Weekly Thing

Writing as a thinking tool, SVPG on product discovery, Paul Ford on the web, llms.txt and AI training preferences, Bambu H3C, Playdate lawn game.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 0:54 — Currently
• 1:45 — This week's photo
• 1:56 — Notable
• 1:59 — AWS Emulator and the engineer's job when agents write the code
• 3:33 — The components of agent memory
• 4:23 — AI and the Future of the Product Role
• 6:32 — Writing as a thinking tool
• 8:06 — The Web Is More Than Enough
• 8:58 — Making it easier for websites to express AI training preferences
• 9:58 — Dagu: Local-first workflow orchestration that just works
• 10:39 — Apple has new Mac app coming to make running local AI models easy - 9to5Mac
• 11:41 — Tool changer. Game changer. Bambu Lab presents H3C
• 12:15 — Road Sign Math: The Dream Realized!
• 13:26 — Supporting Membership
• 14:13 — Journal
• 14:17 — Love that Changelog is bringing my Upcoming events from Release Not…
• 14:23 — Candle making: wax + scent + weigh everything.
• 14:29 — Wrong Wicks
• 15:15 — Happy Halloween!
• 15:24 — My Makerspace is officially zoned.
• 15:27 — The 404 page for Road Sign Math is a work of art.
• 15:34 — This is what 25 lbs of candle scent comes in.
• 15:42 — Thingy, my agentic librarian, moved from a simple picture generated…
• 16:01 — Voted!
• 16:06 — Today is officially MAX Day at SPS!
• 16:09 — This critical vulnerability trend is why you have been getting soft…
• 16:20 — Since I made a 3D version of Thingy it seemed only obvious that I w…
• 16:29 — We are ready for the 2026 Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser!
• 16:47 — Mazie and I sporting our original 2021 Things 4 Good attire.
• 16:52 — So great to get to see friends that you haven't seen in a while.
• 17:02 — Another great "birthday show" from Tina Schlieske at the Dakota.
• 17:12 — I just love this scene for Thingy that Mazie first spotted.
• 17:22 — Briefly
• 17:25 — Fable 5.2 and Jagged AGI
• 17:45 — Quoting Prompting Claude Fable 5.2
• 18:05 — Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models
• 18:22 — How AI Is Changing Software Development in 2026
• 18:44 — Scaling Git at OpenAI
• 19:01 — how the Model Context Protocol works
• 19:09 — What are vector embeddings? An interactive guide
• 19:25 — Microsoft Fixes Nearly 1,100 Security Vulnerabilities
• 19:39 — Minneapolis Skyways Need a Better Map
• 19:46 — 2026 Tekne Award Winners
• 19:55 — Vince Cabansag of Clockwork Wins the Public Service Tekne Award 2026
• 20:10 — Introducing Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheets, and Claude Data
• 20:28 — 5 Token-Saving Strategies to Keep Claude Pro Users Off the Max Plan
• 20:43 — API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions
• 21:01 — OpenAI Adds iCloud Calendar and Mail Plugins and Dot Texting
• 21:12 — Two things that surprised me about my own chatbot
• 21:23 — Bank · a tiny currency for your Slack
• 21:40 — Rouse · The bedside alarm clock you build yourself
• 21:51 — Sand | Hyper-Realistic Sand Simulator in Your Browser
• 22:03 — Outro
• 22:24 — Haiku
• 22:33 — Echoes
• 22:37 — How has the Things 4 Good candle fundraiser grown since 2021?
• 22:56 — How long has Jamie believed that writing is thinking?
• 23:12 — What approaches to agent memory has Jamie shared over time?
• 23:30 — What has Jamie printed since getting the Bambu P2S?

