iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 01/10/2026

If you're up for a nice read, I enjoyed the Hüsker Dü chapter of "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground" by Michael Azerrad

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 27/09/2026

If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/a...

blog.marcua.net

If you write online, consider a “how I write” AI disclosure

Or: How I (don’t) use AI to write this blog

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 27/09/2026

If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/a...

blog.marcua.net

If you write online, consider a “how I write” AI disclosure

Or: How I (don’t) use AI to write this blog

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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 25/09/2026

This is an interesting post, and worth reading. I particularly like the aspects of code review that he identifies as not easily reduced to agent automatable functions www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2026/08/24/t...

adaptivecapacitylabs.com

There is more to code review than (automatable) detection

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 21/09/2026

Yes! “We should be spending some of our productivity gains on things that seem like slowing down: meetings, design reviews, conversations. These ways of maintaining alignment, sharing knowledge, and creating human connections are…more important than ever to creating good outcomes at scale.”

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 12/09/2026

Me First and the Gummie Gummies

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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I needed code indexing of major systems to help me research software. And now Standard subscribers get access to the same dataset. At the moment around 60 databases and programming languages are indexed (searchable, browsable), and the full 400+ project corpus is the goal.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/08/2026

Nice observation! Are you then reviewing the plan and generated code, or do you have a different workflow?

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/08/2026

Prototype-plan-stack in a paragraph

Screenshot from blog post: In the past few months, we’ve settled on a development pattern we call prototype-plan-stack. In the prototyping phase, 1-3 engineers implement a feature end-to-end in our codebase, prioritizing a working demo with reduced focus on some architecture/implementation details. Those engineers, paired with agentic coding assistants, might generate 5000-10000 lines of code without yet having a full understanding of how the code works. In a short planning phase, the engineers then take any feedback and reflections we have about the prototype and iterate with an agent to propose a plan to slice the implementation into 10+ pull requests that are stacked/dependent on one-another and small enough to each be reviewable in a sitting. In a final stacking phase, engineers review the individual PRs in the stack, shipping them in pieces they can digest and comprehend. As they review, they update the plan to include testing and architectural changes, making the stacking phase a relatively dynamic process.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/08/2026

Every team I've spoken with is struggling with whether and how to review AI-generated code. I wrote up the prototype-plan-stack pattern we've used at @b12.io to understand many thousand-line AI code contributions for the past few months, with an actual example: blog.marcua.net/2026/08/31/p...

blog.marcua.net

The prototype-plan-stack development pattern

How we still review the thousands of lines our agents write

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 28/08/2026

OHHHHHHH CONGRATZ! I think it's an unstated requirement that you share a photo of the tiny submission receipt you'll get. Goooo you!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 26/08/2026

Congratulations Hannes! I’m so impressed by what you and your team have done.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 21/08/2026

He's got a comp with an index hand, optimizer hand, and a planner hand And when they meet they execute the plan Powerful man, database man

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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Microconferences: A modest proposal for alternative systems to generate, evaluate, and share knowledge.

argmin.net

Microconferences

A proposal to create alternative systems for generating, evaluating, and sharing knowledge

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 11/08/2026

Really nice blog post that struggles with the mentorship vs. production tension academia is facing. It’s the academic analog to the problem of mentoring junior engineers in the age of agents. I like the guidance for students to only use AI for a task once you know how to do that task yourself.

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Joshua Bowman @thalesdisciple.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Working on an A.I. policy for my calculus classes. Decided to be upfront about the current situation with LLMs and to give a heartfelt explanation for why the course still matters.

Al policy

Context

Artificial Intelligence, or "A.l.," Is a broad term used to refer to several different kinds of technologies. The kind most relevant to this class are Large Language Models (LLMs), which use mathematics to analyze large amounts of human-produced text and then generate new text that simulates what a human might write in response to prompts or questions. Some examples of LLMs are OpenAl's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

Current LLMs can provide a solution to any calculus problem I give you. So why should we work on them, you might ask? Here's the thing: for the most part, the problems were already solved anyway. Calculus as a subject is nearly 400 years old. It has reached into virtually every modern scientific and economic field. And while I would like to believe that I have crafted a few new problems with some small amount of originality tailored to this class, for the most part I have curated a collection of exercises drawn from my years of teaching calculus. Those exercises come from textbooks, workshops, friends, and other fields of study, as well as my own invention.
And they nearly all have known solutions, often with fairly standard approaches.
Before A.I. became widely available, you could find those solutions in another textbook, or from a friend's notes, or through a repository on the internet.

The point of this class is not necessarily to solve problems that have never been solved before. It is for you to develop habits of thinking that are used by mathematicians, scientists, and policymakers-to develop a sort of mental toolbox that can be applied to new problems. If along the way you happen to find a new way of solving one of the class exercises, that's great! I am constantly learning new things from my students. But you will be bereft of discovery if you rely on a LLM for solutions to the calculus problems before you. Here I mean the discovery of having your own realizations, crystallizing your own internal understanding, claiming the knowledge in a way that cannot be taken away from you.
That ownership is what I want for you, and that is what the course is built around.

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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 06/08/2026

Via @jacobian.org "The Django Software Foundation is hiring an Executive Director! Main responsibilities: fundraising, managing staff and day-to-day operations, and generally helping the DSF mature. We’re looking for candidates with a history of nonprofit leadership....

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 03/08/2026

Congratz Andy! So cool!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 03/08/2026

Memory lane! So good.

