Latest / August 19, 2026
11 posts from engineering leaders published August 19, 2026, by Simon Willison, Martin Fowler, Michael Lopp (Rands) and 5 more.
Research: smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task: Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox. Explore what it would take to use this…
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable…
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very…
TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The…
Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes…
Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect…
Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs
LUX Sidecar adds context to RUM, while browser-tool fixes show why measurement conditions and small debugging details matter.
In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters ( example ), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+,…
Fun fact: this blog post triggered safey checks
TL;DR: if admins turn off browser features, those features won't work in confusing ways that are annoying to debug