Pings Archive

thinking about headlines

2026-08-07T02:16:17Z

I updated plaindown to support cool heading formats, and I’m digging it, markata you are next. Time to make the web weird again and really start writing more again.

The code to make it easy ^fun^ to write #

Here’s the markdown that wrote it followed by the output here.

# Build **good places** for _interesting people_.

## Make room for ==the weird idea.==

Some normal paragraph text between headings.

## Build a `personal web` that feels ^**yours**^.

More ordinary prose.

## Follow the [~small~ web](https://waylonwalker.com), not the cr^owd^.

## Make a ~~perfect~~ memorable site.

## Leave space for ==**strange little ideas.**==

## Sometimes the ~~obvious answer~~ ==weird answer== is the interesting one.

## A **good theme** makes _quiet words_, `technical words`, and ==loud words== belong together.

## ==A highlighted phrase can be long enough to wrap onto another line and test the highlight background.==

## Make a [**~small~ corner of the web**](https://waylonwalker.com) that feels _like yours._

## Chemistry should still work: H~2~**O** and x^2^

## Keyboard syntax should still work: ++Ctrl+C++

Build good places for interesting people. #

Make room for the weird idea. #

Some normal paragraph text between headings.

Build a `personal web` that feels ^yours^. #

More ordinary prose.

Follow the small web, not the cr^owd^. #

Make a perfect memorable site. #

Leave space for strange little ideas. #

Sometimes the obvious answer weird answer is the interesting one. #

A good theme makes quiet words, `technical words`, and loud words belong together. #

A highlighted phrase can be long enough to wrap onto another line and test the highlight background. #

Make a small corner of the web that feels like yours. #

Chemistry should still work: H2O and x^2^ #

Keyboard syntax should still work: `Ctrl`+`C` #

Ping 66

2026-07-31T21:54:11Z

Human say few word, machine make big wow

Ping 65

2026-07-13T07:22:58Z

Usage Resets??

Apparently you can use a reset to completely reset your codex usage limits. I never knew these existed and apparently I have some expiring soon. Not sure if they auto apply and this is why I get the weirdest reset experience on the usage chart or what.

I have 3? they expire soon, how many have I missed out on.

One time only

hmmm.

2026-06-22T19:50:49Z

TIL, ?. is sometimes pronounced as a hmm dot

Does codex change throughout the token usage window?

2026-06-21T19:50:49Z

Is it me or can you feel the 5 hour and weekly limit of codex nearing. It feels like it slowly stops working tasks to completion and asking to continue. I nearly start yelling into the enter, “YES, DO WHAT WE AGREED ON, STOP ASKING” then I notice I’m in the single digits of remaining window left.

Mythos gone already

2026-06-13T08:32:03Z

Mythos released days ago, now its gone, before most of us were allowed to touch it.

just good enough

2026-06-10T21:00:55Z

I built shit on the web before AI, some of it was okay, some I put a lot of time into, but some was just really shitty. Done just well enough to get the job done. All of it had to be written by hand or copy pasted from stack overflow. It was a lot of fun. Now we have a new level of shitty, it looks fine. It looks like it should work good. None of it is just barely good enough, nearly browser default style anymore.

Flowing Thoughts Ai To Help Blast Radius

2026-05-29T17:41:35Z

Not sure how this matters to anyone else, but I’m sitting in the car and letting the thoughts flow.

I’m having really interesting conversations with ai recently. Like things I never thought I would care this deeply about. In part because it feels like the vulns are coming faster and harder, and in part because it is really enabling me to invest some time into the development that I would not otherwise have. I’m thinking about least privilege, reducing dependencies in containers, limiting pod access to the Internet and other pods. Reducing the blast radius.

