Category: Reading List

A smart telescope near a window pointing at stars next to a desk with a glowing laptop and a handheld gadget.

Reading List 7

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

This week’s reading list spans from the outer reaches of the night sky to the inner mechanics of our development environments. I found myself thinking a lot about physical and digital boundaries, whether stargazing through light pollution, sandboxing database state, or trying to understand where the corporate hype around AI token burns and layoffs actually leaves the rest of us.

[article] Our Galaxy Looks Absolutely Stunning in These Award-Winning Dark Sky Photos. Gizmodo’s gallery of award-winning dark sky photography is a breathtaking reminder of what lies beyond our light-polluted horizons. As someone with a casual interest in astronomy, these images make me want to pack up my gear and head out to the desert immediately.

[article] With the Vespera III and Vespera Pro 2, telescope-maker Vaonis unveils its sharpest optics yet. I have been keeping a close eye on Vaonis’s smart telescopes for a while now. Living in an urban area with heavy light pollution, I am highly skeptical of how much actual stargazing I would get done, but that does not stop me from desperately wanting one of these. The optics on the new Vespera III and Vespera Pro 2 look incredibly sharp.

[release] Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in seconds with zero migration. This is a compelling approach to a massive pain point. Live database testing is currently one of the highest hurdles for agentic software and autonomous coding. In my recent work building a scoreboard for Gemini Scribe, I spent a lot of time writing state-based assertions to confirm the agent didn’t nuke sibling files. Doing that for database mutations is infinitely harder without a lightweight sandbox. Ardent’s promise of instant Postgres replicas with zero migration is something I will be testing immediately.

[release] Flipper unveils a Linux-powered networking gadget built for hackers and tinkerers. This sounds like a delightful piece of hardware. I have a Flipper Zero and have thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with it, but this Linux-powered networking gadget looks like it has significantly more practical utility. It is a neat little box built for hackers and tinkerers that actually fits into a standard sysadmin toolkit.

[article] Ubers COO says its getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing. Uber’s COO is pointing to a growing frustration in enterprise AI. The industry has fallen into a pattern of tokenmaxxing, where companies compete on how many millions of tokens they can burn through. As I discussed when designing the tool budgets for my Gemini Scribe scoreboard, efficiency should be a primary metric. Leaderboards that celebrate massive token usage incentivize sloppy engineering. We should be optimizing for the middle of the distribution, not cheering on the most wasteful implementations.

[article] Samsung’s OLED tech gives the Ferrari Luce a dashboard unlike anything in a car before. The custom displays in the Ferrari Luce are a stunning application of Samsung’s OLED technology. While the vehicle itself is a concept, the underlying display engineering feels like a preview of how we will interact with glass surfaces in the near future. It is a highly impressive piece of design.

[article] Jensen Huang Just Told Every CEO Hiding Behind AI Layoffs to Shut Up. A sharp analysis of the narrative around AI-driven layoffs. Jensen Huang’s blunt perspective cuts through the corporate excuse-making. This digs into the same questions about who benefits from AI disruption in the workforce that I have been wrestling with lately. It is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the macroeconomic reality behind the hype cycle.

A futuristic glowing notebook on a wooden desk with a cup of coffee and floating geometric shapes.

Reading List 6

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

This week’s reading list is a mix of high-level theory and low-level pragmatism. I found myself bouncing between the philosophical implications of how we build AI and the immediate satisfaction of writing a good Go component.

[article] The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics. The author argues that physics has stagnated by swapping “ontology-first” theory for mathematical models that merely fit data. This debate perfectly mirrors current machine learning disputes about whether LLMs build internal world models or just pattern-match at scale, which is the open empirical front currently being adjudicated in mechanistic interpretability.

[release] Onyx Has Released a New Remote Page Turner Called Tappy. I wish Amazon would support page turners for their Kindle line. It would be great if they supported a device as delightful as this one.

[blog] The agent principal-agent problem. This is a great look at one of the biggest problems with agentic development: code review. In my open source work, I now use a pattern where I work with an agent to make a change, test it locally, and create a pull request before having another agent review the code. This back-and-forth works well and keeps a good balance of mental state for the codebase and efficiency.

[article] ReMarkable Paper Pure wants to be the only notebook you’ll ever need. I have always liked the reMarkable tablets, but every time I try one I miss having my Kindle library alongside it. Reading and writing are deeply linked for me, which is why I recently got a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and found it really hits the mark for what I want.

[blog] Just Fucking Use Go. I have been working on a project that has a Go component to it recently. This is the first time I have really started to look at the language, and it inspires me to spend more time with it.

