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Just talk to it – A way of agentic engineering
A practical guide to working with AI coding agents without the hype.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,537 posts.
1262
Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)
The following submission to Jeremy Friesen’s ‘elevator pitch’-themed Emacs blog carnival is taken from my rather long manuscript in progress (‘the present work’), tent…
1263
Your data model is your destiny
Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right.
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Ruby Blocks
How to start really getting Ruby, especially blocks.
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Copy-and-Patch: A Copy-and-Patch Tutorial
If you can ctrl-c and ctrl-v, you can build a JIT.
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LLMs are getting better at character-level text manipulation
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of…
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Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them
Programming languages have rapidly evolved in recent years. But in software development, the new often meets the old, and the scaffolding that OS gives for running new processes hasn’t changed much since Unix.
1268
Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial
As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve…
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Abstraction, not syntax
Alternative configuration formats solve superficial problems. Configuration languages solve the deeper problem: the need for abstraction.
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Go subtleties
Some of my favorite tidbits from the past year of working with Go.
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Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
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Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
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Completing a BASIC language interpreter in 2025
Completing a BASIC language interpreter in 2025 for replacing the very slow Mattel ECS BASIC for Intellivision.
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JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
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A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler
Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler
1276
How I'm using Helix editor
My Helix editor config and how I am using it
1277
Macro Splats 2025
A Gaussian splat is essentially a bunch of blurry ellipsoids. Each one has a view-dependent color, using a process similar to training an AI model, you can optimize until it converges to the photos you feed in. The result is a sort of 3D photograph that can be viewed freely from any angle. Captivated by this…
1278
Why it took 4 years to get a lock files specification
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
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Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice
"Correct" doesn't mean "correct" when correctly using "correct"
1280
Pipelining in psql (PostgreSQL 18)
the psql client version 18 comes with pipelining, which can speed up client-server communication. In this post, let's see how it works and how much can be g...
1281
Rating 26 years of Java changes
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
1282
Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature
I recently shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature (unobtrusive macOS automatic updates) that was largely developed with AI.
1283
Root cause analysis? You're doing it wrong
If you have arrived here, you should know this is an early draft containing mostly unedited stream-of-consciousness crap because I have found it difficult to structure this topic. My latest attempt is to split this information up into multiple separate articles.
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The <output> Tag
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
1285
The illegible nature of software development talent
Here’s another blog post on gathering some common threads from reading recent posts. Today’s topic is about the unassuming nature of talented software engineers. The first thread was a …
1286
Let's write a macro in Rust
Macros are required to do some very helpful things in Rust, but this isn't an article about any of those things.
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OpenGL: Mesh shaders in the current year
It Happened.
1289
Multi-Core by Default
On multi-core programming, not as a special-case technique, but as a new dimension in all code.
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My approach to building large technical projects (2023)
Whether it's building a new project from scratch, implementing a big feature, or beginning a large refactor, it can be difficult to stay motivated and complete large technical projects. A method that works really well for me is to continuously see real results and to order my work based on that.