iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 28/09/2026

Writing code is now easy, but it remains hard to encode people’s needs (product design) and decode people’s minds (marketing).

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 27/09/2026

I mocked up if the Finder _was_ the Siri app and I think it could work pretty great! The name is a natural fit.

A mockup of the features from Golden Gate’s new Siri app integrated into the Finder

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 26/09/2026

Steve Jobs likened computers to a bicycle for the mind. AI is a rocket for the mind. Directed, it can accelerate you to the moon. Undirected, it can noisily consume energy and explode into nothingness.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 25/09/2026

Much of the appetite for agents exists because the web added so much friction like Subscribe to Our Newsletter, Accept All Cookies, Open in App, Enable Notifications, Share on X, Your Session Has Expired, Sign In With Google, Verify It’s You. We desire that friction gone.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 25/09/2026

Good software helps people make order from chaos. Unconstrained coding agents create chaos from orders.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 10/09/2026

help me I’m addicted to social media posts turning 90s games into pastries. It’s got me DOOM scrolling

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 10/09/2026

I hope the iPhone Duo supports Sidecar — the feature that lets you use an iPad as Mac’s external display. I currently carry around a MacBook Air and iPad Pro. Being able to use my iPhone as an external display would be a killer feature.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 26/08/2026

The fallacy of agentic coding is believing you don’t need to understand the fallacies of distributed computing.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 22/08/2026

Prototype in one programming language, ship in another. A great way to make state smaller, APIs more obvious, implementations simpler.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 20/08/2026

Coding agents are infinite state machines. Your job is to make them produce useful finite state machines.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 18/08/2026

Henry Ford supposedly said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Faster pull requests sounds to me like a faster horse. We need to find the automobiles for the agentic coding age, and master their manufacturing. royalicing.com/2026/faster-...

royalicing.com

Faster pull requests are faster horses

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 17/08/2026

Markdown specs are a laundering scheme for decision-avoidance.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 16/08/2026

“Nothing is overdue.” A perfect example of how fewer features can make a better product. marco.org/2026/08/14/u...

marco.org

Unforgetful – Marco.org

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 14/08/2026

Making informed decisions is the bottleneck, and you can use AI either to help make informed decisions, or clog the bottleneck with even more decisions.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 14/08/2026

Being a systems programmer is a bit like being a crackpot dictator Finally you get to run the state Only to be brought down by resource management

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 11/08/2026

Reading “Steve Jobs in Exile” what’s surprised me most is how he doesn’t sound too different to the post-1997 Jobs from “Apple in China”. There’s still obsessiveness that leads to people endlessly toiling. It’s not until iPod on Windows that his approach seems to succeed!

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 10/08/2026

(Someone looking at my PR) “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Fable-line”

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 09/08/2026

Everyone talks about web scale but not enough people talk about web rotate

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 09/08/2026

Is Google Gemini the Macintosh, Google Search the Apple II, Jeff Dean akin to Woz or Bill Atkinson, and Discovery Loop like General Magic?

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 21/07/2026

QIP lets you write cross-platform components in Zig or C, which are imperative languages. But I love opening a file and seeing how declarative it feels. Here we see clearly what the memory capacity is and what the input/output types are.

A self-contained Zig file to convert a JPEG to a BMP. The input JPEG can be a maximum of 8MB, and the output BMP can be a maximum of 32MB.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 15/07/2026

Indispensable atoms of the computing universe: - Transistor - Datagram - TCP segment - Transaction - URL - S3 object - Token Each invention carefully draws a boundary around essential complexity, encapsulated as a dependable unit with a stable contract and clear failure modes.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 10/07/2026

I’m concerned our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy.

I worry our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy.

We don’t want to read changelogs. Dependabot just opens a PR we mindlessly merge.

We don’t want to review PRs. Codex can digest them, highlight concerns, and write the alterations.

We don’t want to code up prototypes. Claude Code can explore five ideas before breakfast.

We don’t want to learn what new capabilities our platforms have. We want to watch a video of someone reading and download a set of Markdown skills.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 08/07/2026

Here are the numbers running in Chrome to convert a SQLite table to CSV:

Phase QIP component Official sqlite3.wasm
Download (uncompressed) 19 KB 849 KB + JS glue
Compile + instantiate 0.3 ms 46.6 ms
Open database (68 KB) 0.0 ms 0.6 ms
Read table → CSV (891 rows) 1.3 ms 8.8 ms
Total 3.5 ms 146 ms
✓ Both readers produced the identical 891-row CSV (31,420 bytes).

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 08/07/2026

I’m exploring reading SQLite databases via custom WebAssembly vs using the official sqlite3.wasm

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 07/07/2026

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask Claude what you can do for your country when you’ve been replaced by AI

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 24/06/2026

If programming languages are said to be Turing-complete, are coding agents Turing-autocomplete?

