Vivek Haldar

Vivek Haldar — tinkerer, programmer, writer, YouTuber. Sixteen years of essays on programming, AI agents, and the changing nature of knowledge work.

2026

  1. How (and why) to be an effective meat proxy
  2. The OpenAI–Hugging Face Hack: A Systems Problem More Than an Alignment Problem
  3. I Have Become a Cognitive Empty Nester
  4. Continual Learning Needs More Nuance
  5. Beyond Human-in-the-Loop
  6. How I Cut an AI Agent's Token Use by 94%
  7. Cognitive Debt and the Future of Programming
  8. The tension between local and cloud agents
  9. From Emacs to Agents
  10. The Complexity Ratchet
  11. A Tale of Two Job Markets
  12. O Moat, Where Art Thou?
  13. Skills, CLIs, and MCP: What They're Actually For
  14. Human-Agent Interaction Is Becoming the Bottleneck
  15. Meta-Harness: Automating the Benchmaxing Loop
  16. Your Agent Sessions Are Disappearing
  17. Surprising a model
  18. MCP Knife: A CLI Swiss Army Knife for MCP Servers
  19. mcpblox: Transform and Compose MCP Servers with Unix Pipes
  20. The Three Abstractions That Make AI Agents Real
  21. Confessions of an AI Hype-Bro
  22. Subagents, Commands and Skills Are Converging

2025

  1. The Birth of a New Platform
  2. Unix Was a Love Letter to Agents
  3. Coding Agents Are Outliers
  4. Narrate Your Work
  5. The Assembly Language of Knowledge Work
  6. My Video Production Stack (for YouTube)
  7. Natlang Code
  8. The Mac-vs-PC Story Playing out in CLI Agents
  9. AI is a Mirror
  10. Plato's Cave of AI Agent Evals
  11. Fixing Auth for Personal AI Agents
  12. Does AI Make Programming Feel Like Factory Work?
  13. The Personal Side of Jevons Paradox in the Age of AI
  14. The Programmer's Climb
  15. Dijkstra would’ve (incorrectly) HATED vibe-coding
  16. The case against local LLMs
  17. "But LLMs are not deterministic!"
  18. End-user Abstraction
  19. AI coding - From Tactics to Strategy
  20. Writing is building, but software is now content
  21. Human evals are outsourced vibe checks
  22. When Compilers Were the 'AI' That Scared Programmers
  23. Spec-driven Vibe-coding
  24. Don't credit AI
  25. Emacs in the age of AI
  26. AI resistance considered harmful (for programmers)

2024

  1. How I use AI (late 2024)
  2. Programming with LLMs: Part 2
  3. Programming with LLMs: Part 1
  4. Subject-object-verb, or– how we use AI
  5. Portability of LLM Prompts
  6. The de-nerdification of programming
  7. LLMs eat entry-level SWEs

2023

  1. GPT Monologues
  2. Metaphors for thinking about LLMs
  3. Re: Why I don't use Copilot
  4. AI doomers will doom us
  5. IDEs and CAD
  6. LazyPost: Programming in the age of GPT and CoPilot
  7. LLMs are compilers
  8. A spiritual successor to Emacs
  9. Augmenting LLMs with APIs
  10. Prompt LLMs for code, not arithmetic
  11. Moving off Tumblr

2020

  1. Hardware Acquisition Hacks
  2. Automatically edit out silence (dead air) from videos
  3. Remapping arbitrary keys in Mac OS X
  4. How Unix Won

2019

  1. Manifesto for my channel

2018

  1. Laptops with touchscreen keyboards

2017

  1. Review of Chaos Monkeys

2016

  1. Airspace
  2. Church numerals in ES6

2015

  1. Treating algorithms fairly

2014

  1. IDEs in the cage
  2. De-skilling
  3. How software grows
  4. When to do a rewrite
  5. Learning your life
  6. Garland Words
  7. Lurking Smalltalk
  8. Heartbeats
  9. Why technologists want to secede
  10. Bleeding buffers
  11. You can't run with the machines
  12. More on fat vs thin clients
  13. Asynchronous Learning is More Inclusive
  14. The Automatic Corporation
  15. Pebbles and Projects
  16. Shedding
  17. The tool divergence
  18. The Programming Language Consensus
  19. Technium
  20. Hand-drawn maps
  21. Star Trek vs Babylon 5
  22. Fat Client, Thin Client
  23. The Contours of My Attention
  24. Go lang
  25. The Human Resolution Threshold
  26. The Distraction Addiction

