Scott Hanselman

2025-12-11 · open the original ↗

• AI is an evolution, not a revolution. Fontoura, a technical fellow in Azure Core at Microsoft and author of Human Agency in a Digital World, traces a line from early-2000s machine translation, chess and Jeopardy wins and word-processor spell-check to today's models; what changed is web-scale data and processing power, not the foundations.
• Resilient software assumes unreliable parts, unlike traditional engineering. Where a bridge is built to withstand every storm, distributed systems engineer resiliency on top of components expected to fail; Fontoura cites Leslie Lamport's definition of a distributed system as one where an unknown computer's failure breaks yours.
• AI helps experts and leaves juniors without patterns behind. Fontoura shares Hanselman's worry that juniors who lack knowledge of good patterns and anti-patterns get less from AI, and says the fix needs an intentional plan rather than giving AI to everyone and hoping. Fontoura argues current AI lacks systems thinking, and that a team of agents built on one model is fragile in a way a heterogeneous human team is not, a framing Hanselman extended as "one person cloned".
• Productivity gains should be reinvested in innovation, not headcount cuts. In Fontoura's virtuous cycle, better tools make people achieve more with less, which should grow the pie rather than shrink teams, with the value generated reinvested in new technology.
• Digital systems are "laws of fiction" society can choose to reject. Borrowing Yuval Noah Harari's idea of shared inventions, Fontoura contrasts gravity with apps like TikTok and questions social networks' effect on teenagers' health. The AI-domination debate is, in Fontoura's words, dated and uninteresting; the book prefers AI applied to climate, transportation and social mobility, and wants more computer scientists in politics.

2025-12-11 · open the original ↗

• Airport IT succeeds when passengers never notice it. One speaker, who runs IT at an airport, says uptime is the top measure for a 24/7 operation and that redundancy should hide any failure; passengers assuming it is magic is fine. The number of switches the team monitors keeps growing because every capital project, even new windows, now carries sensors in what the speaker calls a smart city.

2025-12-10 · open the original ↗

• Trying to fix a compiler bug led onto the C++ committee. One speaker skipped algebra classes to work on GCC, assuming a compiler was just software whose bugs could be fixed. Their first GCC contribution, in 1997, implemented valarray numeric components; reporting its issues, they were told to join their national body (they were in France) and attend the standards meetings.

2025-12-10 · open the original ↗

• If work has no URL, it probably didn't happen. One speaker's team rule is that ten things done should come back as ten URLs, whether a PR, a Word doc, a markdown file or a code-review comment. Meetings are the exception the rule targets: their energy dissipates, so the speaker's advice is to produce a document from them.

2025-12-09 · open the original ↗

• Competence at a big company is mostly undocumented context. One speaker says the hard part is not syntax but knowing which old systems fall over if touched, knowledge passed on by oral tradition or lost with departed colleagues; the other, also at a large company, says school does not teach this and calls professional work the best learning environment.

2025-12-09 · open the original ↗

• A degree was the lower-risk route past hiring bias. One speaker, a Black woman, says she expected higher scrutiny than her peers in hiring and chose a CS degree over a bootcamp to make hiring as easy as possible. She argues that despite industry lip service about skills mattering more than background, employers overwhelmingly hire people with degrees and pedigree, though bootcamps worked for some.

2025-12-05 · open the original ↗

• Check the airport's official site for its real Wi-Fi SSID. Asked about honeypot networks, one speaker says fake Wi-Fi appears in many public spaces and advises confirming the SSID on the airport's website rather than trusting a plausible name such as an "airport guest" network, a habit the speaker recommends generally.

2025-12-05 · open the original ↗

• Knowing scrolling is harmful does not stop anyone doing it. One speaker, a neuroscientist, admits to still scrolling Instagram when stressed, tired or anxious, and so never tells people simply to stop. The advice instead is to replace some scrolling with something generative, including creating useful content on the other side of the algorithm.

2025-12-05 · open the original ↗

• Modern software bloat dwarfs lean native executables. One speaker contrasts the other's executables of 2 to 12 MB with websites whose PNGs are bigger, citing a 25 MB page at The Verge, and a 500 MB download needed just to control the lights on the podcast microphone.

