The inadequacy of the human control systems surrounding code and AI features is the closest thing we have to the "dark fiber" problem in the dotcom boom (that and electric power). It's all well and good that this one part of the puzzle is now way faster, but if the human processes can't keep up we can't realize the gains yet.
Lesson #2 today is not necessarily about agentic coding, but it's probably exacerbated by it. Full bidirectional sync remains an unsolved problem. Dexie and Powersync are great tools, but still to be reserved for cases where you *absolutely must* have full offline writes. It's very easy to get into deadlocks and burn a lot of tokens and/or brain cells trying to resolve them.
I've written a sync system from scratch in the past, so I should have known better, but I always hold out hope that things are better now.
Today's lesson #1 in agentic coding: complex interaction between non-integrated services is not its strong suit. It actually does surprisingly well, and can even go use a website console to configure things, but unless it's a very common use case, it can spend a lot of time going in circles.
I don't think there's a power on earth greater than that of a nerd with an axe to grind.
Here's mine, of the moment. I love to cook. I also have moderately severe #ADHD, which means I can't count the number of times I've ruined hours of work because I missed a crucial step in the beginning, or forgot to set a timer, or any number of other distraction-related mistakes. So, as therapy for all of that trauma, and as a test for how far I can get with real-world agentic coding on a greenfield project, I'm writing my own recipe manager that caters to my neurodiversity's peculiar UX needs, by breaking it down into discrete bundles of work that include ingredients, prep, and any notes, all in one, impossible-to-screw-up place.
Pretty niche, but 2026 is the year of niche.
Both the utopian left and the utopian right underestimate the will to power. The beauty of what we have, is that it assumes will to power is inevitable, and can't be directly controlled, so instead it pits it against itself.
If there's no monopoly on the use of force, then everyone will have to arm themselves. The biggest companies will either become organized crime, or be forcibly taken over by the organized crime that already exists. Nature abhors a power vacuum.
Ken Miller retweeted
Thanks Jeff Lawson for buying the Onion so we could get this great zoom in on electoral coverage. No other news source has gone to this level of detail.
Now that the new Factorio has dropped you can expect a lot of PTO from you best engineers just saying.
If you're working on a developer tool (including AI infra) and looking to launch on PH or elsewhere within the next year and want some frank feedback, hit me up and I'll kick the tires. DM me and I'll send you a link.
If you are small, you should aim to polarize.
The original Rails demo by @dhh is still the gold standard for promoting your dev product. Short (16 minutes), lively, and wall-to-wall value demonstration. Hard to watch without either thinking it's the best thing ever or recoiling in horror.
The original "How to build a blog in 15 minutes with Rails" from 2005 aka the wups video: youtu.be/Gzj723LkRJY #RailsTurns10
Folks have been asking for tips on getting people to try their dev tools and libraries, so here are a few: 🧵
3. Related, make it easy to get started on a trial. Quick starts, quick signup, clear tutorials, etc. Again, you have 15 minutes max for 90% of devs.