2013

  1. Best of 2013
  2. Generation AD
  3. To tool or not to tool?
  4. Automating software engineering
  5. Sharp tools, dull minds
  6. Malcolm Gladwell and the narrative fallacy
  7. The 1964 origins of responsive design
  8. What changed in 1991 in India?
  9. (A tiny step towards) Automating Web Design
  10. Rules for Computing Happiness
  11. Should I do a PhD?
  12. My review: The Year Without Pants
  13. How will you read your files in a hundred years?
  14. "The Mundanity of Excellence"
  15. Why you should subscribe to my newsletter
  16. Research Roundup: Programming and Remote Teams
  17. Is there a STEM worker shortage?
  18. Rangers
  19. Taking your company completely remote
  20. Long form on the web
  21. We are all remote workers
  22. Talented Beast
  23. Asset allocation is everything
  24. Maintenance is not a bad word
  25. The cost of memory safety
  26. How Hugh Mac­Leod got my money
  27. The difference between a herd and a crowd
  28. HTTP 2.0 marks the end of an era
  29. The Real New Aesthetic
  30. The Organic Digital
  31. Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption
  32. Native mobile apps are a stopgap
  33. The perils of being a knowledge worker
  34. C++14
  35. How I do email
  36. Balance
  37. "We don't do email, email does us"
  38. Waiting faster
  39. NPS
  40. The laziness of synchronous work
  41. Mindfulness sells
  42. CPU pipelines and the structure of work
  43. Backup in the age of the cloud
  44. The One Thing
  45. Games as a hook into CS
  46. What do you think computer science is?
  47. Future programming
  48. Patterns of use
  49. Abolish the "Save" icon
  50. RIP Ebert
  51. Start here
  52. We are all Mad Men
  53. Meetings are mutexes
  54. STEM jobs
  55. Strong opinions, weakly held
  56. Zero Knowledge
  57. What I work on…
  58. Addicted to work
  59. Moving to Chrome OS
  60. From the mouths of babes
  61. Factory machines
  62. The new luxury
  63. Productivity isn't
  64. Colorful geometry
  65. Review: Close to the Machine
  66. Computer Science PhD trends
  67. Tackling tail latency
  68. Blue collar coders
  69. The void
  70. Engineering, Culture and Tools
  71. So Good They Can't Ignore You: Review
  72. Scaling communication: email vs shared documents
  73. The rise of fimperative programming
  74. Grateful for technology?

2012

  1. Best of 2012
  2. New theme
  3. Good reads of 2012
  4. Writing on a tablet
  5. Quantum of Work
  6. Testing Redux
  7. Need to remember
  8. Some advice on internships
  9. The new C++
  10. Treesaver-based copy of this blog
  11. A Programmer's Thanksgiving
  12. Interviews (and whiteboard coding)
  13. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
  14. MOOCs will eat academia
  15. A rare retrospective on a decade-long research project
  16. Deep Shelling
  17. Why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age)
  18. Coaching and review
  19. How did software get so reliable?
  20. It Might Get Loud
  21. Poor man's DIY little printer
  22. Money in the Valley
  23. Science = Prediction
  24. Datacenter power
  25. Citation Reliability
  26. New frontiers in text editing
  27. English is heavily left-handed
  28. Writing and happiness
  29. Shitty legacy maintenance
  30. Personal Trainers for Software
  31. The levels of agility
  32. A Twitter-based Anagram Game
  33. The Cubicle Dilemma
  34. What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry?
  35. The lure of work
  36. Review: The Computer Boys Take Over
  37. Productivity porn
  38. What mobile development taught me
  39. Is C/C++ worth it?
  40. On Vagueness
  41. Teaching data structures with real-world examples
  42. How I read now
  43. Management models
  44. The Nostalgia Trap
  45. Working asynchronously
  46. Recent updates to old posts
  47. Social Engineering for Programming Languages
  48. The Interested Minority
  49. Advice to (prospective) grad students
  50. Operations should be in the computer science curriculum
  51. Executable Thought
  52. The need for Easter eggs
  53. The 7 stages of debugging
  54. My setup
  55. Big science funding
  56. Bug finding and static analysis in the real world
  57. Church numerals in Python
  58. The carrier-messenger wars
  59. The components of a university
  60. Mediated Concert
  61. Reproducing papers
  62. If you see a stylus, they blew it. Not.
  63. Code review. Just do it.
  64. Jonah Lehrer
  65. Computational thinking
  66. Themes: Language
  67. Themes: The Economics of Programming
  68. Showing it
  69. Themes: Modern Work
  70. Blue Java
  71. Innovator's dilemma in programming languages
  72. T-shirts are currency
  73. The intimacy of imperfect technologies
  74. Whither programming language research?
  75. Taylorist Science
  76. Team Science
  77. How to debate
  78. Hookah
  79. Rational Equivalence
  80. Why I blog
  81. Carr and Kelly
  82. Guru moment
  83. Repositories of science
  84. Computation in the wild
  85. The CS assignment I wish I had
  86. Iteration