2025-12-04 · open the original ↗

• Esolangs are an art form, not just puzzles or jokes. Temkin's book 44 Esolangs (MIT Press) is pitched at both programmers and the art world, using words like "monograph" to signal an art book; Temkin argues listicle-style coverage hides languages such as Piet, which lets programmers develop their own visual style in code.
• Each language explores an edge of what code can be. Temkin traces lineages: False's single-character commands led to Brainfuck and to Befunge, which reads in any direction and was meant to be hard to compile, and Piet carries Befunge's flow into colour. Some of the book's 44 are deliberately unrealisable; the book gives all the prompts first and the realisations second, after Sol LeWitt's split between a work's concept and its idea.
• AI gives the most mediocre answer to a creative prompt. Fed one of the book's prompts, for code written as feeling, Claude produced something close to the existing Shakespeare language; Temkin tells students to use AI to generate code but leave it no creative decisions.
• Several languages undermine the programmer's sense of control. Folders, which is Turing complete, encodes programs in empty folders read alphabetically, inspired by Whitespace; Past Tense converts a program's verbs to past tense so it must never run again; Stroll needs three walkers whose site-specific routes, such as tree species, make results change with place and time.
• Non-English languages challenge English's dominance in code. Temkin cites Ramsey Nasser's Arabic Lisp, whose tooling exposed right-to-left biases; Yorlang, in Yoruba, which Temkin says could serve mainstream use; and a single-glyph-per-line language being designed with Jon Corbett. Intercal (1972), whose PLEASE count decides whether a program runs, is the first recognised esolang; Don Woods recently found its original compiler code.

2025-12-04 · open the original ↗

• Wireless is never magic; there is always a cable behind it. One speaker, who works in airport IT, tells visiting students that Wi-Fi and cellular run back to towers and data centres over cable. The flight information displays are on the same interconnected system, cabled from one terminal to another.

2025-12-04 · open the original ↗

• An open-source Zig project led directly to a job. One speaker says the CTO of Tuple starred their Zig version manager, zigup, on GitHub, which led them to the company's performance-focused pitch and a job as its Linux engineer. The CTO knew they were a Zig person, and the speaker says they try to "sneak Zig in" where they can.

2025-12-03 · open the original ↗

• The cultural obsession with finding one purpose is harmful. One speaker, researching a book, found mentions of "finding your purpose" in books up 700% over two decades. The first problem named is that it pushes people to tie their identity and self-worth to one thing, so they lose that self-worth when it fails.

2025-12-03 · open the original ↗

• Mark filters tech news through aggregators, skipping Hacker News's noise. Mark has read Techmeme since about 2007, adds consumer sites such as The Verge, and only scans Hacker News, opening around 20 tabs to read over lunch; The Information comes through Microsoft's employee library subscriptions.
• Curated daily newsletters are Mark's way of keeping up with AI. Mark names The Rundown AI (a five-person team), Superhuman (one person, Zain Kahn), The Neuron (Grant and Corey), the less frequent The Batch from Andrew Ng's deeplearning.ai, and Turing Post, mostly free and ad-supported.
• Mailing lists have become the new RSS, Hanselman argues. He says distributed, pull-based RSS has given way to email newsletters that are easy to monetise but must be dug out of an inbox, and worries that blogging alone now goes unread; his Feedly holds 57,000 unread posts from the feeds he imported when Google Reader closed.
• Their own old newsletters and blogs are a valuable archive. Mark shows a 2001 Sysinternals newsletter at 33,000 subscribers, peaking at 80,000–90,000, and Hanselman his 2003 blog posts, including links to Mark's tools now broken after redirects; Hanselman says he blogged to learn and keep track of things.
• Mark fixed ZoomIt's LCD rendering in three days with AI help. Hanselman says the AI Tour's producer wanted ZoomIt but its default zoom looked poor on LCD screens; after Hanselman messaged Mark, the smoothing fix arrived within three days, written with help from an AI assistant.

