Iterative

Robin Sloan in 2020’s An app can be a home-cooked meal:

When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen. I can report to you: not only is this different activity rewarding in almost exactly the same way that cooking for someone you love is rewarding, there’s another feeling, too, specific to this realm. I have struggled to find words for this, but/and I think it might be the crux of the whole thing:

This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?

Is it simply … the feeling of being home?

Robin Sloan in 2026’s Ask for what you want:

What’s changed between 2020 and today? Oh, just the entire process and practice of computer programming. Here, right up front, I decree: building a personal app with the help of AI agents still totally counts as “home cooking”. You’re no longer grinding the flour by hand; fine. This is a cool development. You do still have to make the meal taste good, and this still requires care and effort. Fine.

Neal Stephenson: Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here’s how to do it. Neal Stephenson has been writing enormous tomes by hand with a fountain pen for over two decades.

Before he went analogue, Stephenson wrote In The Beginning Was The Command Line, a wonderful discussion of the benefits of text-based editors and the late, lamented BeOS.

And that reminded me of this fantastic adventure in writing a graphics driver for BeOS.

Software development is killer app for generative AI. Maybe it’s the only one?. Nope, the other killer app is charging a premium to not train on customers data.

It seems, though, that, using the robots well is causing problems for the model providers: using them effectively is costing too much.

Last week Microsoft stopped accepting signups for personal plans, added usage limits, and basically telegraphed that their “premium request” model was on its way out. Not surprising when a good developer can dump a sophisticated prompt into the Copilot CLI, burn hundreds of thousands of tokens, and only use a handful of premium requests.

Update: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing, an article in which Microsoft note that it costs a lot more to run GitHub Copilot now so you’ll need to pay more but also the price hasn’t changed.

Anthropic also seemed to be thinking about changing their model, A/B testing a pricing page that excluded their most popular plan.

Meanwhile people are experimenting with ways to reduce token usage. Prompting like a caveman shows promise. Learning Chinese doesn’t seem to be worth it. The most 5D chess suggestion: hire junior developers to do the menial tasks. Honestly, it’s enough to get on board with Milton’s plan at this point.

Let’s talk about something that’s actually cool: two people broke the two hour mark for the marathon in London today. Two people! Sabastian Sawe finished in 1:59:30 ahead of Yomif Kejelcha who finished in 1:59:41. Two hours has only been broken in carefully created conditions so to see it smashed by two people in the same race is unexpected to say the least.

If you want to read more about the two-hour marathon mark and the science that goes into pushing human athletic endeavours, Alex Hutchinson’s Endure is a great source.

The Tools That Built Doom is a lovely short doco about the technologies and techniques id Software employed to make everybody’s favourite 3D-ish shooter. DOS-based compilers, NEXT workstations, clay models - a lot of stuff went into the making of DOOM in a very short time.

Last week Brendan Leonard published a lovely essay titled Is It Just Music? about how foundational the music we listened to as teenagers was, about listening outside of the mainstream, about how we collect, discover, and listen to music has changed, and about dropping a very large amount of cash for the raddest boombox on the planet. I loved the essay and it got me browsing TradeMe, where I found someone is selling a slightly dinged raddest boombox ever for a very large amount of cash less than 10km from me! The Promax Super Jumbo may well be the Seneca of tape decks but I kindof really want one.

Here’s a YouTube clip of the Super Jumbo in action

Here’s the boombox battle from Do The Right Thing that made the system famous.

Of course there’s a wiki devoted to boomboxes. Super Jumbo entry.