Working with agents, summer of 2026: you have an always-on, amazingly deep collaborator. The coding ones can work themselves out of most problems, if you are willing to pay for the effort and thinking costs.
But, wow, you are absolutely right! They are boring as nails and write like an entrance exam question.
It is a real relief to spend a weekend, touching grass or concrete, away from the discourse around maximizing, minimizing, or wisely leveraging them.
The frontier labs regularly run promotions like “hey there’s a long weekend or holiday soon! Tokens or this new model is half-off until the next business day back.” I don’t like the nudge to “always be prompting”, working with the models at all time. To trade a long weekend for better token rates smells even worse.
The new sabbath was an offline weekend or vacation. The new time offline is time away from tokens.
So what had happened was, my daily reading sort of tailed off. Distractions and all that. Then my writing dropped off. And then, the web hit me with three great ideas hit me right in a row. The web provides energy for reading, the reading transforms into energy for writing. Suddenly, here we are, posting the links again. The web is good.
Mandy Brown, Umyazu:
Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to change.
Austin Kleon, Problems of output are problems of input
When I stall out, it’s time to start taking things in again: read more, re-read, watch movies, listen to music, go to art museums, travel, take people to lunch, etc. Just being open and alert and on the lookout for That Thing that will get me going again. Getting out the jumper cables and hunting down a battery.
First installment of this could-be-a-series of monthly reading notes. I thought I haven’t been reading much lately, and there goes my self-awareness.
You (almost) can’t do too much reading. Lovely thing, that.
Grass touched, wind felt. Mountains driven, autocross done in ski resort parking lots. Bend, OR and its surrounding areas.
You ain’t got time for all this – the latest newsletter edition from yours truly. Some of my recent writing, remixed. Some all new links. If you’re seeing this on your computer screen, you might like it!
🎧 Human Touch is the Phil Collins-est of Bruce Springsteen albums. From one Oscar winner of the 1990s to another.
📚 Finished: In a Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry. If you’ve ever lived in Texas, even more so if you’re from Texas, this is a great read. It’s not quite Texas as I remember it, as the author was writing a decade or two before my time. But it captures the spirit and backstory of 20th century Texas. Contains great explainers on the rivalries between Austin, Dallas, and Houston. And, that Texas is at least two different things: east Texas, west Texas, and probably south Texas.
The nostalgia was strong as I read this. But, the headlines bear many reminders that the religious right and culture warriors have thoroughly captured and corrupted the state. I hope those who’ve stuck around can recover it, someday.
The local maxima we need to reach the next global maximum
Half-way through 2026, I’m finally getting around to posting some predictions for the year. Really, ideas about how software development can fix the house to deal with coding agents generating lots of code:
- Design with pacing, stable/unstable layers – ala Shearing layers
- Correctness by design/assertion – ala “Making Impossible States Impossible”
- Formal verification (finally) – figure out if we can do better than compilers and unit tests to know if what we asked for resembles what we received
- Even more deterministic static analysis – absent a leap forward in the practicality and ergonomics of formal verification, can we manage the flood plain of incoming code with beaver dams of linters, style checkers, and good old-fashioned
grep? - Improve our observability stance – how can we see the emergent properties of the running system, let alone iterate on them? And, can we do so without spending all our lunch money on observability services and stacks?
Notably absent from this list: guardrails, specs, swarms, optimization, maximalism, orchestration. These aren’t even local maxima, they’re just shiny objects or shovels someone is trying to sell us along the way.
Exploring the Rich History of Funk and Soul Music: A Journey Through Rhythm and Emotion:
Funk and soul music aren’t just sounds; they’re vibrant threads woven into the fabric of musical history. Emerging from the rich cultural tapestry of African American communities in the 20th century, these genres have become a cornerstone of musical innovation. They blend gospel’s fervor, jazz’s complexity, rhythm and blues’ groove, and rock’s edge to create a sound that moves both the heart and the feet. Here, we’ll dive into their roots, evolution, and the enduring influence they wield, keeping audiences captivated across the globe.
I couldn’t have introduced the funk better myself.
Related: Maggot Brain is highly rated but still underrated. That album could stand against any of Stevie Wonder’s “classic period” albums.