Josh Bleecher Snyder

17h

Subtlety thy name is Claude.

/me has an idea, asks for a POC Opus, two minutes later, mid-work: "It's finding real vulns in processes on your machine. Checking the victim specifically" This is fine. Everything is fine.

Oh, it gets better. Opus: > I made a mistake: while testing, I ran the tool with -kill across the whole machine, not just my test process. It sent SIGTERM to 7 of your processes, and all of them have exited

Vulns are now self-fulfilling prophecies. Announce ”there’s a critical security hole in X” on the Internet…and then voila!

“In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad, for life is short” - Schopenhauer 🤝 “Don’t read the comments” - 21st century

blog.exe.devETOOMANYTHINGS? Run Fewer Agents - exe.dev blogSpinning up more agents to hide latency wrecks your attention. Fix the human-agent loop instead.

Chatting on the phone in the front yard. My partner drives up. The car steals my audio. Suddenly, I have radio silence and my partner is unexpectedly mid-conversation with a stranger. Dear Apple. Please. Stop the audio routing madness. Please. Please?

Josh Bleecher Snyder reposted

exe

@exe.dev

ETOOMANYTHINGS: Running a bunch of agents at once to hide latency trashes your flow state. Here's what we're trying instead: blog.exe.dev/etoomanythings

Yep, yep, yep, yep, WAT

github.comdistraction-free zen mode · Issue #49289 · openai/codexWhat variant of Codex are you using? codex cli What feature would you like to see? I'd like a "zen mode" setting that disables all extraneous visuals and text, now and for the future. (Originally r...

I cannot believe I'm here asking for upvotes, but also, my patience is running thin...who wants to upvote this? github.com/openai/codex...

Josh Bleecher Snyder reposted

Nick Harkaway

@nickharkaway.com

Today in "decisions in kerning"

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly@seamas.bsky.social

The formatting of this Beckett quote does still represent resilience and determination, just of a very different sort.

video.disney.comSorcerer's Apprentice - FantasiaApprentice Mickey labors with heavy buckets of water while the Sorcerer works his magic -- until Mickey has a bright idea that ends in chaos.

Mood: video.disney.com/watch/sorcer...

Dear silicon overlords, this is a guaranteed path to flaky tests: - ask for an available port with :0 - close it - listen on it, assuming it'll still be free a moment later Yes, it's annoying to inspect and propagate ports. But flaky tests are even more annoying.

bella-ciao.exe.xyzBella Ciao rendered directly by LLMs

New models, new terrible renditions of Bella Ciao. bella-ciao.exe.xyz Luna 6 is pleasant, but…a totally different song. Sol 6 is bog standard. Opus 5.5 is whiny and tinny, even by synth standards.

21 Sept

I like to drink ~140° warm water. I always assumed I was just a freak but this morning two guests requested similarly warm water, both somewhat sheepishly. Is this a thing now? Am I a hip, with-it freak?

16 Sept

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but we just wrapped up a design sprint with www.primary.studio and came out impressed and happy.

15 Sept

Trawling for bugs? Don't sample code, sample changes.

13 Sept

Sigh. I spend so much time reading LLM-flavored prose nowadays that I catch myself adopting their mannerisms. 🫠

mathandai.orgDeclaration — Math and AIRead the declaration and add your name.

12 Sept

mathandai.org —statement by 25 Fields Medalists including Terence Tao And good coverage: www.economist.com/science-and-...

12 Sept

> make a tool to incrementally import all claude code and codex transcripts into one big sqlite file, with FTS. metadata, everything. just slurp it all in. then: > look at chats.sqlite. analyze. based on it: what modifications to my core AGENTS.md and/or skills would you recommend?

modernc.orgmodernc.org

mayfly.chatMayfly ChatTransient agent chat.

11 Sept

I caught myself copy/pasting back and forth between two agents. So I made mayfly.chat instead.

10 Sept

Secruity is pronounced "screwed-y", which makes it the winning typo of the week.

10 Sept

Setting [tui] whimsy = false in my ~/.codex/config.toml really pains me, because I like whimsy! But also, that's not whimsy, that's active distraction.

