iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Turner @breaking.computer · 29/09/2026

This is the first step in how you end up with a cloud agent platform (meant in a good way).

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 27/09/2026

Solidarity. My imaginary kids were always respectful, pleasant, and easy going as well.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 26/09/2026

Recent events suggest that the bar for “annoying” has been set extremely high lately, so you’re probably fine.

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Reposted by John Turner

Sam Aaron @samaaron.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

What’s this? A “QR Code Link” you say? Yes, it’s Sonic Pi code encoded into a url that opens ready for you to read, play and edit in Sonic Pi in your browser. Share your live coded tracks with greater ease!

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 24/09/2026

I’ve been making Claude do a pass before PR to delete any test that exercises behavior that is guaranteed by the language, framework, or third party, and it‘s helped a lot.

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Reposted by John Turner

Josh Gondelman @joshgondelman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Hey everyone when someone says something like “I won’t hire you if you bring iced coffee to a job interview!” you can just like, ignore that person.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 23/09/2026

I’m certainly not averse to using AI to help with domestic logistics, but if I ever told my family I wanted to “start the morning aligned,” I’d hope my kids would tell their teachers that everything wasn’t ok at home and I’d be forced to get help.

A description of Google’s new family AI agent, CC, with the description “start the morning aligned.”

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 21/09/2026

Even in the music case, a much more helpful framing for me—that I learned way later than “relax and have fun”—was “your brain isn’t good at telling excitement for a show from being chased by a tiger,” since that at least acknowledged the fight or flight feelings.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 21/09/2026

This has only worked for me in the case of stage fright when playing music in front of a crowd, and even then it was more reminding me that music was something that I already had fun with. In other situations I haven’t found it help much.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 19/09/2026

Absolutely, and it’s the kind of thing I find myself coaching people on the senior->staff track about. It’s rarely “go learn this tech thing,” it’s “go learn how to tell a story that someone wants to hear” or “learn some basic economics around incentives“.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 19/09/2026

Would still listen, and I don’t think they’re necessarily mutually exclusive.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 18/09/2026

Most of my greenfield stuff starts with some version of doing C4 diagrams to solidify my mental model before ever touching a coding agent.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 18/09/2026

Increasingly I just don’t let LLMs write prose. I already had a rule that anything where my voice was meaningful—email, docs—would be completely written by me and possibly LLM edited, but increasingly that’s applying in more mechanical places like code comments.

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James @43081j.com · 15/09/2026

i don't mind people using agents to create PRs, but please at least write the description and replies yourself 🙏

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

Working like this also makes it way easier to “sell” your projects to leadership. The people you’re helping will go to bat for you, and VPs love when you can name their reports whose problems you’re solving with a project.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

An ancillary benefit is that you’ll also become known as a trustworthy person to bring issues to, which is very useful when you’re launching the updated version of that new not-so-simple-anymore tool.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

And then you do it again. And again. And again. Eventually people will have similar-but-different problems and you’ll have to expand a tool‘s capabilities. Do that enough times and you’ll have a good shape for a tool that solves a class of problems in a way folks actually need.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

The right way is to ask a single engineer what problems they have, and find the simplest solve for one that’s high leverage. Maybe it’s a script. Maybe it’s patching some existing tool that almost does the right thing. Maybe it’s just showing them how to use a tool and updating your docs.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

The wrong way (which I’ve also done plenty of) is to ask a bunch of people about their problems, generalize them until they’re all a similar shape, and come up with a complex system that solves that general class of problem that everyone has in the abstract but no one has concretely.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

And I mean that very literally. In my experience—I’m currently the most senior engineer in a developer experience org for a company of about 500 engineers, for whatever that’s worth—the best way to make great tools involves asking that question a lot.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 11/09/2026

It’s true. As I told someone recently: much of the job is going around to different engineers and asking “how can I personally make your job easier and more pleasant?” There’s a lot to enjoy about that.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 10/09/2026

Fun concert or very unfortunate goldfish.

