Nouveau The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Everybody’s talking about the death of developers. I get it. The developer whose job was to write boilerplate or scaffold CRUD apps is done—a model can do that in seconds, and that developer is not coming back. But the […]
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers, widely suspected to be companies looking to scan them for AI training (see my previous coverage of Anthropic's book scanning from June 2025.) 404 Media investigated with an AirTag! In July, one bookseller told me they…
Nouveau The following article has been extended and rewritten by Markus Eisele from The Main Thread and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Open a repository after six months of spec-driven agent work and you may find a second system sitting next to the code. Requirements, research notes, high-level designs, low-level designs, implementation plans, […]
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a problem that I needed to solve! The tool is very simple. Navigate to markdown-svg-renderer in your browser and paste in some Markdown to see it rendered... or save that Markdown to a CORS-friendly…
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B and the closed-weight Qwen 3.7-Plus, which was one of Qwen's strongest models of any size as recently…
Récent The practical implications of model routing, clearly explained.
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it. I don’t think that a glitzy…
Tool: CORS Chat I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and both work fine. Conversations are persisted in the browser and can be exported as copy-pasted JSON. One fun detail is that it notices SVG images that are being generated and…
Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, USThis is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) in the entire Pacific Ocean. He showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago. He has since made Pillar Point harbor his home, where he's quite easy to spot: the only white bird with a yellow head, usually hanging out with the smaller black Brandt’s cormorants near the harbor sign visible from the end of the commercial pier.…
Don't classify. Hallucinate! I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solution. Tell the model to output tags without any details of the existing vocabulary, then use vector embeddings against the existing corpus to find the concrete tags that are closest to the ones the model imagined might…
8 techniques, explained visually.
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may never have written: the goals, constraints, and rationale for why the system is the way it […]
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2.1 Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2. I'd introduced code that looks like this: from typing_extensions import Self It turned out the typing-extensions package was not listed as a dependency for sqlite-utils - it was installed by one of the other dependencies in the dev dependency group, but when you uvx sqlite-utils directly you don't get those dependencies. As part of fixing this I figured out how to run a smoke test to ensure the CLI tool still works even…
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2 Lots of improvements in this one relating to the table.transform() feature, which adds support for complex alter table operations by creating a fresh table, copying across the data and then dropping and replacing the old one. transform() now preserves a much larger array of edge-case schema definitions, including check constraints, unique constraints and even comments describing the columns. There are also new introspection properties for check constraints, and a whole…
The technique behind vLLM's 23x throughput jump and the default scheduler in every serving engine.