Now I’ve always been hesitant to bring in new dependencies. I’ve always tried to strip to the lowest possible dependency set n my containers, but I would also re-use the main server container to run cron job workflows. I wasn’t giving much thought about what services they could access, or their internet access

Ping 59

2026-05-23T20:28:48Z

“All you have to be is good”

source

Not sure if this is a quote from somewhere but thought it was some interesting advice that @thorstenball received when he was starting into web development. He asked a friend already in the industry if he thought he had a shot. He had no degree, no credentials, no experience at the time.

remember rule 4

2026-05-20T20:39:22Z

I almost for got Rules 4 today, rollout when smooth late in the day right before a vacation day (terrible time to deploy I admit not my clearest plan). Race conditions are a b****, all around on this one. The app I was concerned about won the race to deploy first and was fine by itself, then another app had a race condition inside itself that killed it

almost left tokens on the table

2026-05-05T07:33:20Z

Almost didn’t get through those gippity tokens this week, woke up yesterday with 50% and a day to use them, cut full 5.4 loose on a big project that needs a lot of work an it gobbled em right up throughout the day ran out just before bed.

Can You Feel the Slop

2026-04-26T12:38:58Z

Do you ever vibe code out a POC, and you can just feel the shitty code underneath? Every change causes 3 things to break and wires get crossed all over the place. Sometimes I just want to write the code again. Maybe its time to slow down.

approve rm

2026-04-21T12:17:22Z

Hot take, if you are unwilling to approve rm you should rethink your workflow, git state, or backups.

Note

This is meant for normal project work with an agent working in the context of a single project, with directory level access to the project.

Ping 54

2026-04-19T09:54:48Z

I’m regressing back to boomer ai for more plan mode style prompting at home… It does a decent job at ingesting a repo and coming up with plans before I start spending precious tokens.

Tokens Just don't go as far as they used to

2026-04-18T12:17:22Z

Not sure if this is simply the flavor of the month, or a shift in gpt5.4 being super subsidized on release and now that we have gpt5.4-mini-fast out they have shifted, but I’m burning through half of my $20 gippity sub in a day with hobby level use. Second week in a row its burning so fast.

Ping 52

2026-04-17T21:19:58Z

Is it just me or are the agents not behaving today?

Ping 50 A

2026-04-15T21:11:58Z

I wrote code by hand today… I was out of tokens

Prove Yourself Agent

2026-04-14T16:12:04Z

Ask your agents to prove their work. Include it in the initial prompt, not later.

What happens when the 0 days are exposed?

2026-04-13T16:12:04Z

What’s going to happen to all of our software when Anthropic Mythos finds all of the 0 day vulnerabilities? Will everything depending on the bugs break? Will it be possible to fix them cleanly? Will we all get pwnd when the bad actors get access to them before everything is patched? Will LTS Operating Systems Die?

Ping 48

2026-04-08T16:12:32Z

What is this job anymore

2026-04-03T20:44:55Z

The job of writing code is dying, models are getting better, the average person will have their average features implemented in average ways with no effort by agents, the writing is on the wall. We are still trying to review most of the critical code, this is slowing us down, is it really stopping any bugs or giving us any more familiarity with the product, marginally.

The time is now to grease up your UAT, testing, deployment pipelines. Dont let agents delete entire regions. Review your backup and restore strategy, you do have a DR plan right?

Things are changing fast, the best of us are still better than the clankers. Most of us have more context than the clankers. Most of us have more intuition of what and where to implement fixes. Context windows and memory will be solved problems. Your DR plan, UAT, testinng and QA environments will not come for free, you need to make them, and deeply integrate them into your processes.

Ping 47

2026-04-02T21:33:20Z

The year of the supply chain attacks

2026-04-02T20:26:33Z

I think I’m starting to understand my role as a platform developer in 2026.

least priveleged access
default deny + explicit allow
understand your blast radius
GREASED creds rotate process
PIN EVERYTHING
keep packages up to date
but not too up to date, use dependency cooldowns

The final nail for Windows?

2026-04-01T20:23:53Z

Easy anticheat for linux is out.

Tip

look at the date

If this were real what would you play first? For me it’s skate . is really the only thing I care about and I’m fine without it.

