jep888

Yeah, as much as I have real sympathy for those who've been impacted by the waves of layoffs over the past few years, I can't help but feel this level of vengeful bitterness isn't productive, or going to lead anyone anywhere good. It's uncomfortable to talk about, because layoffs certainly are not "fair", but I don't think people like working with people who are bitter. I don't think that's an attitude conducive to getting hired in the current environment, either.

Wonderful. I love the little side bonus of stumbling across alternate versions of book covers I haven't seen before.

new from me on: learning loops, speed-running “instinct” and whether or not code is the right base primitive for thinking about using agents in non-software related domains such as legal, finance or marketing.

Yeah I do agree that workout tracking is a (somewhat) rare exception, where quantification is actually good and healthy. Knowing that you're lifting heavier weights, or lowering your RHR whilst running is good. And the Watch is a handy way to do this.

I do think these ambient AI products will have good utility. I've been testing out Grok Bot and Instinct over the past few weeks, and they definitely work. I do think consumer and ambient AI is a different kettle of fish though...

I just believe it'll become too tempting to opt in for the convenience and utility. Perhaps I would too, despite my concerns? I guess the big question on my mind is just how should we think about "the new etiquette" for this kind of thing?

The Narnia series, the Harry Potter series, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows,the Sherlock Holmes series (there are great versions of these made slightly easier for children to read), and of course all of Roald Dahl's books.

Enterprise software has been trending towards better buyer-seller-alignment for a long time. Switching costs keep falling (SaaS was already easier to rip out than on-prem, and AI makes them even lower), and customers finally hold more of the cards.

I'm seeing it from the vendor side too. We're doing more of the work for the customer, pushing for weekly touchpoints instead of quarterly QBRs, and for the first time we're even "bespoke-curious" about building on top of our APIs. The old "sorry, that isn't possible" / "we'll look at getting that into the roadmap" playbook just doesn't cut it anymore.

Put simply: it's a wonderful time to be a buyer of enterprise software, as counterintuitive as that sounds (fears of slop etc).

A few years ago it was trendy to post things on platforms like LinkedIn like "I REPLACED MY WHOLE MARKETING TEAM WITH AGENTS". This always felt incredibly cringe to me (and I guess to everyone except those posting it), if nothing else for that we all instinctively understood that it was not true.

Fast forward to October of 2026, and whilst you still probably shouldn't be tearing up your org chart, this idea (teams of autonomous bots that can be both proactive and reactive, and talk to each other) is starting to work pretty well.

I've been very impressed with Grok Bot over the past week or so. Whilst all of the raw capabilities have been available to us for a long time, I haven't to date seen them packaged in a polished product as well as this.

Poolsuite is one of my favorite sites on the internet. Just a very cool brand and the web-based music player is something I turn to a lot for deep work blocks. Given it's just (great) Soundcloud playlists under the hood, I decided to build a little CLI that uses mpv to play the audio straight from my terminal.

Hope someone else finds this useful or fun.