AI is Throwing a Roadside Picnic
What alien leftovers can teach us about AI-generated science
metedata.substack.com
Roadside Picnic by Аркадий Стругацкий, Борис Стругацкий, Arkady and Boris StrugatskyLLMs do feel like alien technology. It’s still very surprising to me that these relatively simple linear algebra building blocks can now perform as “thinking machines”. It feels unintuitive that “next token prediction” would work as well as it does.
I can relate. I have a bunch of these “will never release” projects as well. They’re tailor made tools for my workflows. LLMs + Agents have many downsides and concerns attached to them but one of the upsides is that all your software wishes can now come true.
This is so stupid that if a spy novelist used this as a plot, you would say “Come on, put some effort into your novels”.
Redesigning source control at Anthropic
As our merges per day grew more than tenfold, source control became our biggest development bottleneck. Here, we share how we migrated to an in-house version control system in five months.
www.anthropic.com
How the Claude Code team does code review / claude.dev Blog
How do you review code at the volume agents produce it? On the Claude Code team, once we had high coverage and deep reviews, we started optimizing for the minimum amount of human review time that doesn't raise reverts or incidents.
claude.devInteresting reads. I guess tooling has to change to support the changes coming from the agentic software engineering lifestyle.
How teams build – Linear
AI usage patterns in software teams: who is adopting AI, how it reshapes where teams spend their time, and how much more they ship.
linear.appNot that surprising. As the models get better, more people will use them for more and more tasks.
I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep
On technological grief
www.derekthompson.orgYes, but watch this video:
If you want to go all in on the agentic lifestyle and have the token budget, this talk is for you:
Time Capsule 6: How Thorsten Ball Uses Amp
Thorsten shares the talk he gave at a customer visit on how he works with agents in October 2026: prompt the what, not the how, never wait for your agents, review only the load-bearing code, and ask for irrefutable proof. Then he shows the Amp team building Amp in orbs with no local dev, and follows an out-of-memory bug report to a fix tested in production behind a feature flag.
ampcode.comTake away: “Don’t wait for the agent”.
I think daytime TV will experience a Renaissance.
None of us know where this is going.