This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide. Tags: newsletter
russellromney/honker "Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this: import honker db = honker.open("app.db") emails = db.queue("emails") emails.enqueue({"to": "alice@example.com"}) # Consume (in a worker process) async for job in emails.claim("worker-1"): send(job.payload) job.ack() And Kafka-style…
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems. The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the Claude Code harness caused complex but material problems which directly affected users. Anthropic's postmortem describes these in detail. This one in particular stood out to me: On March 26, we shipped a change to clear…
Serving the For You feed One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts. spacecowboy runs the For You Feed, used by around 72,000 people. This guest post on the AT Protocol blog explains how it works. The architecture is fascinating. The feed is served by a single Go process using SQLite on a "gaming" PC…
LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js. Spatial text parsing Refreshingly, LiteParse doesn't use AI models to do what it does: it's good old-fashioned PDF parsing, falling back to Tesseract OCR (or other pluggable OCR engines) for PDFs that contain images of text…
GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it's hard to put into words what's good about it - I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for! There's one notable omission from today's release - the API: API deployments require different safeguards and we are working closely with partners and customers on…
Release: llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0 Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5. Tags: openai, llm, codex-cli
[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit. — Maggie Appleton, Gathering Structures (via) Tags: blogging, maggie-appleton
Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B active MoE) across all major coding benchmarks. On Hugging Face Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is 807GB, this new Qwen3.6-27B is 55.6GB. I tried it out with the 16.8GB Unsloth Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M quantized version and llama-server using…
As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...] Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We…
Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing. Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their changes, which include tightening usage limits, pausing signups for individual plans (!), restricting Claude Opus 4.7 to the more expensive $39/month "Pro+" plan, and dropping the previous Opus models entirely. The key…
Anthropic today quietly (as in silently, no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page, which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it's already reverted): The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $200/month Max…
OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to GPT-5. Here's how I put it to the test. My prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio gpt-image-1 First as a baseline here's what I got from the older gpt-image-1 using ChatGPT directly: I wasn't able to spot the raccoon - I quickly realized that testing…
AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality. — Andreas Påhlsson-Notini, Less human AI agents, please. Tags: ai-agents, coding-agents, ai
scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles I firmly approve of Steve Cosman's efforts to pollute the training set of pelicans riding bicycles. (To be fair, most of the examples I've published count as poisoning too.) Via Hacker News comment Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data, pelican-riding-a-bicycle