David Demaree @demar.ee · 19/09/2026If your agent says: - Nothing is redundant for the current shape. The shape carries more than the product needs. - What reaches the model, and what bounds it. - The product, and where the code diverges from it that's not your agent, that's J.R.R. Tolkien 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 19/09/2026This morning I asked Fable to go over my website/ops monorepo with a vengeance, looking for stuff other agents (including previous Claude runs) had over engineered, overexplained, or generally left a mess. Four hours later, this was the result. This is an AI-generated diff I can get behind. 110
David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/09/2026For me, what's more surprising than the lack of results is just how bad the output was, and how stupid Astra was about approaching the problem. In each iteration, Astra just changed the sequencing of sentences/grafs/words, while keeping sentence/graf length inhumanly long. 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/09/2026I asked Codex to work for ten passes, or until it had achieved a Pangram score of 100% Human. (Honestly, I'd have accepted 50%+.) The best it could do was _one_ attempt where Pangram didn't see any human-written content, but was willing to believe it was AI-assisted, not AI-generated. 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/09/2026We all keep hearing about how advanced AI can break out of sandboxes, find novel workarounds for hard problems, yada yada. So I decided to try an experiment: I asked GPT-6 Astra (in ULTRA mode) to try to write a 3-paragraph blog post that could fool Pangram's AI detector. 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 25/08/2026Today in Apple enshittification: I saw this "Add Mac to AppleCare One" alert in the sidebar of my Mac mini's Settings app, and thought "oh no, I thought I had coverage! Let's fix it!" 110
David Demaree @demar.ee · 04/07/2026Claude drugs will be enormous horse pills, but mostly placebos, because the real drugs are too dangerous for anyone but a select list of partners. 210
David Demaree @demar.ee · 02/07/2026Know what bothers me about Claude Design? It's not just the generic, template-y look, the obsession with eyebrow headings and numbered cards, the same warm grays everywhere… It's that, if you give Claude copy, you can't trust it not to rewrite stuff. 101
David Demaree @demar.ee · 21/06/2026In a product newsletter I subscribe to, the author recently shared a link to a chat with Claude _three times_ in <500 words. He says this chat with an AI is more valuable than a Harvard MBA for understanding brand and marketing. Given space for actual insight or a real CTA, he linked to Claude. 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/06/2026That was Google's Gemma open-weight model. Qwen3.6 -- one of the latest Chinese-developed open source models -- answered The Question, and wasted no tokens on such frivolities as "explaining why." 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/06/2026Installed a local LLM on my Framework laptop, unfortunately, it's useless garbage that can't answer The Question 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 11/06/2026New pastime: making the most expensive and powerful AI model research its own limitations 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 08/06/2026Lest you think Google's the only search engine peddling AI slop, here DuckDuckGo is mistaking a bug asking for WSL support in Codex for that feature existing already 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 07/06/2026I’m sure this guy’s digital book is amazing but I’m not sure why anyone would pay $100-150 for a treatise on making software when established masters of design and engineering are out here blogging for free 010
David Demaree @demar.ee · 06/06/2026Earlier I was trying to find a variation of the "Stop Using Math" meme and searched "Stop Using Math Meme Variations". Google replied, "Message received, loud and clear. No more 'stop doing math' formats, 'girl math' tropes, or overused calculator jokes" on a page full of the memes I asked for. 2194
David Demaree @demar.ee · 06/06/2026We achieved perfection in 1995 and have been falling from grace ever since #trackballs4eva 110
David Demaree @demar.ee · 05/06/2026Echoing this passage from Chiang's piece, we know the moon landing happened not only because there was TV footage of Neil Armstrong bopping around in a huge silver suit, but because it was preceded by years of rocket launches and space journeys, getting progressively closer to the moon. 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 04/06/2026Windows, my friend, if you're gonna encourage me to use AI search to fix settings, you can't just shrug when I ask for something you don't like. 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 02/06/2026One true way to know copy was written by AI: 3+ variations on “The [thing] [synonym for ‘bottleneck’]” in one phone-sized screen of text. 011