nnxyz rooms, 626 Nifty Ink works, stroke-by-stroke SVG replays, Linking Things, Claude Duet, AWS Lambda Web Functions, Margaret Hamilton.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 0:54 — Currently
• 1:38 — Quote
• 1:59 — This week's photo
• 2:09 — Notable
• 2:12 — How employment is changing at Anthropic
• 3:07 — How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two
• 4:39 — Deciphering Glyph :: Programming Isn’t Special
• 5:09 — Claude Duet | Your personal AI assistant
• 6:29 — Announcing AWS Lambda Web Functions
• 6:59 — Pele · Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG
• 7:30 — The people holding up the internet | Data Drop
• 7:55 — The nnxyz rooms
• 10:36 — Supporting Membership
• 11:13 — Journal
• 11:17 — We took Tammy's Mom to her first MN United game!
• 11:29 — My Maker Space is now in a totally workable and ready spot!
• 11:33 — Whitman on Walls!
• 12:47 — Great time connecting with BigCharts alumni Steve Sutherland and Ji…
• 12:53 — Cold and rainy weather put a damper on the evening but it was still…
• 13:07 — We saw Sting tonight at the Orpheum.
• 13:23 — I added a new Upcoming feature to Release Notes: > Release Notes no…
• 13:55 — Tammy had these amazing trophies made for the inaugural Grandpa Don…
• 14:03 — Fire tower walk in Pequot Lakes.
• 14:08 — I’m bartending tonight.
• 14:13 — Morning coffee with a nice fire.
• 14:16 — Card shop stop for Pokémon at Spitty’s Cards.
• 14:22 — This weekend marked the 23rd annual Olson Family Vacation!
• 14:40 — It is fun to explore new card shops in different cities so we stopp…
• 14:53 — Briefly
• 14:57 — Build your own decision model
• 15:15 — Train your own Decision Model | Unsloth Documentation
• 15:24 — Microsoft-Decision-1: Our model for fast decision-making
• 15:36 — Superlite: hand an agent a spec, come back to tested work
• 15:46 — Video Game Reverse Engineering Community Shuts Down Because AI Has Made It Too Easy
• 15:57 — I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
• 16:09 — Watt Window: See Your Energy Costs @ Minnedemo42
• 16:19 — BeastBox: Your Mouth Is the Drum Kit @ Minnedemo42
• 16:31 — Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 | MIT News
• 16:45 — With HomeView, Apple Shows How Powerful Its Ecosystem Can Be
• 17:02 — Drafts Adds a Chat Console and Better Dictation - MacSparky
• 17:19 — Nordwand-Mono: A compact monospace neo-grotesque font designed for developers (and adventurers).
• 17:29 — Maclock | Mini Macintosh-Style Retro Desk Alarm Clock
• 17:39 — php2shell: Leaked critical PHP RCEs
• 17:49 — Announcing Privacy Badger for Safari on macOS
• 17:57 — People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again | TechCrunch
• 18:17 — Outro
• 18:25 — Haiku
• 18:33 — Echoes
• 18:37 — How has Jamie written about AI changing how programming feels?
• 18:51 — Does Jamie think programming is an art?
• 19:06 — How has the Olson Family Vacation changed over the years?

Your Version Number Release Notes, Claude Haiku 5.5, zkAPI, hard budget caps, Tufte's Razor, M8 Ultra servers, Twin Cities Marathon.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 0:41 — Currently
• 1:20 — This week's photo
• 1:27 — Notable
• 1:31 — Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 Anthropic
• 2:26 — We’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
• 3:56 — Introducing zkAPI: private usage credits for any API
• 5:12 — On the Rumored M8 Ultra AI Servers
• 6:30 — Tufte's Razor · An interactive guide to the data-ink ratio
• 7:44 — mb 2.0 with MCP support
• 8:34 — Supporting Membership
• 9:10 — Journal
• 9:14 — Today is that sad day when I take the boat in to be put in storage…
• 9:22 — My newest MCP experiment was to add it in WT Builder and then Claud…
• 9:35 — We went to BRKTHROUGH tonight and tried out their various games.
• 9:52 — Working with Otto this morning to create a new version of my mb uti…
• 10:03 — Had a great time cheering on the Twin Cities Marathon runners this…
• 10:09 — I was inspired by the time analysis I had Claude do last week on wh…
• 10:30 — Weekly Thing Archive Improved
• 11:16 — We got to watch the US Men's National Team take on Canada tonight i…
• 11:38 — Thingy, my digital librarian, got a big improvement this week with…
• 11:57 — Briefly
• 12:00 — AI is changing developer work. Here are three skills to strengthen.
• 12:17 — If You Understand These 5 Platform Engineering Terms, You’re Ahead of 90%
• 12:38 — We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare
• 12:53 — “you said no mcp!” | earendil
• 13:13 — Pi 1.0 | Earendil
• 13:25 — Jev and DuckDB: Plain-English Conditions in SQL
• 13:45 — OpenAI silences familiar voices
• 13:57 — The future of independence is interdependence
• 14:14 — The Death and Life of the Average Memecoin
• 14:24 — How to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain
• 14:47 — Birchfeed
• 15:00 — Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging · Refactoring English
• 15:10 — BIGWORDS.PAGE: Turn any screen into a sign
• 15:23 — Mandelnaut — Making Fractal Wallpapers
• 15:33 — Outro
• 15:42 — Haiku
• 15:50 — Echoes
• 15:54 — How did Your Version Number start, and how has it evolved?
• 16:08 — What has Jamie taken away from Tufte's seminars over the years?
• 16:20 — How has Jamie viewed Apple Silicon's AI potential since the M1?
• 16:37 — Why does Jamie think crypto suits payments for AI agents?

