Latest / September 1, 2026
16 posts from engineering leaders published September 1, 2026, by Simon Willison, Troy Hunt, Martin Fowler and 8 more.
Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day . Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the brand…
It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more
Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of signs of AI writing . That page points out that: Humans are…
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime , including a full Python installation, a…
Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council ) and found a need to display some GeoJSON files on a map and export that as a PNG. I asked GPT-5.6-Sol…
They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior , and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams , co-creator of Dwarf Fortress Tags: ai , game-design
The pace of change in software engineering is only accelerating, especially since January of this year. This is all to do with the industry-wide adoption of LLMs, AI tooling, and AI infrastructure. At The Pragmatic Engineer, we always want to capture as much of what’s going on
Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which column. #1 Now depends on mcp>=2.1.1 . This is the first…
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are…
Application security might seem like a strange thing to build a coaching course about. But the thing that makes coaching work is that the person comes out feeling bigger than the problem. That’s useful in many things. It’s especially useful in a field that seems to have been…
AI-generated code removed some of the signals reviewers used to rely on.
I skipped August’s Recently because this summer has been relentless, mostly in the positive sense. July and August were filled with bike rides, 5K races, friends in town, life changes and logistics. For a friend’s birthday, we rode the rickety Coney Island Cyclone , which was…
I started writing Logic for Programmers because there weren’t any good resources on logic for, uh, programmers. Now that the book’s out, the new problem is that there aren’t any good free resources on logic for programmers. So, to solve that problem (and maybe hype the book a…
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I…
One of the hardest problems in distributed systems is conflict resolution, or the same basic problem as merge conflicts in Git. Git merge conflicts happen when your branch differs from upstream in a way that Git can’t easily work its way around so it exposes both sides of the…
Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can overtake sidewalks, houses, foundations, and even trees. The only…