Index

Programming & Software Engineering

1. MCP Knife: A CLI Swiss Army Knife for MCP Servers 2026
2. mcpblox: Transform and Compose MCP Servers with Unix Pipes 2026
3. Subagents, Commands and Skills Are Converging 2026
4. The Programmer's Climb 2025
5. Dijkstra would’ve (incorrectly) HATED vibe-coding 2025
6. End-user Abstraction 2025
7. How Unix Won 2020
8. Church numerals in ES6 2016
9. How software grows 2014
10. When to do a rewrite 2014
11. Lurking Smalltalk 2014
12. Bleeding buffers 2014
13. More on fat vs thin clients 2014
14. The tool divergence 2014
15. The Programming Language Consensus 2014
16. Fat Client, Thin Client 2014
17. Go lang 2014
18. Automating software engineering 2013
19. (A tiny step towards) Automating Web Design 2013
20. The cost of memory safety 2013
21. HTTP 2.0 marks the end of an era 2013
22. Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption 2013
23. Native mobile apps are a stopgap 2013
24. C++14 2013
25. Waiting faster 2013
26. CPU pipelines and the structure of work 2013
27. What do you think computer science is? 2013
28. Future programming 2013
29. Zero Knowledge 2013
30. What I work on… 2013
31. Tackling tail latency 2013
32. The rise of fimperative programming 2013
33. Testing Redux 2012
34. The new C++ 2012
35. A rare retrospective on a decade-long research project 2012
36. How did software get so reliable? 2012
37. Science = Prediction 2012
38. Shitty legacy maintenance 2012
39. A Twitter-based Anagram Game 2012
40. What mobile development taught me 2012
41. Is C/C++ worth it? 2012
42. Teaching data structures with real-world examples 2012
43. Social Engineering for Programming Languages 2012
44. Operations should be in the computer science curriculum 2012
45. The need for Easter eggs 2012
46. The 7 stages of debugging 2012
47. Bug finding and static analysis in the real world 2012
48. Church numerals in Python 2012
49. Code review. Just do it. 2012
50. Computational thinking 2012
51. Showing it 2012
52. Blue Java 2012
53. Innovator's dilemma in programming languages 2012
54. Whither programming language research? 2012
55. Repositories of science 2012
56. The CS assignment I wish I had 2012
57. How to make your new programming language successful 2011
58. The 0.1x developer 2011
59. The abstraction-optimization tradeoff 2011
60. Flash Crisis 2011
61. Why developers should learn the economics of code 2011
62. Size is the best predictor of code quality 2011
63. Smeed's Law for Programming 2011
64. The Poisonous Long Tail 2011
65. The Upside of Complexity 2011
66. Large Computer Systems are Organic 2011
67. The Perils of Closed Worlds 2011
68. More machines, more reliability 2011
69. OOP = FP? 2011
70. How to Write a Twitter Bot in Python 2011
71. Coding blind 2010
72. Engineering is all about failure 2010
73. Gabriel vs Brooks 2010
74. Software processes are software too 2010
75. Google Apps Script + Spreadsheets = Mashup Hub 2010

Personal Essays & Culture

1. Skills, CLIs, and MCP: What They're Actually For 2026
2. Meta-Harness: Automating the Benchmaxing Loop 2026
3. Surprising a model 2026
4. Your Agent Sessions Are Disappearing 2026
5. Manifesto for my channel 2019
6. Review of Chaos Monkeys 2017
7. Airspace 2016
8. Learning your life 2014
9. Heartbeats 2014
10. Shedding 2014
11. Hand-drawn maps 2014
12. Star Trek vs Babylon 5 2014
13. The Human Resolution Threshold 2014
14. Best of 2013 2013
15. Generation AD 2013
16. Malcolm Gladwell and the narrative fallacy 2013
17. My review: The Year Without Pants 2013
18. Why you should subscribe to my newsletter 2013
19. Rangers 2013
20. How Hugh Mac­Leod got my money 2013
21. The Organic Digital 2013
22. Balance 2013
23. NPS 2013
24. RIP Ebert 2013
25. Start here 2013
26. From the mouths of babes 2013
27. The new luxury 2013
28. Review: Close to the Machine 2013
29. The void 2013
30. So Good They Can't Ignore You: Review 2013
31. Best of 2012 2012
32. New theme 2012
33. Good reads of 2012 2012
34. It Might Get Loud 2012
35. Poor man's DIY little printer 2012
36. Writing and happiness 2012
37. Review: The Computer Boys Take Over 2012
38. The Nostalgia Trap 2012
39. The carrier-messenger wars 2012
40. Mediated Concert 2012
41. Jonah Lehrer 2012
42. The intimacy of imperfect technologies 2012
43. Hookah 2012
44. Why I blog 2012
45. Guru moment 2012
46. Iteration 2012
47. Best of 2011 2011
48. Reading Happiness 2011
49. Sun Ray 2011
50. The Shy Scientist 2011
51. Cracks in Minimalism 2011
52. Michael Crichton 2011
53. Alone Together 2011
54. How the first Gulf War brought modernity to India 2011
55. Presentism 2011
56. Best of 2010 2010
57. Ode to the Album 2010
58. Deresiewicz: Essays about the Internet 2010
59. Medium Shear 2010
60. Dilli 2010
61. Why James Cameron did not win the Academy award for best director for Avatar 2010