OpenAI dots, Cloudflare cf CLI, Daring Fireball on Muse, Claude Max usage, Elixir Collector signed releases, MicroLLM lab, Gemini 4.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 0:49 — Currently
• 1:36 — This week's photo
• 1:48 — Notable
• 1:52 — Introducing dots | OpenAI
• 4:01 — Daring Fireball: I’ll Wait
• 5:27 — Introducing cf: the agentic CLI for the entire Cloudflare API
• 5:53 — The cryptographic world computer
• 6:24 — MicroLLM lab — tiny LLMs, Q4, in your browser
• 6:58 — Don’t confuse space and time.
• 8:00 — Continuing our infrastructure updates: What’s changing in the coming months : r/modnews
• 8:52 — Trump's Use of Truth Social's Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans' 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation
• 9:25 — You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner - Derek Thompson
• 10:36 — Supporting Membership
• 11:16 — Journal
• 11:21 — We watched Mayday on Apple TV tonight.
• 11:30 — It still gives me a big grin when you open a model and then later g…
• 11:42 — I guess I’m getting my money's worth for my $200 Claude Max account.
• 12:16 — The Radish Farm Stop opened a couple blocks from our house and it i…
• 12:29 — I used some of my Claude Cloud credits to put in place a truly secu…
• 12:49 — I realized I could probably get a data point I've never been able t…
• 13:06 — Happy Clash Royale cake day to me!
• 13:11 — We got the very last of the available Pokémon 30th Celebration at t…
• 13:22 — Oh no — I've used all my tokens!
• 13:32 — It was great to connect with the Twin Cities tech community tonight…
• 13:45 — Beastbox was an amazing demo at Minnedemo.
• 14:00 — Watt Window was my other demo highlight from Minnedemo.
• 14:22 — Briefly
• 14:25 — An Ode to Links - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
• 14:42 — Kids turned the comment section of an NPR podcast into a group chat | The Verge
• 14:54 — Beauty — A Markdown editor for people who notice things.
• 15:05 — Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet
• 15:27 — GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities | Anthropic
• 15:48 — Introducing Gemini 4
• 15:54 — Plan mode is dead | Ayman Nadeem
• 16:05 — The internet discovers TLA+. Now what? | Reasonable
• 16:13 — The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
• 16:31 — Museum of numbers
• 16:40 — The DNS Museum
• 16:50 — Outro
• 17:02 — Haiku
• 17:11 — Echoes
• 17:14 — What has Jamie said about RSS and closed platforms over the years?
• 17:30 — Why does Jamie think command-line tools suit AI agents?
• 17:45 — What lessons on site performance did Jamie take from MarketWatch?