2011

  1. Best of 2011
  2. How to make your new programming language successful
  3. The 0.1x developer
  4. The monk tax
  5. The programming assembly-line
  6. The abstraction-optimization tradeoff
  7. The origins of Silicon Valley
  8. Jumping to analysis
  9. The empirical science of happiness
  10. Flash Crisis
  11. Why developers should learn the economics of code
  12. Deft with descriptive filenames
  13. Size is the best predictor of code quality
  14. Smeed's Law for Programming
  15. The Poisonous Long Tail
  16. How things grow
  17. Reading Happiness
  18. GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression
  19. The Upside of Complexity
  20. Do you have an RSI prevention plan?
  21. An ergonomic keyboard and mouse configuration
  22. Media Meta Argument
  23. Large Computer Systems are Organic
  24. Emacs as a login shell
  25. Comments on Stallman's Dystopia
  26. Stallman's Dystopia
  27. The Perils of Closed Worlds
  28. More machines, more reliability
  29. Teaching as performance
  30. Side effects of PhD programs
  31. dotEmacs Extract: Interactively change font size
  32. Sun Ray
  33. OOP = FP?
  34. The Shy Scientist
  35. The levels of Emacs proficiency
  36. Cracks in Minimalism
  37. tldr summary: The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance
  38. In Aggregate
  39. Turn your blog into an online magazine - a blogmag
  40. Michael Crichton
  41. Alone Together
  42. The Cognitive Style of Unix
  43. How the first Gulf War brought modernity to India
  44. How to Write a Twitter Bot in Python
  45. Englsh Wtht Vwls
  46. Presentism
  47. Stephenson on Emacs
  48. Text Input: The Next Frontier

2010

  1. More on and or
  2. Best of 2010
  3. Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy
  4. Parsing "and/or"
  5. Use Accessibility Technologies Before You Have To
  6. Ode to the Album
  7. Editing Google Docs in Emacs
  8. Posting to Tumblr from Emacs
  9. Coding blind
  10. My favorite Chrome extensions
  11. The 18th Century Origins of Lolcat-speak
  12. To jump or not to jump?
  13. Deresiewicz: Essays about the Internet
  14. Listening to your reading
  15. Engineering is all about failure
  16. Accessing Google's RESTful APIs from Google Apps Script
  17. The Internet is making us smarter, but is it making me dumber?
  18. Taylorism in the modern tech industry
  19. Checking into Internet rehab - and sneaking out
  20. What can Kanye and U2 teach you about teamwork?
  21. Nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns
  22. Upsight
  23. Medium Shear
  24. English Words Lifted from Hindi
  25. Dilli
  26. Text to speech in MacOS X - automatically
  27. Collecting Needles
  28. Gabriel vs Brooks
  29. Software processes are software too
  30. Why James Cameron did not win the Academy award for best director for Avatar
  31. No ||
  32. Google Apps Script + Spreadsheets = Mashup Hub
  33. Connecting my blog to Buzz