It’s an edition coming in right at the buzzer this week! I had a really fulfilling day today — went to the first session for a new book club this morning and hosted friendly low buy-in poker with some friends in the afternoon. I’m feeling good about the time I’m spending with people I care about so far in 2025; I hope to continue it through the rest of the month!

• Cursor: I tried out the Cursor editor for a bit this weekend and it kind of blew my mind. Building on top of VSCode is a huge advantage: I was able to get it to match my existing editor setup exactly within 30 seconds of launching the app for the first time. It’s really cool easy it is to move compiler errors and failed terminal commands into an LLM chat with a single keypress and get back some explanation along with diffs to apply to your existing code to fix the error.

  I can see how non-thoughtful use of tools like Cursor can lead to code slop, though. Applying a few AI diffs to a personal project was super easy, but I felt so unmotivated to proofread or refactor code that I didn’t write. If I was to integrate Cursor more into my daily workflow, I’d need to be more comfortable spending most of my day reviewing code rather than writing it.

• The Linkfest (Clive Thompson): I found another curation newsletter! I’ve only read the most recent issue but I appreciated the variety of different types of content that Clive included. Two weeks is also an interesting cadence — I’m interested to see how this newsletter fits into my reading routine.

• The State of Garnet 2025: An interesting read about programming language implementation.

• How I run a coffee club (Phil Eaton): It’s always good to remember how a little bit of effort can help maintain a really valuable thing like an in-person tech meetup. I’ve been meaning to go to this specific one, and I enjoyed reading about how Phil keeps it running.