Jon Atkinson

The CVE embargo/fix window is not going to survive the tragic commons, and it's going to be violent.

It's Monday morning so time to start every implementation from scratch.

Building up a personal agent relationship feels so much more like gardening than software development.

Witch hunting level: some guy uses AI to reverse engineer an M4 GPU driver for Linux and part of the community that should be for the open source, for the hacking, for the liberation and freedom is against him.

Someone make a printer with a built-in Tailscale client.

Anyone who think that AI was a necessary precursor to online slop creation, I present to you the Scaled Agile Framework.

adding a message board feature to my homepage to make it more attractive to OpenAI agents like a bee hotel

Robot athletics where they run at 40mph and explode when they fall down? This is so much better than the human version.

I was interested in Taalas a few months ago and demo'd their chatbot to a few people to show the speed of silicon models. I didnt know until today they were bought by AMD. Here's my dream: a motherboard, with a socket for a CPU. A socket for RAM. A socket for an LLM. Upgrade every couple of years.

I really do like Opus 5 (and it's plenty capable for what I do, I rarely reach for Fable unless we are doing Heavy Lifting), but the number of times I need to end a session with "can you explain that again in English please" is way way up compared to 4.8.

current feelings around AI: the CEOs shoveling slop into everything should be in jail but the guys spending upwards of $60,000 on elaborate, janky home rigs to run local models for no reason other than to see if it works are engaging in a long and semi-honorable tradition of computer toucher shit

we told our model with no internet access to hack a fictional company. unfortunately the model had internet access and the company was not fictional

Anthropic winning as usual

I have had two conversations this week which have independently separated software engineering into "new thinkers" and "old thinkers". Not sure what I think about that.

...aaaand my ambition got the better of me and I've just used 100% of my Fable in an afternoon.

I'll say one thing about the Opus 5 launch - I'm barely reaching for Fable for most of my work.

A new Claudism i see all the time in Opus 5 is "evidence-backed". At least 15 times today.

The trillionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX and a major media org is posting about how we need to expel all non-white people from their countries and kill the people who oppose this. And it’s just…fine? People will still show up to work for him?

<Queen>I want to breakthrough</Queen>

This week has already deteriorated into Fable capacity monitoring and it's only Wednesday. Can I afford to spend a couple of % on this feature?

Most domain registrars have NO BUSINESS providing DNS services in 2026. DNS is complex and ifnits not your core business I guarantee your service is a problem waiting to happen.

It's astonishing how much more malleable my computer feels with LLM assistance. I have been programming computers for myself since 1992 (ouch), but I have never had a feeling that the computer is *this* much of a composable tool. My software nest is feathered.

A lot of tokens were burnt this month.

A lot of the anti-AI folks give "if Mamdani wins I am leaving the city" vibes. Lots of bluster and threats but no real action. No attempt to understand, but plenty of performative purity.

Me and my son had a conversation at dinner last night about public key encryption. I did a bad job at explaining how it works, so I asked Claude to build an interactive lesson. Today my kid built a Scratch project to encrypt and decrypt strings and it's all just fucking bicycles for the mind y'know?

Okay look I haven't read a line of code for nine months. And I have delivered more projects in that time than ever before. Time to just say it.

It is my belief that many devs right now are not maximizing what they can do with automatic programming because they still look at the code. Doing it makes you the bottleneck. Your time is better invested in new ideas, QA, design, and asking yourself what is your goal.

Now software is so disposable, I'm finding it easier to just create new 'generations' of a project based on the previous. My code folder is filled with idea1, idea2, idea3 because it's easier to just start fresh and point claude to the prior work.

s/strategy/excuse?

I'm assuming the "we are building in Electron because native development hard" strategy is going to fall apart. Any day now. Maybe a little quicker?

Just jam it all in the furnace.

"... which extras are genuinely worth including?" All of them Claude just do them all pal.

I was just talking to my wife and I described something as "load bearing" and... look it is what it is. IDK what to say.

I love these stories about chud justice www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Agent loop harness with particular attention paid to planning and verification.

The fun part about this is that people online deny that the primary concern is lowering the barrier to entry and worrying about competition, but a lot of the time people actually *in* the industry will just come out and say it lol

the price of compute has mostly been falling through the floor for decades but it briefly gets more expensive because we figured out the coolest thing ever (seriously it’s so cool that there’s thousands of sci fi novels about it) which needs a lot of compute and everyone loses their minds

Fugu is very impressive. But it absolutely powers through tokens. Probably great for a single poweruser, but difficult for larger teams to justify.

Imagine being one of those anti-AI reply guys and making that your whole THING.

One of the things I really like about KDE is that when a new Plasma release comes along I read the feature list and get excited for the new things and then immediately forget them and go back to using an incredibly stable and unsurprising desktop the same way I have for 5 years.

Reflecting on the Ladybird project announcing they will no longer entertain unsolicited contributions. Have any truly durable OSS projects thrived in the age of Github? Linux, Firefox, the BSDs, Python, PHP, KDE, Gnome, Postgres - all predate the Github model and look like they will survive the era.

In case you are in the camp of “Andrew Tridgell is vibefucking rsync” please read this.l and adjust your priors. medium.com/@tridge60/rs...

I wrote something a few weeks back about the anti-AI position in media consumption. www.jonatkinson.co.uk/blog/anti-ai... - I don't think I did a great job making a coherent argument here but I really feel that a lot of the anti-AI is a performative purity test.

Dispatching prompts with the line "ULTRATHINK this shit" is a feeling of power like nothing else.

Unnamed Company (YC W27). We are developing an ad-tech platform to monetise those moments when the Claude API mysteriously slows to a crawl.

I feel that I'm increasingly becoming a data store minimalist. It's taken 20 years, but I've gone from "everything in RDBMS" to "SQlite is enough" to "I can just use Markdown with some front matter".