Ethan Mollick's overhang, Attention, M5 Ultra local models, AGENTS.md, Boris Cherny's thinking loop, MnTech on AI policy.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 0:51 — Currently
• 1:35 — This week's photo
• 1:46 — Notable
• 1:49 — The Incumbents Are Coming | Andreessen Horowitz
• 2:50 — The Overhang - Ethan Mollick
• 4:19 — M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents - MacStories
• 6:03 — I am often wrong | Boris Cherny's Blog
• 6:42 — AI is too important to fear, too powerful to use carelessly
• 7:09 — Attention is all you have
• 8:13 — Journal
• 8:17 — I just published Weekly Thing 350 which is notably the very first i…
• 8:37 — Some screenshots of my WT Builder custom app to create issues of th…
• 8:48 — The reward for sending the first issue of your newsletter after a 3…
• 8:59 — Weekly Thing Podcast Improvements
• 9:57 — This most recent issue of Arena all about Software looks really good.
• 10:07 — Briefly
• 10:10 — Anthropic decides to support OpenAI's markdown instructions spec
• 10:23 — Orchestrating Claude Code Agents: The Chief of Staff Pattern
• 10:36 — What a task costs on Opus 5.5 | Claude by Anthropic
• 10:53 — Thorsten Ball - What I believe about the future of software development
• 11:05 — What is LinkedIn
• 11:15 — Announcing the Presenters of Minnedemo42 – Minnestar
• 11:26 — What Sun got wrong | The Observation Deck
• 11:39 — Apple Copland D11E4 Emulator in Your Browser – pagetable.com
• 11:53 — Supporting Membership
• 12:28 — Outro
• 12:49 — Haiku
• 12:59 — Echoes
• 13:03 — How has the Weekly Thing publishing workflow changed since 2017?
• 13:28 — What has Jamie taken from Ethan Mollick's writing on AI?
• 13:45 — What local AI hardware and apps has Jamie actually tried?

Product engineering after AI, Claude Code and Codex, Homebrew's BrewUI, code reviews in flux, GPT-6 Astra, Unread 5.0, Kubb tournament.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 2:05 — Currently
• 2:47 — This week's photo
• 2:59 — Notable
• 3:02 — What is happening with code reviews? - Gergely Orosz
• 3:55 — Introducing the Agents API | OpenAI
• 4:21 — BrewUI: 📺 Homebrew's official macOS GUI
• 5:11 — Your car is selling your data | The Verge
• 5:51 — An end to fully open networks | Seth's Blog
• 6:47 — iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review - MacStories
• 7:08 — I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots
• 7:35 — Building and Puzzling about Software
• 19:51 — Journal
• 19:55 — Sugar at First Avenue tonight!
• 20:00 — Cool and windy for a boat ride but the swim parkas made it just fine!
• 20:07 — Out There: A National Parks Story
• 21:09 — Kicking off the 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament with a quick ru…
• 21:16 — The four bracket winning teams from our 8th annual Team SPS Kubb To…
• 21:24 — Nice lunch for SPS Tower tenants today.
• 21:27 — Delicious Black Krim tomatoes from my friend Eric.
• 21:34 — Briefly
• 21:38 — macOS 27: The MacStories Review - MacStories
• 21:47 — watchOS 27: The MacStories Review - MacStories
• 21:55 — iPhone 18 Pro: A Photographer's Review - YouTube
• 22:13 — Unread 5.0
• 22:23 — A quote from Boris Cherny
• 22:46 — Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude | Claude by Anthropic
• 23:05 — Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich
• 23:14 — OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed cyber-attack on RubyGems
• 23:33 — OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
• 23:43 — One-on-Ones Aren’t for You - Leadership Freak
• 23:58 — Instagram’s head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm
• 24:17 — Supporting Membership
• 24:47 — Haiku
• 24:56 — Outro
• 25:20 — Echoes

Internet of AI, Flipcash community coins, agentic LLM harnesses, RCCF method, adult friendship, productivity apps and agents, zerolang, Shortcuts Playground, Claude Code monorepo.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 1:21 — Currently
• 1:40 — Notable
• 8:20 — Journal
• 10:31 — Briefly

Mythos kernel exploit on Apple M5, Firefox hardening, curl vulnerability, AI maintenance costs, flow state lament, Claude for Legal, Signal Foundation.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 1:25 — Currently
• 5:56 — Notable
• 11:29 — Journal
• 15:16 — Briefly

Claude personal guidance, Redis array type, watchOS maps, AI company learning, Agentic Coding, workplace productivity, Death of Scrum.

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In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 1:39 — New Weekly Thing Website
• 6:44 — Your Version Number
• 11:13 — Notable
• 23:42 — Journal
• 26:15 — Briefly

Podcasting, Claude Code quality reports, Anthropic, Cloudflare accounts, wuphf, Port 22, Micro.blog, MCP Servers.

Read this issue on the web →

In this episode

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 1:14 — Notable
• 7:49 — Journal
• 9:53 — Briefly