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 24/06/2026

Instead of primarily more code what about using coding agents to reduce state? Less state means fewer moving parts, fewer possible failure modes, and fewer bugs. The code will be easier to digest and understand as a reviewer.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 18/06/2026

Coding agents offer a reset of software orgs. Over years we’ve separated frontend from backend, devops, ux, etc. Zoom out and you’ll see latency, durability, consistency & simplicity are what makes good software. We can bypass silos that lead to these qualities being worse.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 16/06/2026

Getting excited by coding agents because they’ll let you write way more code is a bit like flooding a lake and getting excited because you’ll be bit by way more mosquitoes.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 31/05/2026

QIP Components: - Quick for AI to make & quick for users to run. - Isolated sandbox with no file system, network, or environment access. - Portable components that work identically on web, server, and native.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 04/05/2026

Agree with this. The everything upfront spec approach just doesn’t sense to me. I need to run and use what I’ve made to know to do next. youtu.be/IZRWzXjaXxM

youtu.be

Sculpt, not Spec

YouTube video by Scott Hanselman

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 02/05/2026

What if the power of AI-generated UIs is not in assembling bespoke UI components on the fly, but in accelerating the user to navigate and knowing which parts to *remove* to help them focus?

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 13/04/2026

AI coding agents can add more entropy to your project. The hard things are: - Adding value for users. - Removing entropy.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 13/04/2026

Bragging about your AI token spend is like boasting how much fuel you used driving to the gym.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 04/04/2026

The purpose of my software is to remove entropy from the world. A person uses my software and their life is simpler so they can focus on what matters to them. We do this by consuming a little electricity and a little storage space. This is design *and* engineering of systems.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 27/03/2026

I’ve been over time rethinking opinions of event systems and observable property pubsub as now being overkill. Rather than adding an immediate-mode API over a retained-mode API like React does over the DOM, let’s start with immediate-mode. youtu.be/2Tjh3cr_8d4

youtu.be

Jonathan Blow on event system

YouTube video by Jonathan Blow highlights

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 21/03/2026

AI coding presents us a fork in the road to increase or decrease constraints. More constraints means stricter security, tighter tolerances, fewer lines of code, less moving parts and state. Reduced constraints means more lines of code, laxer security, more state and complexity.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 11/03/2026

All my career I’ve had imposter syndrome. It’s a terrible worry of thinking the wrong thoughts, saying the wrong words, deciding the wrong decisions. But I sought knowledge & peers that led to growth. I am concerned that people will redirect so much to AI they never grow.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 11/03/2026

The MacBook Neo shows that the iPad Pro would really benefit from a modern multitasking operating system like Mac OS 9 running on it.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 04/03/2026

HTTP’s If-None-Match and If-Match must be one of the widest-deployed synchronization protocols. If-None-Match (GET): server sends 304 if the requested etag is still current. If-Match (PUT/POST): server sends 412 Precondition Failed if the requested etag is _no_ longer current.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 03/03/2026

AI is shining a light on the barnacles that have accumulated in software: Heavy frameworks. Layers of indirection. Endless glue code. Bloated teams. Exponential communication and elaborate hierarchies. AI is a barnacle scraper — but only if we learn to simplify, not add more.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 02/03/2026

One technique using coding agents I like is to purposefully leave out a decision as part of the work I’ve requested. This lets me see the LLM’s assumption as the correct consensus, and that lets me gauge what an obvious default might be for other people.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 27/02/2026

Anyone interested in a vertical web browser? The idea instead of tabs is you get a text view and a vertical stack of web views. The web views render as compact mobile versions. The text view lets you edit URLs in bulk and can be saved to a .txt file. It’s native Swift.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 27/02/2026

AI agents fully embrace message passing, where you separate the command from its execution. Whether that’s calling tools, using things within the host like bash, fetching URLs, they all generate messages that are serializable into text and then pass that to an executor.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 26/02/2026

Thinking that you’ll be more successful the more coding agents you have running in parallel is like thinking you’ll be more successful as a manager the more reports you have.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 26/02/2026

With AI I/O is back at the center. You want to connect things together. You want to modify & share state. That doesn’t work in world of hermetically sealed SaaS apps. Closed will try to sell you their limited integrations, but Open will be best for both users & agents.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 25/02/2026

Qwen3.5 is more socially anxious than me. It tell itself “Wait, I need to make sure I don’t overthink” after doing a lot of thinking in response to “Hello!”

Qwen3.5 thinking to itself the best response to “Hello!”

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 24/02/2026

“Ask not what your country’s AI can do for you — ask what you can do for your country’s AI” — Anthropic

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 23/02/2026

If coding agents give us this enormous productivity increase, we can adopt data-oriented design, matching the underlying machine. We can tell the agent “allocate the memory statically for this problem.” We can do more work upfront instead of dynamically on users’ devices.

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Patrick Smith @royalicing.com · 23/02/2026

The same industry that harped on about being able to reverse a linked list with hand written code on a whiteboard now says you don’t even have to look at your code. This deep unseriousness shows you need to take your education into your own hands.

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