely too much Destiny, so this tracks.

💻 Amp and Paper are pretty dang good, Claude Opus 4.6 is as good as they all say. I’ve bounced off Cursor, VS Code and its forks just aren’t for me.

✈️ Visited my parents in Dallas, had literally too much Tex-Mex. Happened to sit at the table next to Randy Travis at dinner one night. We rented a new Ford Bronco, and that is a large car. Perfect for Texas highways, though, if you don’t mind the wind noise.

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:34:06 -0700

Behind every guitar god there is, literally, a drummer making the odd 7/8 or 5/4 bar sound like 4/4. Paraphrasing Einstein, true guitar gods don’t play at dice or outside of a strict 4/4. (Inspired by: what the heck even is “Black Dog”?)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:56:05 -0700

Squeeze out the trickiest part of the problem, another part of the problem becomes the trickiest. A tale as old as time.

Today, it seems like the biggest opportunities will be in the third of my opening statements. Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less of a contributor to the overall speedup. Lowering the costs of the rest of the problem is work that remains to be done. It’s going to take a long time, because the real world is fully of sticky problems, surprising feedback loops, human stubbornness, and the occasional adversary.

– Marc Brooker, You Are Here

You squeeze out coding time, you’re still left with open problems like:

Running software in isolated, trusted environments (sandboxes) and coordinating work between programs (agents, databases, etc.).
Human think time, which generates things like taste, and deciding to include this feature instead of that feature because intuition says it will improve the software.
Coordination and collaboration between humans, which generates recurring meetings (no, thanks) but also great ideas out of nowhere (that’s why we’re here!)
Verifying what you’ve built and vetting that what you’re proposing to integrate (merge) into the software is any good.

Be careful not to squeeze out the costs that are actually valuable. Otherwise, you might end up with inversions like banks that operate vast airborne transit networks at a loss.

Blogging (Classic)

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:17:19 -0700

NetNewsWire was one of the first, if not the first, Mac OS X apps that I bought for my first Mac, an iBook G3. Indulge me some nostalgia for a moment.

NetNewsWire 2.0, was three whole Mac-assed applications:

A feed reader we all came to love, miss, and then love again
A blog editor, later spun off into MarsEdit and still a thing you and I can buy today
An outliner, lost to time, AFAIK

I think this design came about because the author, Brent Simmons, had worked on Radio, one of the first blogging apps. And it was a feed reader and blog editor, all built on a programming environment built on top of an outliner.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a pretty good time for bootstrapped environments! And, generally not doing things some specific way because that was the shortest road to the hyper-growth treadmill.

I mention this because I’m rediscovering a blogging workflow and realizing it’s a lot like what the NNW of old gestured at. Consider Austin Kleon and Matt Webb. They’re both long-time RSS fans, opinionated but not over-the-top note-takers, and they’re great writers on the web. Clearly, they’ve got something figured out. They both read websites via NNW, throw the good stuff into their notes (outlines), and then mix the good stuff together into a blog editor and hit publish.

To stand on their shoulders a bit, here’s me doing my spin on their workflow:

Am I stealing like an artist yet? I hope so!

This setup won’t conquer writer’s block or slop out a newsletter opinion piece for you. But it’s a pretty dang good way to arrange the web, on your desk per se, so that you stay in your zone, not some algorithm’s. And it arranges the world so that neat ideas roll downhill from your feed reader to your notes and into your editor for digestion and posting to your blog.

This is a recommended way of writing on the web and thinking about the world.

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:25:00 -0700

I love when/what Matt Webb builds:

It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.

— mist: Share and edit Markdown together, quickly

We need more “this (thing) should be as easy to collaborate on as Google Docs” sort of things in the world. Granted, I’m not a fan of writing in or using Google Docs! But the collaboration model is right and people know how to use it. May many more bloom.