Ping 43

2026-03-31T18:33:05Z

Okay so I logged into twitter today, and we are back…. probably not for long, but we are for now. Claude Code source leaked, the tweets are great. [[ thoughts-956 ]], [[ thoughts-958 ]], [[ thoughts-959 ]], Some typescript css text layout with bouncing balls, bubbles, strings, and webcam video to text is blowing up [[ thoughts-957 ]]. This is the tech twitter I remember no sad news how the world is corrupt by the other side.

Social Media is dead

2026-03-28T12:17:44Z

Social Media is dead, interest media killed it long ago. I no longer feel like I’m connecting to people, creating community, having fun, learning. I feel like I’m being shoveled slop from the slop machine, I’m sure mostly create by well intentioned people just trying to make it in the world, trying to make their mark, trying to make something of themselves. The algos long lost the idea of subs and likes, and transitioned to how long you will pause on a topic. What used to be a series of recognizable faces, names, avatars, each with their own personality that I could come to learn and know who was just trollin, who was serious, is now mostly unrecognizable. Platforms have changed and fractured communities people went separate ways, not all the same ways. No one community is like it used to be, and its hard to find.

Where Is The Tech Industry Going

2026-03-27T14:11:49Z

Agents suck

Get left behind if you don’t use them

Burn out if you use them too much

The software world has been flipped upside down seemingly overnight. Slow at first, then all at once. It started with auto complete, to chat, to, ide integrations, to agents that would f&!^ over your repo more than it would help. Up till this point we are just little bit better and more specific than copy paste from Stack Overflow. Then in Nov 2025 models learned how to effectively use tools and do what you ask of them, sometimes more, sometimes less, but generally for the basic shit most of us make its a net positive with each iteration.

Our techniques for managing work need to change.

Our expectations need to change.

Burnout for a lot of folks is coming.

Is Compaction The Issue

2026-03-26T09:37:47Z

I saw today in work chat something along the lines of “we need bigger context windows” “compaction times are holding us back”. Maybe I’m just blessed with the lack of lord jira, maybe juggle too many projects at once and they are all pretty much done when I get back. Maybe I do more long running specs and spend time making good plans that it does not matter.

Anyways the point I’m getting to is that if you think that compaction is your main issue slowing you down, and 10x this if you are a manager thinking this is what is slowing down your team you need to look at your workflow. Not because it sucks. Not only because it could be better. Because you are signing yourself and your team up for burnout if you are sitting there watching these things run like waiting for paint to dry and firing more prompts at them as soon as they are done. It feels easy. It feels like you are going fast. Its eating more brainpower than you think, and its not getting you to your destination any faster.

Lets Land The Plane

2026-03-25T08:41:15Z

Part of @steveyegge ’s gastown/beads is a prompt “Lets land the plane”. It’s very straightforward forward and what any sane human would probably do before finishing work, except the last part. The “generate a handoff prompt for the next session” was not something I’ve put much thought into. But now that I juggle 6 sessions at a time and often end up with 20 sessions open because I don’t want to close them and loose the last bit of context. This is what I need to keep from crippling my laptop memory from all of these stale sessions hanging around.

Taken from https://ianbull.com/posts/beads

I don't want someone else running my agents

2026-03-23T00:00:00Z

I don’t want to review the pr, I dont want to fight the mass of changes clobbered across the codebase. I want to own my platform. With everything changing with agents writing more code than I can imagine in a day work looks different now. I still want to work with real people. I want to collaborate on ideas. I want someone to bounce ideas off with. I want someone else in the war room with me on launch day, or when the whole thing goes down. But I don’t them slopping in my sandbox, if someone is going to be stirring the slop in my product I want it to be me. Work is feeling different now. New lines need to be drawn in new directions. Expectations are changing, the way work is completed is changing, and we are all here trying to figure out what this looks like moving forward.