2025-12-03 · open the original ↗

• Telling a programmer something is impossible guarantees they'll try. The speakers define nerd sniping as telling a programmer something cannot be done, so they drop everything to prove otherwise; one is told they were sniped into building AppVeyor. The clip also mentions a Windows port contributed to Mitchell Hashimoto's terminal, Ghostty.

2025-12-02 · open the original ↗

• An airport's IT scope is that of a city plus aviation. One speaker lists the airport's own fire and police departments, airlines, stores, water and restaurants, on top of FAA safety regulations. Anything with a chip needs a cable, so the speaker says they were probably consulted on it.

2025-12-02 · open the original ↗

• Social media works like an artificial career leaderboard. One speaker argues it is not normal to see manicured versions of hundreds of lives, including classmates from 15 to 30 years ago. Since people are incentivised to share only successes, viewers inevitably ask why a peer is "up there", as if there were a ladder everyone was climbing.

2025-11-28 · open the original ↗

• AI gave a usable starting point, not a finished answer. One speaker says AI helped them write a custom GPU shader, outside their expertise, that keeps screen capture on the GPU and does the YUV conversion there. The first output "kind of worked" but not well; they credit it with getting them to the finish line in reasonable time, and say all their users now spend less CPU capturing and sending the screen.

2025-11-28 · open the original ↗

• The airport is a landlord, so IT stops at the handoff. Tomlin, VP of IT systems and infrastructure at Philadelphia International, says her team maintains base infrastructure while tenants run their own; American Airlines, for which PHL is a hub, manages its own terminals. When Aeromexico was onboarded in June (a direct PHL–Mexico City route, her first new airline), her team extended the carrier's circuit from a central utility hub building to its nearest closet and handed off, with no visibility into the airline's networks.
• An airport is a mini city where everything runs on cable. She describes fire, police, water, retail and federal agencies on top of FAA-regulated aviation, and says anything "with a chip in it" that needs a cable involves her team, from runway lights to flight information displays wired from terminal A west to terminal F. The FAA tower is separate from the ground towers that take over once planes land.
• Closed networks and enterprise displays keep public systems locked down. Answering Hanselman's story of a friend hijacking a Chromecast menu board in Portugal, she says PHL uses closed, on-prem networks that do not touch the internet and enterprise displays without smart-TV connectivity, with a dedicated infosec team and repeated pen tests. Her advice to travellers is to check the airport's website for the official Wi-Fi SSID rather than trust a look-alike.
• Her proudest win is uptime passengers never notice. Because airports run 24/7, she counts redundancy that hides failures as the team's real success, alongside getting Aeromexico operational in time for its inspections. New capital projects keep adding sensors to the building, and she wants to pull that data and apply AI to it, weighed against whether the opex can be sustained on a government budget.
• Public-sector IT rewards curiosity and breadth over a lane. She moved from web developer to IT director at the Free Library of Philadelphia, then to the city-owned airport, which has an IT department of a little under 80, mixing city staff and contractors. She argues that government work exposed her to servers, cabling and cloud in a way a private job would not, that city airport jobs are publicly posted, and that the people running civic infrastructure need policymakers' support to maintain it.

2025-11-28 · open the original ↗

• Early-career developers face anxieties that compound on each other. One speaker, drawing on mentoring early-career engineers, lists AI, the reputed intensity of LeetCode-style interviews, and the shift from being graded against a standard at school to a career with no rubric. They say coaching through this means helping mentees accept that some of it is outside their control and make peace with it.

2025-11-27 · open the original ↗

• Native Windows development feels painful but rewards long familiarity. Asked whether native Windows apps are a dying art, the speaker says people offer sympathy when told the team builds natively, and admits to "a bit of Stockholm syndrome" after years on the platform. They credit reading Raymond Chen for their grasp of Windows internals, and say a feature like "app fail" they could not have built at first is now a fun puzzle thanks to accumulated niche tools and knowledge.