David Demaree @demar.ee · 29/05/2026Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure 030
David Demaree @demar.ee · 28/05/2026Introducing Opus 4.8! It’s marginally better at everything, except the one thing people consistently use Claude for. For that, Codex is better. BTW all tokens now cost double and there’s a 2 million token minimum luv u khxbai 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 23/05/2026Nobody: Jellycat: PEANUTS WITH HATS! SMILING VEGETABLES! LITTLE CHEESE GUYS! 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 20/05/2026Very relatable and resonant newsletter from Shreyas Doshi today: shreyasdoshi.substack.com/p/on-blunt-f... re “The real audience is the backchannel”, in a lot of corp cultures there’s a norm that feedback isn’t real until it’s been delivered, even if it was delivered confusingly or in bad faith. 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 19/05/2026I caved and installed Arc. On macOS, Arc defaults to iCloud Sync, which was deprecated almost two years ago. If you switch to Arc Sync, there's a confusing-ass prompt to _also_ turn on iCloud Sync. You can't switch back to only iCloud Sync. The docs say don't use iCloud Sync. 🫠 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 19/05/2026A few times a year I'm tempted to go back to Arc as my daily browser, but I just can't look past the fact that TBCNY has this giant ad for Dia — in full Arc-looking mode — on Arc's web page _yet still lets you download Arc_. Why not just make this redirect to Dia?! 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 17/05/2026He’s home! Lots of meds, lots of bed rest, tons of sweetness. 020
David Demaree @demar.ee · 14/05/2026Look, writing a salty post title in the notes app and hoping it turns into a post is my process, okay? 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 14/05/2026Our beloved CCO (chief canine officer), Johnny Cash, is in the hospital with a herniated disc in his spine that caused him to lose movement in his hind legs. His doctors seem optimistic, but please send all your love and good vibes his way 151
David Demaree @demar.ee · 06/05/2026Sorry, if you say you’re not doing something for the money, my mind goes straight to Spaceballs 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 29/04/2026For autism awareness month, I’d like to better understand whether online autism influencers — a phrase that I can’t believe is a real thing — think it’s helpful to tell folks that they were measured against the wrong standard while having no advice re what to do about it? 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 20/04/2026“Filmed in IMAX” is hilarious for a game so many of us played on Steam Deck or PS4 or whatever old gaming PC we had around because it looks great (and will kick your ass thoroughly) on any hardware 100
David Demaree @demar.ee · 06/04/2026Sometimes I’m in a photo and I’m like My god My head is HUGE. Does this explain why I’ve always felt so… different? All these years, have I always been… a FunkoPOP? 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 27/03/2026What are you talking about? That dispensary has been open for months. You’re just imagining the paper in the windows. 020
David Demaree @demar.ee · 17/03/2026IRISH AVENGERS: Sure if we don’t have to stop Lucky from gatherin’ all the Infinity Charms, or else won’t he snap his wee fingers and pinch half the universe so 001
David Demaree @demar.ee · 15/02/2026paper.design is a new, Figma-like design tool with bleeding-edge features like "Copy as Tailwind" and "Insert weird shader effect", as well as something truly mind-blowing: It can access local fonts _without a local font server/app thingy_. Figma, take note! 010
David Demaree @demar.ee · 13/02/2026Just as a test to see how Notion's Granola-like AI transcription works on Linux, I had it record and summarize about a minute of my child playing Pokémon and yapping about it 000
David Demaree @demar.ee · 13/02/2026My new favorite kind of email: an AI notetaker was kicked out of a meeting, but was there long enough to catch 1 min of discussion about kicking out AI notetakers, then summarizes it as if it were a whole meeting. 131
David Demaree @demar.ee · 31/01/2026So much of our family’s conversation is in a hyperlocal dialect consisting of stuff Siri misheard one time, such as “creamy juice,” and now, “beef rice stoops.” 020
David Demaree @demar.ee · 02/01/2026What are y’all getting sworn in on? I’m going with the hardcover copy of T.S. Eliot’s complete poems and plays I’ve had since 11th grade 010