2026-10 - W3
Developing Taste
The things you’ll create probably won’t be good at first, but that’s a good sign. Your taste is good enough to tell that your work is not on par yet. This phase is normal. Don’t quit, it’ll get better overtime.
It’s still OK to enjoy programming - Blogomatano
Friendly reminder.
What Shall I Teach My Son?
I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition. … I believe in Dr. Alfie Kohn’s notion that we should relate to our educational charges as humans, not objects – “doing with” vs “doing to”. Thus, I believe it may be most honest and effective to invite our children to help us craft the purpose for their education as we figure it out together.
What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose · WVEZ Solutions
That’s always the best way to learn, but really really hard to have this mindset, because it could have some social impact on yourself.
Chain of Thought For Humans – BorisTheBrave.Com
These are also useful skills for real-time problem solving. I think there are some further benefits for this particular use case:
- It forces you to establish named formal rules and concepts, instead of relying purely on building intuition. In other words, engaging System II, which the puzzles are explicitly designed to require.
- It forces you to acknowledge when you are making an arbitrary choice. Useful for backtracking or exhaustively searching a possibility space.
- I think it lets you use echoic memory to slightly augment your working memory.
- I may well have accidentally triggered the Hawthorne effect
A stack to calm the mind and stay on track - ratfactor
Interesting alternative to TODO list. That can work for the human brain. Maybe I should design something like this instead of relying on my todo list… Although, I’m not sure how to schedule some task? Since it’s a stack, so a new task will always be on top.
Supervisory Engineering Work - Annie Vella
I believe it’s time for our industry to recognise that the role of a software engineer has changed. We need to agree on what the job actually involves now and what it takes to do it well, and then adjust our expectations to match. For example, what does it really mean to hold engineers accountable for code they’re less and less likely to have written, or even read?
Predictability vs Outcomes - Silicon Valley Product Group : Silicon Valley Product Group
Outcomes require humility, and knowledge of the craft of product, especially product discovery, where we are working to quickly discover a solution that can generate the necessary outcome. This problem goes far beyond executives and stakeholders. Many product leaders and product managers contribute to this problem every day by continuing to push untested ideas onto product roadmaps, usually with expectations on dates or at least timeframes. Framing this trade-off as predictability versus outcomes hopefully gets closer to the essential decision that a company needs to make when deciding their culture and what they choose to reward and incentivize.
Move Slow and Fix Things | Matthias Endler
Don’t sell out your moral compass for a quick buck. You don’t have to jump on the AI bandwagon just because it’s the flavor of the month.
How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with Al | Katie Dill (Stripe) - YouTube
Good talk on AI design.
- Avoid Zombie UI: Stop building generic, soulless interfaces.
- Refuse to confuse done with good: Speed and polish don’t equal quality.
- Have a clear POV: Set human standards so AI doesn’t default to generic outputs.
- Encode intent: Embed design standards directly into AI workflows.
- Embrace post-build editing: Human quality control shifts to rigorous editing at the end.
- Raise the ceiling: Use AI to invent new interfaces, not just make old ones faster.
The Goose Programming Language · Goose
Interesting programming language, claiming to be faster than C++ and safe rust
Don’t anthropomorphize big tech companies
That…makes lots of sense.
All of these are mistakes. Your relationship to the tech company that employs you is not like a relationship with a person. It’s more like your relationship with your car. If you drive poorly or fail to change your oil, your car may stop working or even kill you, but it doesn’t love or hate you. It has no sense of fairness. It’s simply a dangerous, useful machine: useful enough to be worth getting into despite the risks. Anthropomorphizing it makes it harder to avoid those risks.
38 things we’ve learned about building AI products
Nice list from PostHog!
- Subagents cost more than you think. They don’t share the parent’s cache and lack of observability can cause unreliability. Wizard runs used to spawn many subagents that took longer or never returned, only for the main agent to do the actual work after waiting.
- Shipping fast makes context drift, so fix it at the source. We have agents that check merged PRs for docs updates and make a pull request when relevant. This helps context keep up with the pace of what’s being shipped without relying on endless manual fixes.
I’m 38. If You’re in Your 20’s or 30’s, Read This. X
Another list. I like list.
- When you turn 35 you’ll see the difference between those who took risks and those who didn’t.
- Having kids isn’t the end of freedom, it’s the beginning. It’ll give you meaning that’ll fuel your greatness.
- Chasing obsession is the fastest way to become a high performer.
- Raise your standards so high people think you’re a psychopath. Screw being average.
- Never follow the conventional path. It’s full of boredom and has the most competition.
- One of the clearest signs of intelligence is being able to hear an opinion you disagree with and not act emotionally.
- As you get older you’ll want to leave your loser friends behind. It’s normal.
- The more hard things you do the more successful you become.
- No one who climbs the corporate ladder is happy. It’s a trap. Choose freedom.
- If you have 8 hours a day to work a boring job, you have 1 hour in the morning to invest in yourself.
- Find a dark place. Be at one with it. Enjoy it. Stay there 6-12 months.
- Maniacs are incredible. They teach you what effort and obsession can do.
- Avoid being busy. It means you don’t know how to focus and it’s a sign of low status.
- Some of the most successful people like Keanu Reeves are bizarrely quiet. Try it.
- Disappear from public life. Adopt a nickname. Then build something online with zero fear.
- Money isn’t evil. It’s a resource that’ll help you reach personal freedom.
- If you don’t learn how money works you will always work for money.
- Keeping your dopamine addiction under control will help you more than any other health hack.
- The strongest animals only eat plants. Eat more plants to have more energy.
- Turn off news and politics to naturally increase your IQ.
- Flow states are more important than productivity.
- Take your parent’s plan for your life & light it on fire. The best path is one you create.
- Be wary of religion. Most are mindless cults.