I gave a new talk this week. The first one since last year. Not based on my book, unlike last year's - a truly, from scratch, 45 minutes on something I...

Local LLM vulnerability detection and sandboxing on underprovisioned Silicon, a 3 part series. # Part 2 of 3: The Sandboxed Local Agent # In part 1 we got our local oMLX server running and had a…

Credit: linardi91 / pixabay Engineers, we use a lot of words to talk about architecture, but at a fundamental level, I think architecture is about making good decisions easier, on a timeframe you c…

Credit: linardi91 / pixabay Engineers, we use a lot of words to talk about architecture, but at a fundamental level, I think architecture is about making good decisions easier, on a timeframe you can reason about. → Small startups can't reason about a long timeframe, so architecture has limited ROI.→ Banks have requirements around audit trails and - for trading systems - response times, that influence their architectural choices.

TL;DR: The resistance to AI-assisted software development among experienced software engineers isn't random or capricious–it follows the pattern Thomas Kuhn identified in scientific revolutions sixty…

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Credit: Google DeepMind / Pexels In February I wrote about The Spreadsheet: one tab per week, a column for each area of my life, and a green/yellow/red rating for impact and vibe. Every Monday I feed it to Claude and ask "how did I do?" and "what can I learn?" Nine months in, I'm still doing it. And with that much data, the patterns are inescapable.

Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL . I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been…

I've been trying to learn marketing lately. I would not say it's going well. I started with a Coursera course, and one module in I was so frustrated by the pseudo-scientific framing. Some of it was actually scientific (I recognised Sheena Iyengar's work) and some of it only seemed so. Claude told me I should read this book instead. I told Claude I had to finish my current book first.

Credit: Paul Hudson / Wikimedia I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsi…

Credit: Paul Hudson / Wikimedia I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they're a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what's worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now. Not how to run a 1:1. How to think one level up, and systematically.

I called this newsletter what's my job again, because I think that's the job of leadership - it's not fixed, it's a question we must keep asking every day,...

The compass determines direction. The navigation determines the route. The route leads to the destination. In that order.

For the experienced engineer. Secure software is engineering, not just something for specialists, so you can learn how it works. Eight weeks, async, with personal feedback.

Anthropic's guide to the Claude Code effort level and model selection: when to raise or lower effort—low, medium, high, and max—and how to choose between Claude Fable, Opus, and Sonnet.

Adapted from Mix and Match Robot expressions by anarres (Openclipart, CC0) I've been skeptical in general about sharing workflow skills. I have a bunch I share with direct collaborators, but there are a lot of "AI skills" repos out there and I've only found 2 of them really useful to me (#1, #2). I thought working out what you wanted and making your own was important - but I kept packaging up a similar set of skills to share with specific people, because I underestimated the value of having a starting point.

A 2026 Wharton study documents how AI is restructuring human reasoning in the workplace, and what leaders can do before the window to act closes.

Credit: NeedPix Something that comes up regularly in coaching is the idea that you get stronger against the weight you can lift, not against the one you can't. If your goal is to bench 100kg you don't get there pushing at that weight on a bar you can't move. You start lower and work up. You build your strength. You manage your fatigue.

An 8-week course to help you manage yourself effectively, build sustainable energy practices, and lead with confidence.

Quit fast, leave slow