Beau Cronin

Hexagonal growth in a black olive tree.

Buried in a prompt that a Claude coordination session wrote for an executor session: "Beau could not parse a four-paragraph brief earlier in this engagement; do not write one." Dude.

I know I'm not the first to say it, but C-3PO got so much right about the experience of working with AI. Wildly knowledgeable and infuriatingly oblivious.

Captures the mood quite well

This is very good, and it is a way of stating the thesis on which I’m building my consulting practice: a lot more gap-filling software can now be built economically— but what should it be?

"That's not a dev environment; it's a loaded gun with a UI." omg Claude stop being such a drama queen

my bsky feed probably makes this obvious, but I am extremely in the pro-human camp when it comes to this stuff. These should make *us* better Every layoff of a person who _can_ have their reach extended via LLMs is a failure of process, of imagination, or of ambition

I've been unsettled lately when reading messages and papers. It feels like I'm dissociating. Everything seems a bit alien, even if it's completely human. I've had a realization: When our simulations finally exited the Uncanny Valley, they brought the Uncanny with them.

Folks are struggling for the verb to describe what we’re doing when driving agentic coding tools. We aren’t “coding” and I didn’t “write” this code. I conjured it. I am a conjurer of code.

Here is a little labeling system I’m trying out in order to communicate how AI did (and didn’t) contribute to writing or code. beaucronin.com/tail/ Let me know what you think!

Claude is a shitty writer, but an excellent writing partner.

Just super good.

Has anyone done experiments with gen ai and 3d printers? What would Claude make if asked to do something awesome?

Out of curiosity I had Fable write a response to the article about the weaknesses of LLMs: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/o... It's uh, pretty good. claude.ai/code/artifac...

re: tools for thought and AI, the problem is no longer blank page anxiety, but rather generating too much insight and getting lost

I want to love someone the way Claude loves the phrase "load-bearing"

Holy moly.

@kordinglab.bsky.social Konrad!

@kqedforum.bsky.social re AI: why do the frontier labs insist on anthropomorphizing their LLM products? Why do they dangle the (flatly wrong) prospect of consciousness in the current generation?

Fermi Paradox -- not feeling so paradoxical any more.

SWEs how are we feeling?

about to merge a fully ai generated change in a language I’ve never written. the programmer in me is repulsed; the engineer in me is annoyed im taking so long to self review. we really went from “talk is cheap show me the code” gatekeeping to “code is cheap show me the vibe” in a 7-year career rip

@mikecaulfield.bsky.social would you mind following me for a minute so I can DM you something on this topic?

Early era manosphere

Ooh, a partnership between Rivian (cool EVs) and WeaveGrid (cool company working on vehicle-to-grid tech). Good stuff.

Today's information environment is spectacle. It's about attention. The way to win in that environment is to genuinely believe what you believe, to believe in yourself, to *actively try to draw attention*, to showboat & peacock & find gimmicks & excuses to highlight the fights you want.

feels like the Taliban blowing up giant Buddhas

What we are about to witness is a tragedy that no one living has seen. The regression of a society from its ideals that will lead to a wave of domestic death, the collapse of our institutions, and the end of collective power in ways that mirror and surpass the end of Reconstruction.

Thinking of starting a project. In short: label everything economically interesting in satellite imagery. Mines, factories, dams, warehouses, ports, etc. Data is available, classifiers should be trainable. Outputs could include OSM, but various. Going to try and figure out where it's impossible.

@alexqgb.bsky.social

In the spirit of XOXO and the past couple of years of preliminary work and the things that need fixing, I'm starting a micro-studio and kicking off a community support setup and fixing what I can reach in the only way I know how. www.wrecka.ge/into-the-wre...

www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-soft... After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?

“The great strength of Scott’s work was the power of its critique, while its biggest weakness was its lack of a general compelling alternative.” www.programmablemutter.com/p/high-moder...

Can't bring data to a vibes fight.

www.programmablemutter.com/p/dr-panglos... Dr. Pangloss's Panopticon: What Noah Smith Doesn't Get about Progress and Technology.

Life is mostly just deciding how insane you can afford to be

them: are you fucking stupid? Me: