Latest / October 16, 2026
7 posts from engineering leaders published October 16, 2026, by Simon Willison, Filippo Valsorda, Jamie Tanna and 2 more.
We think "did a human read the code?" is an imprecise proxy for "what could go wrong with this change, and which check—automated or human—is the right one to catch it?" Asking that question also changed when review happens. Before, review was a gate at the end of the road: write…
We now know how the seeds of the NIST elliptic curves were generated: they’re not the hash of some saucy sentence, but the output of drand48() seeded with the time, which was indeed in 1997–98.
Something that I've hit time and time again over the years - but seemingly have never blogument'd - is that when you add a required status check on GitHub (in branch protection or a Ruleset), it needs to report back as successful before you can merge a given Pull Request. This…
It happens infrequently enough to not investigate too much further, but sometimes I'll end up with my Xorg/X11 session crashing, or something else happening which leads to my existing tmux sessions failing to interact with the new X session, with errors like: % gh repo view…
Armin Ronacher and Ben Vinegar had me on State of Agentic Coding to talk about the curiosity test, DHH coming around, durable agents, a Lisp you program by talking to it, and why the labs cannot afford to fail.
I have to say, Peter Steinberg (aka lobster man) is absolutely brilliant. He was so ahead of his time with OpenClaw. I remember when he first tweeted about it last year, and when it turned into utter lobster madness at the beginning of the year. Heck, I even ran OpenClaw
Programming is fun!