Ping 38

2026-03-22T09:56:48Z

When agents do the work its harder to recognize a dead end.

Learning to agent

2026-03-19T20:53:08Z

All we are hearing lately is Agents are the future, something flipped around NOV 2025 with opus 4.5. It turned snake oil into action. It changed programmers will be replaced in 6 months to now. Not all of them, but probably most of us who are not extraordinary. If you fall into the camp of folks not adopting, I got no issues with that. No one is twisting your arm, well maybe your boss or cto is, thats on them. I don’t mean to say this is the future as in, get in or get left behind. I mean it as this is where your other engineers probably are, the junior to mid level engineers are here. If you are not trying to meet them where they are how are you going to lead them.

Studio Ghibli Images in the Wild

2026-03-19T20:49:26Z

I just stumbled into an image in my org chart of someone who clearly turned themself into a Studio Ghibli character in chatgpt during the small window of time that it seemed to do this for everything. Its clearly the aesthetic that It would do by default for that week, then would not do it whatsoever. I’d link it, but its from an org chart. I mostly found it interesting how we now have these recognizable artifacts from specific moments in time.

Ping 36

2026-03-19T17:42:56Z

I feel like there’s an inevitable phase to every ai/agentic worked feature/epic where you have to get in and chat with it 2025 style (except it actually works and doesn’t turn your project to shit). Planning is great, planning out epics for full orchestrator’s to churn for hours on is amazing, but it always leaves me with a handful of thorns multiplied by complexity level of things that I can shout a list of 6 items at a time that it can one shot. I haven’t seen anyone put a name to this phase yet, so I’m going to call it the UAT phase for now and it seems like a very necessary part of the SDLC. It was important before, but feels more so now as engineers distance themselves from the implementation.

Research, Plan, Implement

2026-03-18T20:49:26Z

I heard this term yesterday, and I think a lot of people are missing out on step 1. It’s important to experiment with agents and learn what they can do well and what they cant, this changes every couple of weeks at this point. You might be spending hours planning something that could have been implemented right away, or maybe wasted time planning something that needed more research, more context engineering. Agents start fresh every session, they cant remember what you asked them to do 5 minutes ago in the other session, getting the right tokens in session is critical.

Context Poisoning Was There All Along

2026-03-17T21:10:38Z

I wrote some code by hand on Sunday. Sat down with my son and started building out a game in pygame from scratch. We went to google, we searched how to do something, we copy and pasted from the docs. Not because we are dumb, but because we cant remember some aspects of the pygame api. Now that these patterns are established we no longer have to google them, we simply grep our codebase and replicate the pattern. Easy right? It’s funny that it took ai to coin the term context poisoning even though it was there all along.

Agents cannot replace the thinking, they only amplify it

2026-03-17T20:32:16Z

Agents cannot replace the thinking, they only amplify it. If you set the agents off in the wrong direction that’s where they will go. They will sprint there faster than you can go. This is ok, its one of their advantages, they can give you signal quick. Remember if they are off in the wrong direction more research and planning is needed, and maybe a little bit more thinking on your end to steer them in the right direction.

Thinking about ai productivity again

2026-03-16T21:01:44Z

Thinking about AI productivity again. It’s allowing massive amounts of work to get done, to levels that humans cannot physically type out in some cases. But not all of this work is necessarily high value work. Right now I’m working on one of the biggest PRs to an internal cli library. Probably the largest PR I’ve ever done professionally. It touches all of the cli, refactors every command, reaches into the business logic layers to drive deeper separation. I reaches into the common layers to drive consistency. It ensures that every command (50 or so) has similar flags, supports –plain, –no-color. It specs out contracts to ensure that data goes out stdout, any extra goes out stderr. This makes everything unix pipe friendly. There was quite a bit of research and prep that went in, that turns out to already be distilled down into clig.dev. The point is that this is all good work. It will make the product consistent, repeatable, expected, and most of all boring. Most of the time, it will just work. Since we did it ahead of a lot of other agentic work on the product its establishing good patterns for the product moving forward. But its low value work. We wouldn’t have likely put humans on this work wholesale and fixed critical paths as they came up. Its not cutting cost, selling more product, or driving critical business decisions. Yes it’s worth it now, but it would not have bee in the past.