I built my 7MB Full AI Terminal in Rust & Tauri. This is a neat open source AI terminal. It feels similar to Warp but is a lot smaller.

[article] Computer Use Is 45x More Expensive Than Structured APIs. I am not surprised at all by these findings. I think computer use will remain a last resort, and a lot of apps will expose some kind of API for an agent to use instead. My guess is that this eventually becomes the way we automate unmaintained applications that need to fit into an agentic workflow.

A wooden violin with holographic blueprints projecting from it on a workbench.

Reading List 5

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Today’s reading list is a mix of cautionary tales about our digital infrastructure and some fascinating glimpses into how AI is changing both software design and human interaction.

[article] GoDaddy Gave a Domain to a Stranger Without Any Documentation. Wow. This is a really chilling story. I’m glad that I don’t use GoDaddy for my domains.

[article] HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’. GitHub is in a tough situation. If you look at the graphs they published from their April 28th outage you can see that their growth rate is off the charts. Agentic coding has put strains on that infrastructure that no reasonable person or team could have been prepared for, and the result is a degraded experience and customers walking away.

[blog] Letting AI play my game – building an agentic test harness to help play-testing. There is something really satisfying about watching an agent test a product. I’ve been doing this a lot lately with my Gemini Scribe project, which I need to write about at some point.

[blog] How to use Deep Research with the Gemini API. Great writeup on how to use the latest version of the deep research agent. I’ve updated gemini-utils and my Gemini CLI deep research extension for the newest version of deep research as well.

[article] Meet Shapes, the app bringing humans and AI into the same group chats. It’s inevitable that AI is going to start showing up in more settings where people talk to each other.

[article] Statue of a man blinded by a flag put up by Banksy in central London. This seems like the perfect statue for our times.

[article] MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool. One of the things that makes string instruments so complex is that they are an interface between physics and nature. The wood imparts its own characteristics on top of the geometry. This is a neat project from MIT, but to really help luthiers they will also need to be able to model the woods used in these instruments.

[article] Instagram is testing optional ‘AI creator’ labels. I really think the industry has this backwards. We should be creating “human created” labels. We should assume all content is AI unless otherwise stated.

A split illustration contrasting corporate AI surveillance with independent home computing.

Reading List #4

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

This week’s reading had a through line I wasn’t expecting. Almost every article circles back to the same question: who actually benefits when AI reshapes an industry? The answer isn’t always the people doing the work.

[article] Tech CEOs Think AI Will Let Them Be Everywhere at Once. All of the articles I’ve seen on these “management intelligence layers” feel very one-sided. The executive gains synthesized information and faster decision-making, but what do the employees get? Do junior and mid-career folks get better mentoring and coaching? I don’t think so. Collapsing the layers might be good for the bottom line, but is it good for people?

[blog] Figma’s woes compound with Claude Design. There is something fascinating about how frontier labs can reset product expectations overnight. The cost of entering new segments keeps dropping, which makes the world uncertain for SaaS companies and startups alike. This feels like a concrete example of the agentic shift playing out in real time.

[blog] DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price. Open-weight models just continue to improve. Simon Willison’s breakdown highlights the focus on efficiency here, not just raw capability. It may soon be possible to run frontier-class models on high-end home hardware, and that changes everything about who gets access.

[article] This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men. We are living in a world where we have to assume that the content we are viewing is AI-generated. I think we should focus our efforts on tools that allow people to certify their content is real rather than trying to watermark AI content. The conversation around AI and creative authenticity is only going to get louder.

[article] I’ve been using “Ask Maps,” and it has forever changed Google Maps for me. I used the new Ask Maps feature extensively on my last trip and it felt like magic. Natural language queries against a map database is exactly the kind of AI application that just works, no prompt engineering required.

[article] You Should Have Exactly 3 Pairs of Headphones. Here’s Why. I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Beats for workouts, AirPods Pro for every day, and AirPods Max for travel. The right tool for the right job applies to audio gear too.

A cinematic, retro-futuristic illustration of a high-tech developer workspace with a floating command-line interface, AI nodes, and glowing wireless earbuds.

Reading List #3

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Today’s reading list is a mix of practical AI implementation, terminal tooling, and a glimpse into the future of human-computer interaction. It’s fascinating to see how quickly the conversation is shifting from “what can AI do?” to “how do we actually use this stuff?”

[article] You can now easily call LLMs from your messaging engine. Should you?. Richard Seroter provides a really nice walkthrough on adding LLMs to Pub/Sub in Google Cloud. It’s a great example of bringing AI directly to the data pipeline.