2025-11-27 · open the original ↗

• Zig is obscure to most developers but has proved itself. One speaker describes Zig as a zero-dependency drop-in C/C++ compiler with cross-compilation out of the box, unknown to "dark matter" developers outside the Hacker News crowd. They admit they would have written it off as a hobby project, but say it has built a big community and is simple and fast.
• Native executables are tiny next to today's bloated websites. The same speaker contrasts the other's 2 MB and 12 MB executables with sites like The Verge, which they put at 25 MB in the browser's dev tools, while shipping executables that do 10 times more in half the size. Their other example is a 500 MB download just to control a podcast microphone's lights.

2025-11-26 · open the original ↗

• Promotion to principal brought burden more than status. One speaker, who reached principal engineer about a decade after graduating, says the milestone felt satisfying to a goal-oriented person, but they were not watching for markers like faster email replies, beyond perhaps a little from more junior people. What they noticed instead was the new burden of being the one in the meeting expected to know things and figure them out.

2025-11-26 · open the original ↗

• Competence, built through hard challenges, is what creates confidence. The speaker rejects "fake it till you make it" as inauthentic. Their approach to impostor syndrome is to take on big, scary technical challenges in environments where people will sponsor you and support you if you fail, and to build self-confidence through repeating that.

2025-11-25 · open the original ↗

• Tuple is native because it serves human connection, not UI. One speaker notes that Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot desktop apps all feel like web views, while Tuple immediately feels native. The other agrees, arguing that apps heavy on UI chrome suit the web, but Tuple deliberately minimises chrome, so getting the system APIs right for sending video and audio over the network matters more.

2025-11-24 · open the original ↗

• General meeting tools add typing lag that ruins pair programming. One speaker describes pairing over Zoom or Teams as a dance of scheduling, screen sharing at mismatched resolutions and granting control, with lag between a fast typist's keystrokes and their appearance on the other screen. The other says nearly everyone at Tuple is a developer, so the team pays close attention to that kind of lag.

2025-11-20 · open the original ↗

• C++'s crusty reputation comes from its backward compatibility. Dos Reis, a principal SDE at Microsoft on the MSVC toolset and on the ISO C++ committee since 1997, says 1990s "C with classes" code still compiles, so nothing forced people to modernize and the old image fossilized. He also faults advocates like himself for not showcasing a killer app in modern C++, the way the STL once changed minds.
• Compatibility is a feature; renovate in place rather than rewrite. He argues customers would quit a language that made them throw away working code every two years, and that memory safety is now the forcing function to re-examine code. His answer is incremental renovation instead of a rewrite in Go, Rust or Java; he says MSVC itself contains comments from the 1980s alongside the newest features.
• Engineering means dull, robust code the next person can maintain. He separates programming from engineering and teaches around contemporary problems rather than the language's history, starting with constexpr by default so the compiler catches accidental dynamic initialization. He contrasts this with 1980s-style template metaprogramming showing "how cute I am," which he says does not scale.
• C++ neglected tooling, but modules forced the committee to act. He agrees with Hanselman that package management and build systems were neglected, allowing diverse tools but fracturing the community. Designing modules for C++20 made the problem unavoidable, and he asked Herb Sutter, then running the committee, for a tooling study group.
• Memory safety by default needs profiles, still not standardized. He says memory-safe C++ is possible today; the problem is how easy it is by default. Profiles, developed with Bjarne Stroustrup, did not get into C++26, and they are pursuing them and parts of contracts on a parallel track released alongside it. He recommends Stroustrup's updated A Tour of C++ as a modern starting point, and learning two or three different paradigms, such as C++ and Haskell.