Did you even like to code?

2026-03-07T20:59:39Z

Here’s something I’ve been wrestling with lately. I keep hearing people come to the realization that they never liked coding, they thought they did, but secretly hated it the whole time. I dont think I’ve ever kidded myself about this. I like building things. I like having an idea and see it come to life. Just because I like the end product more, and that coding really was a means to an end, something I will never do again in the same capacity that I have in the past, does not mean I did not enjoy the art of solving problems by typing syntax into a file to tell a computer how to solve a problem.

The only thing that seems interesting is AI right now

2026-03-06T20:55:26Z

The only thing that seems interesting is AI right now, I’m writing less code, and I kinda just don’t care as much about the small open source stuff as I used to. I enjoy reading about what other people are thinking, doing, creating. But when I go to grab a podcast while I wait on my clankers its one talking about how other people are using them, how to make them more secure, more effective, how the new models change things, what models are good at what. It’s all so new and changes so fast. Any sort of new open source project starts out sus that it was just vibe coded anyways, So at the moment it feels like ooh how did you get that, how do I make mine, and that the thing itself has less value. I hate that its this way, but it is.

It's all moving so fast

2026-03-05T20:53:59Z

AI is moving so fast this year its hard to keep up, I’ve written 3 or 4 versions of one blog post to replace I'm Out On Agents, but it feels like everything changes before I can get it out.

Is gpt-5.4 slow?

2026-03-04T20:47:00Z

What you don’t have six agents orchestrating the work of 6 subagents yet. I saw in a work chat that people were complaining about 5.4 being too slow and they keep going back to opus. For me its been working great, I have it working on critical infrastructure work, that I will need to maintain. I appreciate its accuracy and completeness. And honestly I’m rarely watching agents run. Its like watching paint dry at this point. Its interesting to read their thinking prompts, but not productive work. While its running I’m teeing up the net prompt. Working with another set of agents to write a set of issues for the next epic. I might be too privileged though. I own a whole platform and have plenty of autonomy to work on what I see fit for the day. I don’t have a boss breathing down my neck waiting for a single ticket to be complete. I’m working on 6 projects at a time. I’m taking walks to avoid becoming a burnt out zombie. I’m definitely not complaining about it kicking out massive amounts of code too slow though.

We are the Grey Beards

2026-03-04T20:44:12Z

In November 2025 everyones beard lost its color, we aged into the next generation without realizing it. If you were getting paid to write code at this point in time, you are part of a special point in history where we used to write code by hand. There will be systems air gapped systems somewhere devs will continue to do it how we’ve always done it, some day they will peek out of this cave and realize that they are the only ones left, no one else remembers what its like. Writing code will quickly become a hobby that people do, in a weird niche way. Not because you want to build something, but like the guy with a mainframe in his garage that likes to watch the lights blink. Because its nostalgic, it’s a very cool skill, its fun and rewarding, but it won’t be to get something done.

Clankers got me tired

2026-03-03T20:42:25Z

I spent all day grinding on a 20 minute fix. I want the agents to do it. They can do it, but they are missing the harnesses they need to replicate my workflows of old.

The Ghostty Guy

2026-02-26T18:49:39Z

I was today years old when I realized that the ghostty guy is the Hashicorp guy.

Ping 23

2026-02-03T16:50:52Z

I taught wyatt #bada55 green, I apologize in advance, I underestimate the power of immature humor has on him.

Ping 21

2026-01-29T07:30:59Z

Agents right now

can I access the project you mentioned?

yes

Can i access /tmp

yes, just do it

While I’m I at it, kubctl delete...

yanks plug front internet

Quick Tip To Get Agents Running Longer

2026-01-21T16:22:26Z

Here’s a quick tip if you want to get your agents running longer, prompt better.

