-
Excuse me, could you hold my context?
Someone at work recently said that with AI, their perceived cost of context switching had gone to zero. This surprised me at first because context switching is a notorious bugbear of engineers. Context switching is what happens when someone or something interrupts you during focused work: All of the information your brain was juggling drops… Read more ⇢
-
Welcome to the Derangement
I’ve been reading Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know (2025). It’s the first work of fiction that’s held my attention in several years. The real world has been so strange that fiction has felt trite. In spite of being populated by pompous poets and unhappy academics, this book pulled me in. There’s a good… Read more ⇢
-
Peanut butter and chocolate
In October 2006, Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse wrote an internal memo that became known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto (PBM). … I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriadopportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer ofinvestment spread across everything we do and thus we… Read more ⇢
-
Grateful for Om
I was saddened to read about the passing of Om Malik last week. I didn’t know Om very well, but our paths crossed in the mid-aughts in San Francisco during the Cambrian Explosion of blogging. As it did for many others, Om’s curiosity and generosity left a lasting impression on me and bent the trajectory… Read more ⇢
-
The spinning plateau
The wild elevator ride of winter 2025 Winter 2025 to spring 2026 were a wild elevator ride in AI coding and agents. Claude Opus 4.5 was released in late November and ushered in the era of “I barely look at code anymore” when developers stopped using coding agents inside of their editors and instead just… Read more ⇢
