It honestly feels like it’s been way longer than six weeks since my last Weekly. This winter has been defined by lots of travel for me. All exciting and fulfilling, but not all energizing. It’s hard to find a rhythm without routine!

Last month I asked Devin to migrate my site way from SCSS. Without any additional prompting it used Netlify previews attached to the PR to visually diff my production site with its branch. $30 and an hour later I had a finished PR ready to review.

I’ve been using Cursor and other LLM-assisted coding tools for a while now. But I was blown away by how Devin just used the existing tools on GitHub just like it was a human developer. It was expensive, but still at least an order of magnitude less than I would have had to pay a web developer to do the same work a few years ago.

• Defining Slop (Neurotica via Simon Willison): “slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce”.

  My experience with AI leads me to believe that it isn’t all just slop by definition. AI can lower barriers and help produce quality, but it’s important for humans to do the hard work of ensuring that the output is actually coherent enough for others to consume. I’ve believed for a while that code is about communicating with other humans as much as it is about giving directions to a machine. I think agentic coding modifies this idea but doesn’t do away with it completely.
  

• Don’t Let AI Write For You (Alex Woods): I consider writing to be an essential part of my thought process — both prose and code. The act of writing shapes what I want to say or build. Fully automating a blog is a not-so-subtle note to your audience that you don’t really respect the time they’re spending reading your ideas.

• Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI (Lalit Maganti): If I can describe the benefit of LLMs to my professional life in one sentence, it’s that agentic coding dramatically lowers the activation energy for new features and functionality. Once I can see something working, it’s so much easier to ride the feedback loop down to the bottom of the run. This was a great case study of that phenomenon in action.

• Every layer of review makes you 10x slower (Avery Pennarun): I think the definining question of the next 18 months will be whether or not AI can diffuse through the rest of the economy as fast as it’s disrupted and displaced programming. Software engineers have been saying for decades that writing code is the easy part. The industrialization of programming is changing a lot of things, but building and running organization is still the same challenge it’s always been.