Ping 19

2026-01-18T00:00:00Z

What no one is talking about is that Deegs doesn’t get the red plate without Anstie on the ground.

image

What is that

2026-01-15T19:22:47Z

I was unironically asked what is that about my keeb today. Followed by no way that works, how would you type a, s, y, u, after showing, I go the “that’s weird” walk away.

Ping 17

2026-01-12T12:01:16Z

I’m not sure if its good to keep issues and plans in the repo long term, but I’m going to give it a shot.

read @pages/issues/issue-1.md create a plan to fix the issue, then write your plan to fix in @pages/plans/fix-issue-1.md

new keeb so good

2026-01-03T00:00:00Z

New keeb feeling so good I don’t want to leave it. I’m going to go from having my worse favorite at work, to having my new favorite at work.

Ping 15

2025-12-22T08:55:20Z

mise looks like what I wanted nix to be for me.

Mise looks promising

2025-12-21T10:52:57Z

I’ve been all in on just for a while now, but mise looks so good it might be my next move.

Gross phone

2025-12-19T09:51:00Z

Is there a world that giving my phone to my kids does not result in it being covered in peanut butter and snot?

Ping 12

2025-12-16T11:44:47Z

Is bet new teen lingo? My kid is starting to say bet in every sentence.

So he explained it as “I’m down”, “You bet”, “Yes”, “I like that”, “You betcha”

Ping 11

2025-12-16T08:11:43Z

Naming things is hard, pings will now be numbered.

I'm being gaslit by the ai

2025-12-15T16:16:12Z

I’m being gaslit by the ai. It just did a big hard change, now cant do a seemingly basic change, and assures me that that its fixed my issue on every iteration.

notifications for static site builds

2025-12-12T08:28:45Z

This morning I set up notifications for changes to my static site builds leveraging git name status and ntfy.

fast changing dev server today

2025-12-10T13:45:49Z

The dev server is cooking today, I’ve dropped markata builds from 2m40s (hot cache) in prod to 15s (hot cache) in dev. Currently building 2745 posts and 274 feeds.

Not every print needs supports

2025-12-08T14:17:05Z

Not every print needs supports. So many models default to having it on, whether needed or not. Well designed parts, designed for 3d printing almost never need supports (depending on constraints).

reminder Include steps to reproduce

2025-12-08T10:09:23Z

Include steps to reproduce your bug when you file a bug report or issue. You may quickly forget how you got there, and no one can fix a bug that is not reproducible.

All I want for Christmas is, filliment

2025-12-07T16:38:30Z

All I want for Christmas is filament

I don’t need gifts or fancy things

I just wanna model, tinker, and print,

watch layers stack just right.

Santa, if you’re listening… PLA, PETG, ABS will do.

git worktrees are needed

2025-12-06T09:58:06Z

git worktrees are goated, and must be leaned on moving forward.

I got the kubernetes in my basement autism

2025-12-05T21:13:03Z

What flavor of autism did you guys get, I got the kind where I run kubernetes in my basement.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5Cac-cf5MOE

my home row

2025-12-05T00:00:00Z

My home row layout. It’s not quite home row mods.

https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/fd74f80e-ff5e-4548-8419-bd407144bb6c.excalidraw

gpus are awesome

2025-12-03T00:00:00Z

GPU’s are awesome. I just added gpu support to my bambu-studio distrobox and its flying! On my wayland based system the native package has never worked, (arch or bazzite), but running in a distrobox does. Outside of distrobox the 3d rendering canvas is black, no output. It used to work fine without gpu support, was snappy enough, complex models were a bit sluggish, but fine. Lately something happened and simple models bring it to its knees. It got unusable!

The print I happen to be working on is some custom designed gumdrops for a theater set. The ui is working and not lagging 30s between clicks causing clicks to happen on the wrong ui element.