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Reposted by John Turner

Colin @colin-fraser.net · 03/09/2026

attention Fastmail executive team: please continue to be normal. If you have any thoughts about anything other than emails, please keep them to yourselves. Please do not fund any external projects that have anything to do with anything other than emails. Thank you.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 04/09/2026

Yeah, though mostly split between fiction and non. The rare time it’s been more than two at once is I read a novella for a few days straight or something.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 29/08/2026

A certain subset of folks on this site are about to discover y’all’d’ve, and I‘m very excited for them.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 22/08/2026

Now we just need a Claude Code plugin that’ll play Unchained Melody

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 19/08/2026

A teammate of mine did that program and really enjoyed it. Congrats and best of luck!

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 15/08/2026

I developed mild RSI in one of my hands as a jazz guitar major, so jazz RSI is definitely a thing.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 15/08/2026

When I last tried Claude Desktop a few months ago I liked the interface, but had a lot of issues with the sandbox not being the same as normal CC. Have you found that as well? Is it just a process of setting it up as you go?

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 14/08/2026

I’m not averse to a good language debate, and I’m certainly not neutral, but I feel like a lot of the Go discourse is some form of “omg, I can’t believe Go lets you <thing that no one would ever actually do>”.

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Reposted by John Turner

Kate Lingley 龍梅若 @klingley.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Buddhism in the wild (photo by Jerry Feldman, Target Honolulu)

View of an end-cap display at Target, with a sign above it saying “Must have!” The shelves are empty.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 13/08/2026

I want these too, but I think an AI agent would be content with getting served a markdown file with curl commands to run.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 12/08/2026

I used to mostly abide this, but the past few weeks PR stacks have muddled the picture a bit. It’s really easy to get Claude to orchestrate a large scale change, break that change up into PRs, and then stack them for easy linkage.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 12/08/2026

With LLMs becoming increasingly good at using repo information for research, knowing how to keep your commit history easy to read is an underrated skill.

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Samuel @samuel.fm · 10/08/2026

github when I rebase my 28-tall PR stack

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 09/08/2026

Certainly the most dangerous I’ve ever done. I missed a decimal point on an amplitude value on my C For Audio class’ “making a sine wave” assignment, which I was testing with earbuds. One of the more unpleasant experiences of my life.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 08/08/2026

Somewhat tangential to the point of the thread, but this is why I always push back on the idea of giving new grad and junior engineer candidates systems design interviews. There are other reasons too, but the likelihood that they would have studied or experienced it beyond interview prep is low.

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Sam Aaron @samaaron.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Sonic Pi v5 is released. Sonic Pi is now more friendly, more accessible, more powerful and more fun. There's something to excite everyone - from the friendlier error messages, to the pro-audio config, to the new dynamic visuals for performance. Enjoy! www.patreon.com/samaaron/pos...

patreon.com

Sonic Pi v5 Released | Sam Aaron

Hi everyone, today is release day! Sonic Pi is now more friendly, more accessible, more powerful and more fun. Everything has been complete

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Reposted by John Turner

Obsidian @obsidian.md · 05/08/2026

Good news, everyone! We made it easy and free to convert your entire Airtable workspace to durable Markdown files that you own and can use offline. Obsidian Bases supports all your views, filters, and formulas. Your data is yours, take ownership of it.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 05/08/2026

They do, but from what I can tell abiding what they say is totally optional.

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Reposted by John Turner

Ashley Willis-McNamara @ashley.dev · 02/08/2026

Oh, you wanna come over? Cool. Just give me three business days to clean my house until it looks like no one has ever lived here.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 02/08/2026

This makes me curious if, at some point, the debate will be build vs buy vs customize instead of just the first two. That’s always been an option, but the carry cost of a fork has historically been high and tedious in many companies.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 02/08/2026

Power chords on bass don’t sound THAT bad. This is a bit mellow dramatic.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 31/07/2026

Better interdiff review tools. I really want to be able to easily see what’s changed when someone adds a commit to a PR. Also, folder based ownership files. A single, top level codeowners gets hard to manage in a large monorepo.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 31/07/2026

My wife has ADHD, and tools like this have been really helpful for her, and it’s a thing I keep hearing about.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 30/07/2026

Sorry, mine‘s past its deadline.

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John Turner @breaking.computer · 28/07/2026

I was very much on the “nurture“ side of the nature/nurture debate, and believed—quite erroneously, I came to find out—that parents who said things like “they were always like that” were underestimating their role in who their child became personality wise. My eldest disabused me of that one.

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