2025-11-16 · open the original ↗

• Vibe coding suits small utilities, not production code. Hanselman builds on Edge Light, a WPF app on .NET 10 that he vibe-coded the day before to copy a macOS Tahoe feature putting a ring light around the screen, and he says it has only a handful of users. He works entirely in GitHub Copilot CLI with Claude Sonnet, dictating through Windows' built-in voice typing (Win+H) because of mobility problems in his hands, and says an IDE such as VS Code or Visual Studio would give a better experience, including debugging.
• Treat the agent's answers as claims to check, not verdicts. Reviewing a contributor's PR that swapped emoji for Segoe Fluent icons and a blur for a drop shadow, he asks the agent for risks and warns that "any one of these things could be wrong or a lie." The agent flags that the icon font is missing on Windows 10 and offers to check his users' systems, which he notes it cannot know; they add a fallback, merge, bump to 1.8 and watch the GitHub Actions build and auto-update work.
• Plan before coding, and keep permission prompts on. For the new feature, cycling the light between monitors from a toolbar button, he has the agent plan on a new branch before writing code, greys the button out for single-monitor users, and refuses "YOLO mode" so he sees every commit and push. His four mismatched monitors exposed a bug: the app started on monitor 2 because the screen array does not guarantee the primary display is index zero.
• Juniors can use these tools but miss the edge cases. He argues the risk for early-career engineers is not the tool but missing DPI, API choice, backward compatibility and hot-plugging; former testers, he says, are good at this work. He pushes the agent past a button-only bounds check to handle resize events when a monitor is unplugged, and admits he has not tested that path.
• An LLM mirrors you back; it is a sycophant. He notes Claude says "You're absolutely right" without knowing that he is, and echoed his own "good corporate citizen" phrasing. He also caught a hard-coded 0.4 default version in his build script and had it read the version from the project. He leaves open whether a cut-out or "bubble" around the mouse is something to vibe or write by hand, and concedes the 45-minute session might not beat doing it manually.

2025-11-13 · open the original ↗

• Postgres's popularity is a "happy accident" of several factors. Giordano, who works on the open-source Postgres project at Microsoft and joined via Citus in 2017, points to extensibility as the second objective in Stonebraker and Rowe's 1986 design document, which let Citus scale Postgres horizontally as an extension rather than a fork. She adds the permissive MIT/BSD-like license, which got it into universities, and watershed moments such as JSON support around 2012, followed by JSONB.
• No single company owns Postgres, which she sees as decisive. Microsoft, EDB, Amazon, Google and smaller firms all pay upstream contributors, and some call it "the people's database." She credits managed services as trendsetters, dating Heroku's to 2007, Amazon RDS Postgres to 2013 and Azure's to 2017. Hanselman's own theory is that standards compliance and enterprise focus made it "an overnight success in 40 years."
• Features win by persuasion, not a top-down roadmap. Work is bottom-up and decided largely on public mailing lists; an author must convince enough people and find one of the 31 committers willing to commit and then maintain the change. She says this makes Postgres conservative about features, and that even a hyperscaler's engineers must lobby across company lines. Asynchronous I/O for reads, new in Postgres 18, took about five years of groundwork across earlier releases.
• Open source does not mean open trademark season. As a board member of the Postgres Community Association, which holds the Postgres and PostgreSQL names and the Slonik logo, she urges anyone naming a product with "Postgres" to read the trademark policy first. Hanselman cites a past attempt to trademark the name that the core team pushed back on.
• The project deliberately avoids depending on commercial vendors. Its source lives on project-run git servers, with GitHub only a mirror, maintained by a volunteer sysadmin team of about seven or eight, with sponsored hardware. Its build farm has over 200 "animals," and she reports over 229 million seconds of build time across Postgres 18's roughly 15-month development cycle. Azure shipped Postgres 18 in preview, in one region, on GA day, which she says it had not managed a couple of releases earlier.

2025-11-12 · open the original ↗

• A single informal paper list carries Mark's to-dos. Mark keeps one office-supply notebook, work in the left column and home in the right, carries unfinished items forward under a new horizontal line, and throws old notebooks away. He says many studies show offloading to a list removes a load from the brain, and argues a more organized system costs effort whose return he doubts; he puts links, AI hallucination screenshots and papers on jailbreaks in OneNote instead.
• Procrastination can be background processing, not avoidance. Mark calls himself an "incredible procrastinator" but says he is subconsciously working on a task and sizing its effort before he starts. Hanselman likens it to a background agent and says his own last-minute talk preparation feels like rumination rather than avoidance, adding that once you find a system that works, keep it, while people early in their careers should try several.
• Hanselman relies on paper, a reMarkable and the calendar. He has kept notebooks for about 20 years, back to at least 2007, and says writing things down is why he sleeps well; his reMarkable e-ink tablet syncs everything, which shows him how much he has offloaded. He argues the shared calendar removes the most "psychic weight" in a household, and recommends iPhone geofenced reminders ("remind me next time I'm at Fred Meyer to buy milk") as underused.
• Neither host has a true second brain. Hanselman says he keeps wishing for an organized Obsidian or OneNote knowledge base but falls back on paper; asked whether AI should do retrieval over their notes, they joke about handing it to AI "interns" and conclude there is only "a hierarchy of brains." Both call the episode rambling and "not our finest hour."

