2026-06 - W1

Talk is Cheap - by Jake - Sovereign Games

Symmathecist (n)

Learned a new word.

A symmathesy is a learning system made of learning parts. Software teams are each a symmathesy, composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all their tools. The people on the team learn from each other and from the running software (exceptions it throws, data it saves). The software learns from us, because we change it. Our tools learn from us as we implement them or build in them (queries, dashboards, scripts, automations).

Shift from a Leader-Follower to a Leader-Leader Approach

When Marquet took command of the Santa Fe, he made a radical decision. Instead of giving orders, he trained his crew to state: “I intend to…” This small language shift triggered a transformation with stunning results.

Interesting advices.

Nat Friedman on things he believes

I like list, and this is a good list!

• Enthusiasm matters!
  • It’s much easier to work on things that are exciting to you
  • It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason
  • Energy is a necessary input for progress

AI model choices 2026-06 - Kaushik Gopal’s Website

Interesting choice of AI models, especially on the “default model”, which is surprisingly not frontier models from OpenAI or Anthropic.

On Rendering Diffs :: Pierre Computer Company

Really fast!

Ad Infinitum - Matthias Ott

Scary future awaits us… I’m getting more and more pessimistic about kids’ future.

A related blog post: I Don’t Want My Search Engine to Think for Me — SearchZee Blog.

Do Things You’ll Love Yourself For

The loving relationship with Future Self mostly comes down to how Present Self does things. A task done lovingly is done with an open heart and full attention.

Nicely said. We should love ourselves more.

Three Ways to Get Paid - Jason Zweig

There are three ways to make a living:

1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

The Third Bit: Twelve Ways to Be Wrong About AI-Assisted Coding

1. Counting the lines of code generated
2. Timing artificial tasks
3. Before/After with no control group
4. Asking developers if they feel more productive
5. Counting commits, pull requests, and tickets
6. Measuring only the easy half
7. Treating adoption rate as a success metric
8. Comparing volunteers to non-volunteers
9. Measuring the individual instead of the system
10. Measuring during the novelty period
11. Treating suggestion acceptance rate as a quality signal
12. Comparing AI to nothing

Technical Debt Is a Prompt Now | Pavel Voronin

This is related to cognitive debt, but not identical to it. Cognitive debt accumulates when a team uses abstractions it no longer understands. Generative debt accumulates when a codebase contains confused concepts that models are likely to continue.

Cognitive debt is about what the team no longer understands. Generative debt is about what the model is now likely to reproduce.

If code is context, architecture is model steering. That changes the value of refactoring.

AI Can’t Care - Dan Moore!

But caring about your reader is the root of communication.

AI Won’t Save You From Forgetting How to Think - DEV Community

Interesting way of staying sharp.

Why DSA and algorithms are actually the right antidote Not because Google-style interviews are a good measure of engineering talent — they’re often not. But because DSA problems are the most concentrated form of a skill you use constantly in real work: breaking down a problem you’ve never seen before, reasoning about it carefully, and arriving at a solution you can defend. Working through a sliding window problem trains you to notice patterns in data. Implementing a graph traversal from scratch forces you to hold state in your head. Getting a time complexity wrong and figuring out why teaches you to question your own assumptions. None of that is interview prep. All of it is thinking. And thinking is exactly what AI is tempting us to skip.

Jamie Hurst’s Blog - Is this sustainable?

The cost of building has collapsed, but the cost of aligning organisationally has not. If anything, it’s gone up. When three different teams can each produce a working solution to the same problem in the time it used to take to write a proposal, the bottleneck moves from engineering to coordination. … The productivity gains from AI got captured by output volume rather than output quality. The org’s expectations rose to absorb the speed-up, and the slack that used to exist between tasks, the unstructured time where strategic thinking actually happens, got eaten first because it’s invisible on a dashboard. I’m at a point in my career where thinking is supposed to be most of the job, and most of it now happens on holiday because the working week doesn’t accommodate it.

Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower - YouTube

Really good interview with legendary and ex-distinguished Google engineer Kelsey Hightower. Must watch and very inspirational!

Zig 2026: No-AI Policy, $670K Foundation, Left GitHub & Why Zig Isn’t 1.0 - Andrew Kelley Explains - YouTube

Really inspirational interview. Andrew made me want to learn zig. I love how the interview finished:

I am happy.

On mid-career (dis)satisfaction

Yet another interesting list, now on career topic.

</> htmx ~ Code is Cheap(er)

Will AI Make Me Worse? - Wading Through AI - Episode 5 - YouTube

Insightful podcast. No real answers, but there are some advices to cope:

• ask ai “how to do X” instead of “do X”
• have side projects and implement code by hand
• find in the process what can be used to leverage to improve yourself without relying on ai
  • e.g. ask to re-implement core functions to better understand and then be better at reviewing code

The counterintuitive way to get better at everything

Yet another good list:

• The Single Most Useful Constraint: Stop multitasking. It’s the equivalent of repeatedly smashing your concentration in the face with a folding chair.
• Good Enough Is Good Enough: Every minute you spend wringing your hands over unimportant details is a minute you’re not spending on something that could actually improve your life.
• Stop Brainstorming: You’re told, “There are no bad ideas,” which is obviously a lie, since there are SO SO SO many bad ideas. If you really believe there are no bad ideas, take your 401(k) to the roulette table.
• Shared Obligations: You don’t get strong relationships by avoiding every inconvenience. You get them by accepting that other people are gonna cost you something… and deciding they’re worth it.
• Use Deadlines And Commitment Devices: If you want a behavior to happen, build a structure around it that makes not doing it annoying, embarrassing, or expensive.

I can’t bear to read AI-generated prose - Surfing Complexity

Me too Lorin, me too…

I’m just turned off by reading anything that strikes me as being AI-generated. If I’m asked to read a design document, and I suspect the doc was written by AI, I need to fight myself to actually get through it. I feel like a writer should always spend more time generating a document than a reader should spend consuming it, and asking me to spend more time on understanding something that someone else didn’t put the effort into writing feels like a violation of an implicit contract.

GitHub - AllThingsSmitty/typescript-tips-everyone-should-know at labnotes.org

Interesting tips.