AI & LLMs

1. The OpenAI–Hugging Face Hack: A Systems Problem More Than an Alignment Problem 2026
2. I Have Become a Cognitive Empty Nester 2026
3. Continual Learning Needs More Nuance 2026
4. Beyond Human-in-the-Loop 2026
5. How I Cut an AI Agent's Token Use by 94% 2026
6. Cognitive Debt and the Future of Programming 2026
7. The tension between local and cloud agents 2026
8. From Emacs to Agents 2026
9. The Complexity Ratchet 2026
10. A Tale of Two Job Markets 2026
11. O Moat, Where Art Thou? 2026
12. Human-Agent Interaction Is Becoming the Bottleneck 2026
13. The Three Abstractions That Make AI Agents Real 2026
14. Confessions of an AI Hype-Bro 2026
15. The Birth of a New Platform 2025
16. Unix Was a Love Letter to Agents 2025
17. Coding Agents Are Outliers 2025
18. Natlang Code 2025
19. The Mac-vs-PC Story Playing out in CLI Agents 2025
20. AI is a Mirror 2025
21. Plato's Cave of AI Agent Evals 2025
22. Fixing Auth for Personal AI Agents 2025
23. Does AI Make Programming Feel Like Factory Work? 2025
24. The case against local LLMs 2025
25. AI coding - From Tactics to Strategy 2025
26. Human evals are outsourced vibe checks 2025
27. Writing is building, but software is now content 2025
28. When Compilers Were the 'AI' That Scared Programmers 2025
29. Spec-driven Vibe-coding 2025
30. Don't credit AI 2025
31. Emacs in the age of AI 2025
32. AI resistance considered harmful (for programmers) 2025
33. How I use AI (late 2024) 2024
34. Programming with LLMs: Part 1 2024
35. Programming with LLMs: Part 2 2024
36. Subject-object-verb, or– how we use AI 2024
37. Portability of LLM Prompts 2024
38. The de-nerdification of programming 2024
39. LLMs eat entry-level SWEs 2024
40. GPT Monologues 2023
41. Metaphors for thinking about LLMs 2023
42. Re: Why I don't use Copilot 2023
43. AI doomers will doom us 2023
44. LazyPost: Programming in the age of GPT and CoPilot 2023
45. LLMs are compilers 2023
46. Augmenting LLMs with APIs 2023
47. Prompt LLMs for code, not arithmetic 2023
48. The Automatic Corporation 2014

Work Culture & Professional Life

1. How (and why) to be an effective meat proxy 2026
2. Narrate Your Work 2025
3. The Assembly Language of Knowledge Work 2025
4. De-skilling 2014
5. Should I do a PhD? 2013
6. Research Roundup: Programming and Remote Teams 2013
7. Is there a STEM worker shortage? 2013
8. Taking your company completely remote 2013
9. We are all remote workers 2013
10. Talented Beast 2013
11. Maintenance is not a bad word 2013
12. The perils of being a knowledge worker 2013
13. The laziness of synchronous work 2013
14. Mindfulness sells 2013
15. We are all Mad Men 2013
16. Meetings are mutexes 2013
17. Addicted to work 2013
18. Computer Science PhD trends 2013
19. Blue collar coders 2013
20. Engineering, Culture and Tools 2013
21. Scaling communication: email vs shared documents 2013
22. Quantum of Work 2012
23. Some advice on internships 2012
24. A Programmer's Thanksgiving 2012
25. Interviews (and whiteboard coding) 2012
26. Why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age) 2012
27. Coaching and review 2012
28. Money in the Valley 2012
29. Personal Trainers for Software 2012
30. The levels of agility 2012
31. The Cubicle Dilemma 2012
32. What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry? 2012
33. The lure of work 2012
34. Productivity porn 2012
35. On Vagueness 2012
36. Management models 2012
37. Working asynchronously 2012
38. Advice to (prospective) grad students 2012
39. Themes: Modern Work 2012
40. T-shirts are currency 2012
41. Team Science 2012
42. The programming assembly-line 2011
43. The origins of Silicon Valley 2011
44. Do you have an RSI prevention plan? 2011
45. Side effects of PhD programs 2011
46. Taylorism in the modern tech industry 2010
47. What can Kanye and U2 teach you about teamwork? 2010
48. Collecting Needles 2010