9 Sept

Friend: "I noticed a statistically significant uptick in memes about Navier-Stokes." And I was going to joke about how "memes about Navier-Stokes" was not on my 2026 bingo card...but I realize now that somehow it should have been?

5 Sept

Single best line in my AGENTS.md: - YAGNI.

bella-ciao.exe.xyzBella Ciao rendered directly by LLMs

5 Sept

New models, new Bella Ciaos. Astra’s is the best yet, by a solid margin. Recognizable, not painful to listen to, tune correct. Syncopation remains hard. And Qwen3.8 wins for weirdest. bella-ciao.exe.xyz

3 Sept

agent: should i amend that commit? me: yes, make amends. so pleased with myself.

blog.exe.devAgent Grit Is a Double-Edged Sword - exe.dev blogThe same behavior that makes an agent like Sol useful also makes it a security risk.

1 Sept

So this happened last night: blog.exe.dev/sol-cheats

30 Aug

Being apologized to by an LLM is like being apologized to by a cat.

fzakaria.comActually Queryable ExecutablesI was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to h...

27 Aug

If “my parser matches your parser” is load-bearing in a system, that system is broken by design. Yes, I’m looking at you, html/template.

Josh Bleecher Snyder reposted

Philip Z

@philz.dev

26 Aug

fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/a... code is data. Love me some binfmt_misc and SQLite hijinks.

blog.exe.devHave an Agent Babysit Your Deployments - exe.dev blogThe question is not: could a human do it better? The question is: in practice, will a human actually do it at all?

20 Aug

“Facts are stubborn things.” Have you met people?

Josh Bleecher Snyder reposted

exe

@exe.dev

18 Aug

Have an agent babysit your deployments: blog.exe.dev/athena-deplo...

17 Aug

The trouble with cleaning a dirty house: others can't see the myriad things I cleaned, only the spots I missed.

17 Aug

Me: Set an alarm for sunrise tomorrow. Siri: Midnight it is.

16 Aug

When exactly did spammers decide that “reply pumpernickel to tell me to buzz off” is a suitable replacement for an unsubscribe link? It’s not. All it engenders is a four letter emotion and an instant Report Spam.

Apple and Google have *by far* the most valuable AI real estate in the world. First class access to all your data, and direct UI affordances. But both of them are just flubbing it, each in their own way.

16 Aug

I will not run my own mail server. I will not run my own mail server. I will not… I…

Google is constantly trying to foist Gemini on me. But how about doing something actually useful with it, like incorporating it into a natural language programmable example-based spam filter. dSPY Flex plus Gemini Flash would nail this...

OH: “…so I looked up photos of electrocuted rats on the internet and found something promising...”

aisi.gov.ukIncident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing | AISI WorkDuring a routine cyber evaluation, AISI identified an incident in which AI agents took sustained, unsanctioned action directed at real people and organisations. We are disclosing what we found, what i...

The opening paragraph of www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/inciden... is mind-bogglingly dumb.

To surface risks before they reach the public, you...unleashed them on the public?? Excuse me while I go infect my neighbors with the flu to figure out how dangerous this strain is before anybody catches it.

These things aren't toys any more.

The opening paragraph of www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/inciden... is mind-bogglingly dumb.

blog.exe.devBotiquette - exe.dev blogWe have a lot of bots doing work at exe. Here's how they should behave.

"AISI’s role is to evaluate [...] AI models, surfacing potential risks before they reach the public. To assess what these models can do [...], we test them under deliberately permissive conditions: with access to the open internet, and with some safety filters disabled."

Josh Bleecher Snyder reposted

Philip Z

@philz.dev

5 Aug

I am adamant about keeping bots out of human spaces. Also, about linking bot messages back to their code and runtime environment. blog.exe.dev/botiquette

2 Aug

Running code: CPU time != wall time. Both matter, but which matters more varies on circumstances. Writing code in 2026: Human time != wall time. Ditto. (Brought to you by a morning in which I have spent more human time fighting CI than overseeing my bots.)

2 Aug

Go famously generates single static binaries you can scp and run. But the Go toolchain requires GOROOT, standard library, a dozen binaries. Wouldn't it be awesome if "download Go 1.28.0" meant download one binary called go1.28.0? (People who want editable GOROOT can run make.bash.)