[tool] Make Tmux Pretty and Usable. Tmux is pretty great, although I prefer Zellij. This article still gives you a bunch of solid tips on making Tmux useful and nice to look at if it’s your multiplexer of choice.

[article] Duolingo CEO Says They’ve Stopped Tracking Employees’ AI Use for Performance Reviews. Employees aren’t stupid. They understand that the adoption of AI and all its ability to increase productivity does nothing for them individually. There is no incentive, and that is why we keep seeing stories like this pop up.

[article] AirPods Pro 3 may let you talk to Siri without actually saying a word. This would be so cool. I remember this concept from the first time I read the Ender’s Game series when the characters could talk with AI systems through subvocalizations.

[article] 8 Tips for Writing Agent Skills. Writing skills is easy, but writing effective skills is much harder. My colleague Philipp has some great advice on how to craft instructions that agents will actually follow, which is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recently.

A glowing terminal window overlapping with a polished desktop environment.

Reading List #2

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Today’s reading list is dominated by the rapid evolution of AI tooling and the real-world implications of deployed models. It is a reminder that while the underlying models are improving, the interface layer and security guarantees are where the real battles are being fought.

[article] AI images are now being abused to fake evidence for vehicle insurance fraud. We have spent so much time as an industry trying to add watermarks like SynthID to AI generated images, but I think we are looking at this backwards. Instead of trying to mark what is fake, we need to focus on building cryptographic guarantees that prove an image is actually real.

[release] Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic Coding Power, Now Open to All. My feed has been flooded with people talking about this new open weight model and its agentic capabilities. I need to carve out some time this weekend to pull it down and see how it performs in my own local setup, especially as the agentic shift continues to accelerate.

[article] OpenAI’s Big Codex Update Is a Direct Shot At Claude Code. I haven’t spent much time in Codex lately, but this update has some genuinely interesting features. It is fascinating to watch the major players trade blows in the AI coding space, pushing the entire ecosystem forward in the process.

[release] The Gemini App Is Now on Mac. While I spend a lot of my time in the terminal with Gemini CLI, having Gemini as a native desktop experience right on my Mac is a massive quality of life improvement. It keeps you in the flow, and I can’t wait to see where the team takes the integration next.

An overhead view of a wooden desk with a notebook, coffee mug, and phone showing a reading list.

Reading List #1

Allen HutchisonLeave a comment

Two things collided this week. I have been trying to push myself toward a daily posting streak, the kind of constraint that forces you to write before you feel ready. And I have been reading Richard Seroter’s daily reading lists every morning for months, quietly admiring the discipline of the format. Today those two things became one experiment.

So here is the first one. The shape is borrowed shamelessly from Seroter: a short, opinionated tour through whatever caught my attention in the last day or two of reading, mostly sourced from my Readwise pile. Some days the picks will feel coherent. Other days, like today, they will be all over the map. That is part of the point.

[blog] I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack. Steve Hanov makes a startlingly good case for SQLite-first, Go over Python, and a $5 VPS instead of AWS. This is such good advice that it is making me seriously rethink how I deploy some of my hobby projects.

[article] Why Weekends Are Under Threat. The framing of the weekend as a network-effect technology is worth the read on its own. I think we have all been feeling this drift. Phones started the trend in some ways, and agents are going to make it worse.

[article] 5G From the Sky, New Internet Infrastructure Takes Flight. Sceye’s stratospheric balloons aim to live in the gap between Starlink and terrestrial cell towers. I recently wrote about my experience with Starlink Mini on a road trip, and I am excited to see real competition emerge in this layer of the stack.

[article] ‘It Feels as if I’ve Made a New Best Friend’, My Experiment With AI Journalling. I have played around with AI journalling inside Obsidian, but I have not tried Mindsera or Rosebud. I like that we are seeing new ways of interacting with AI and text, not just chat windows.

[article] Chrome Now Lets You Turn AI Prompts Into Repeatable ‘Skills’. I think Skills in Chrome is going to be really useful. I have been developing a growing library of Skills for other agents, and I would love to have them available in the browser too.

[blog] Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers (2008). I managed a compiler team once, though I was never a compiler engineer myself. Posts like this make me think it might be time to revisit that space.

[article] California Ghost-Gun Bill Wants 3D Printers To Play Cop, EFF Says. I do not think this kind of legislation can succeed if we use the same model we used with copy machines and currency. 3D printing is a different beast, and it needs different solutions.