Tools & Technology

1. My Video Production Stack (for YouTube) 2025
2. IDEs and CAD 2023
3. A spiritual successor to Emacs 2023
4. Moving off Tumblr 2023
5. Hardware Acquisition Hacks 2020
6. Laptops with touchscreen keyboards 2018
7. IDEs in the cage 2014
8. Pebbles and Projects 2014
9. To tool or not to tool? 2013
10. The 1964 origins of responsive design 2013
11. Rules for Computing Happiness 2013
12. How will you read your files in a hundred years? 2013
13. Long form on the web 2013
14. How I do email 2013
15. Backup in the age of the cloud 2013
16. Patterns of use 2013
17. Moving to Chrome OS 2013
18. Factory machines 2013
19. Writing on a tablet 2012
20. Treesaver-based copy of this blog 2012
21. Deep Shelling 2012
22. New frontiers in text editing 2012
23. How I read now 2012
24. My setup 2012
25. If you see a stylus, they blew it. Not. 2012
26. Deft with descriptive filenames 2011
27. GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression 2011
28. An ergonomic keyboard and mouse configuration 2011
29. Emacs as a login shell 2011
30. dotEmacs Extract: Interactively change font size 2011
31. The levels of Emacs proficiency 2011
32. Turn your blog into an online magazine - a blogmag 2011
33. The Cognitive Style of Unix 2011
34. Stephenson on Emacs 2011
35. Text Input: The Next Frontier 2011
36. Use Accessibility Technologies Before You Have To 2010
37. Editing Google Docs in Emacs 2010
38. Posting to Tumblr from Emacs 2010
39. My favorite Chrome extensions 2010
40. Listening to your reading 2010
41. Checking into Internet rehab - and sneaking out 2010
42. Connecting my blog to Buzz 2010

Philosophy & Epistemology

1. Technium 2014
2. The Real New Aesthetic 2013
3. The One Thing 2013
4. Strong opinions, weakly held 2013
5. Productivity isn't 2013
6. Grateful for technology? 2013
7. Executable Thought 2012
8. Reproducing papers 2012
9. Taylorist Science 2012
10. How to debate 2012
11. Rational Equivalence 2012
12. Carr and Kelly 2012
13. Computation in the wild 2012
14. How things grow 2011
15. Media Meta Argument 2011
16. Comments on Stallman's Dystopia 2011
17. Stallman's Dystopia 2011
18. Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy 2010
19. No || 2010

Economics & Social Issues

1. The Personal Side of Jevons Paradox in the Age of AI 2025
2. Treating algorithms fairly 2015
3. Why technologists want to secede 2014
4. You can't run with the machines 2014
5. What changed in 1991 in India? 2013
6. Asset allocation is everything 2013
7. STEM jobs 2013
8. MOOCs will eat academia 2012
9. Datacenter power 2012
10. Citation Reliability 2012
11. The Interested Minority 2012
12. Big science funding 2012
13. The components of a university 2012
14. Themes: The Economics of Programming 2012
15. The monk tax 2011
16. In Aggregate 2011
17. To jump or not to jump? 2010

Cognitive Science & Learning

1. Asynchronous Learning is More Inclusive 2014
2. The Contours of My Attention 2014
3. The Distraction Addiction 2014
4. Sharp tools, dull minds 2013
5. The difference between a herd and a crowd 2013
6. Games as a hook into CS 2013
7. Colorful geometry 2013
8. Need to remember 2012
9. Recent updates to old posts 2012
10. Jumping to analysis 2011
11. The empirical science of happiness 2011
12. Teaching as performance 2011
13. tldr summary: The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance 2011
14. The Internet is making us smarter, but is it making me dumber? 2010

Linguistics & Language

1. Garland Words 2014
2. English is heavily left-handed 2012
3. Themes: Language 2012
4. Englsh Wtht Vwls 2011
5. More on and or 2010
6. The 18th Century Origins of Lolcat-speak 2010
7. Nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns 2010
8. Upsight 2010
9. English Words Lifted from Hindi 2010

Unclassified

1. "But LLMs are not deterministic!" 2025
2. "The Mundanity of Excellence" 2013
3. "We don't do email, email does us" 2013
4. Abolish the "Save" icon 2013
5. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" 2012
6. Parsing "and/or" 2010

Technical Tutorials

1. Automatically edit out silence (dead air) from videos 2020
2. Remapping arbitrary keys in Mac OS X 2020
3. Accessing Google's RESTful APIs from Google Apps Script 2010
4. Text to speech in MacOS X - automatically 2010