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ewuuu @eugenewu.net · 03/08/2026

vibes like this classic www.usenix.org/legacy/event...

usenix.org

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/07/2026

In "Authorize, don't authenticate," I argue for the elimination of the login screen in applications that manage your personal data. You should be authorizing apps to access your data, not authenticating for the privilege of handing it over! blog.marcua.net/2026/07/31/a...

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/07/2026

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 19/07/2026

Any data engineers in my network or on #databs looking for a short-term contract setting up a Databricks-based ingestion/analysis pipeline? Would be for an academic lab studying the platform economy in collaboration w/ NYC gov. Happy to connect you!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 08/07/2026

Not to be confused with famous Computer Scientist Count Binpack

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Jeffrey P. Bigham @jeffreybigham.com · 05/07/2026

end of an era. the lesson one should not take from this is that human annotation/labeling is over, but the players have changed. scale, surge, companies that work at larger scale, have taken over.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 25/06/2026

I'm starting virtual office hours for anyone who is a new/soon-to-be professional in software engineering/product management/design. I'm excited to learn from and give my opinion on questions and experiences participants have in these interesting times for our field. blog.marcua.net/2026/06/25/o...

blog.marcua.net

Office hours for new and soon-to-be software engineers, product managers, and designers

Free conversations with a neutral sounding board

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 25/06/2026

I'd appreciate it if you told me about any mailing lists that might be relevant to participants or if you shared directly!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 25/06/2026

While my primary goal is to be helpful, my secondary goal is to learn. In speaking with peers who are in our second decade of professional software/product building, we realized we're farther from the problems new entrants face, and I'm excited to hear about their experiences directly.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 25/06/2026

blog.marcua.net

Office hours for new and soon-to-be software engineers, product managers, and designers

Free conversations with a neutral sounding board

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 23/06/2026

Dear New York: Today is the day to work through the uncertainty and make some compromises. Go vote!

A floor decal in the shape of an arrow that says Vote NYC

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 01/06/2026

One of those days where my feed is about one thing: bsky.app/profile/dono...

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 01/06/2026

Really nice framing from @skamille.themanagerswrath.com : When using AI tools for communication, respect for your collaborators is the thing to optimize for.

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Kurt Luther @kurtluther.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Abstracts due today for Papers and Talks at ACM Collective Intelligence and HCOMP 2026. Hope you'll submit!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 12/05/2026

I've now heard two podcast interviews with eng managers saying "I connected Cowork to Slack and it's helped me with 1:1s/reviews." Maybe B12 uses Slack differently than them, but I'm not so sure the "manageable context" is there so much.

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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Whatever your transactional database is, help me understand your use of it. This survey is run by @theconsensusdev, independent of any database or vendor. Repost or pass along to industry peers for broader representation forms.gle/fqjQsezWsztx...

forms.gle

Transactional Database Usage Survey

All questions relate to the primary database(s) you use to store transactional (e.g. typically user data, not event / activity data) data. This survey is run by The Consensus, independent of any data...

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 06/05/2026

For designers to work outside a codebase, you have to keep wireframes and implementation in sync. To that end, I'm sharing Figmimic, a bookmarklet that copies any website or webapp into Figma in an editable state. Try it: marcua.net/minitools/fi... Blog post: blog.marcua.net/2026/05/05/f...

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 05/05/2026

Also our monorepo has been called `crowdsurfing` since 2015, so.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 05/05/2026

A fine use of CLAUDE.md: a coworker instructed their agent to use Ska bands as example constants in tests. If you're wondering, the examples are geographically spread across the US (not internationally) and the later waves of Ska. They will be on `main` soon.

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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Donate $30 to an educational non-profit or open-source project and I'll credit you $30 toward The Consensus Standard subscription. I'm excited to support these organizations with you! theconsensus.dev/subscribe.html

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 28/04/2026

You had me until you said you ate the bananas for two weeks! That’s an impressive amount of ripening! :)

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Olivier Grisel @ogrisel.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

The team of JupyterCon 2023, PyData Paris 2024 & 2025 organizes a new conference named Compute! Paris 2026 on open source computation and data. The event will take place on November 25–26, 2026 at Sorbonne Université in Paris. CfP deadline: May 24, 2026: compute.events/paris2026/cf...

compute.events

Call for Proposals — Compute! Paris 2026

Submit your talk proposal for Compute! Paris 2026. The Call for Proposals is open from April 15th to May 24th, 2026.

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George Stagg @gws.phd · 20/04/2026

I've been working on this over the last few months and in my opinion it is just beyond cool. Grammar of graphics for SQL users!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 13/04/2026

It has an RSS feed! Yay!

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 09/04/2026

“Why now?” is a great question! Maybe with overall review load increasing, people are looking for short-term efficiencies, or maybe it’s some comfort in agentic reviewers. I’d love to see studies of the tradeoffs regardless.

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 08/04/2026

Aww thank you! I'm particularly curious about the interviewing and managing portion for "Review plans & code you didn't write." Models are getting better at working with loose task definitions, but speedrunning "the engineer is thinking more critically about AI-generated code" is a tough one

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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 08/04/2026

Late last year, I gave a talk at Northeastern to students in a few software engineering classes about what's changing and what's staying the same for junior engineers in industry with the introduction of coding agents. Slides and notes here: blog.marcua.net/2026/04/08/a....

A timeline of the professional experiences a junior engineer used to develop over several years. Skills that used to take years to hone are now required in your first moments with a coding agent.

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