More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code . With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP support via Codemode which in some ways is a long time coming, but then also maybe somewhat surprising to some. So I wa

Serde is an amazing serialization library for Rust and it has been a huge reason why I felt productive with it for years. However already while at Sentry I got quite frustrated with some of the limitations with it but actually replacing Serde is tricky because of the might that it has in the ecosystem. Also because it’s quite hard to actually do better without also making some potentially painful

Yesterday David Sacks wrote a tweet and within a few minutes people did, what they usually do, and they asked Pangram if it was AI. And Pangram said it’s entirely AI generated . To which David replied that these AI detectors are bogus . Now Pangram has a pretty low false positive rate, but if you have ever used an LLM as a writing assitant, you will have probably noticed that it claims your posts

This week some flavor of “AI is going to kill us all” went viral. In particular one where an employee put his personal probability of that happening above 10%. Which made me go to the Wikipedia page of P(doom) and I realized that Dario Amodei’s apparent probability of something bad happening seems to be between 10-25%. And well, Dario then wrote about pacing the frontier . And Sam read it and want

I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense . The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution . Agricultural involution describes the intensi

A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work quite similarly: they act as bridges between your car and the phone. From there they deal with video and audio streams and pass s

Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at work — a post with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the people around you, many of whom have no more power over the source of your anger than you do. I did learn that lesson, but it did not come naturally. One thing in

One of the memes on Twitter is that “programming is solved now.” I’m not sure to what degree it is, but one thing is pretty clear: the act of familiarizing yourself with a language no longer matters and some of the friction that mattered for humans does not matter for agents. As a result, LLMs make language choice much less consequential than it used to be. If you don’t like the choice, you can se

A few weeks ago a paper was shared that showed how to extract reasoning traces from closed-weight models. Together with online discussions about tricking models into leaking them, it made me investigate it more out of curiosity. Twitter seems full of half-truths and confusion about how this works, so perhaps this helps some to understand what is happening. Hiding Traces Reasoning traces are usuall

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Considering I want GitHub to get some competition I have thoughts about this. GitHub’s governance has never been democratic and there is plenty about the platform that I dislike. Yet I do not need my infrastructure to be democratic but I need it to be predictable and reasonably neutral towards the