2025-11-06 · open the original ↗

• Computers belong running, not behind glass. Jones, formerly senior engineering manager at Living Computers: Museum + Labs and now at the Interim Computer Museum, argues a machine behind glass only celebrates industrial design, while a running one conveys what it did. He says Living Computers had seven full-time engineers, "unheard of" for a technical museum, since most outsource exhibit building and interpretation.
• The new museum survives on community, not a benefactor. ICM, a nonprofit that got charitable status in April and joined Benevity for matched donations in May, focuses on covering lease and utilities; Jones reports 356 members and sponsors and its first surplus quarter. He draws the model from SDF.org, a 1987 BBS turned nonprofit Unix ISP that he says survived the dot-com bust on membership; a $36-a-year membership gives access to 26 remote vintage systems, real, hybrid and simulated.
• Living Computers' collection was not gutted, contrary to coverage. Jones calls GeekWire's June 2024 articles cruel and a missed opportunity, saying only about 30 LCM items went to the Christie's auction alongside space art and other memorabilia. He says most of the rest is at the Mims museum in Roswell, Georgia, which took the Living Computers name and is preparing an Apple 50th exhibit, or at ICM's roughly 3,000 sq ft space in Tukwila, near SeaTac, open to members by appointment.
• Legacy media is degrading, which is why the museum is "interim." ICM's preservation lab holds about 3,000 magnetic media artifacts, from disk packs to DECtapes, and uses techniques such as baking tapes to restore binders. Jones says the name expresses urgency: data remains trapped on esoteric carriers while the media slowly degrades.
• Retro tools bridge old machines and the present. Hanselman argues "we're forgetting how to drive stick shift" and says running multitasking Unix on a simulator taught him how the cloud descends from the Altair. Both cite adapters that put old machines online and read old disks; Hanselman says he recovered a never-released DOS 4 beta that Ray Ozzie sent him on floppies. Jones adds that history's sidelined ideas, such as Lisp machines and the Connection Machine, show the best concepts do not always win.

2025-11-05 · open the original ↗

• Halo 4's backend was rebuilt from scratch for Azure. McCaffrey, a services engineer at 343 Industries, speaking in a show recorded on 7 February 2013 (show 358), says it was the first Halo whose services ran entirely on Azure, and that the team rebuilt and re-architected every service rather than porting it, because a game's load peaks at launch and then tapers. Elastic capacity let them avoid expensive hardware that goes out of warranty while still supporting the long tail; older Halo titles then still ran in physical data centers.
• Queues let the game hand off stats without waiting. The stats service writes game data durably to Azure Service Bus queues and acknowledges at once, so players keep playing while processing happens later in a single transaction. She says the goal was to survive the service being down for two to three days without losing data; presence, by contrast, is fully real time. During a performance test they took down production Service Bus queues, and the Service Bus team fixed the problem before launch.
• Cheat-and-ban detection moved from nightly batches to near real time. McCaffrey wrote it using complex event processing on StreamInsight in Azure: rules from the community management team are defined first and the event stream from games runs through them. Signals include players muting someone or leaving when they host, and bans now land within 10 to 15 minutes of detection instead of the next day, with durations that escalate for repeat offenders.
• Build for an environment where anything can fail. Because deployments are VIP swaps between full staging and production deployments, done during the day without draining traffic, services had to be idempotent and fault tolerant. She warns that lifting server code into Azure unchanged "will probably work" but will not be cost-effective; the team also gave each developer their own account after shared-account cores were left running overnight.
• Orleans simplified scaled-out code, then internal-only. The team used Orleans, a Microsoft Research actor-model framework whose single-threaded "grains" let her write code synchronously while it handled message addressing; at recording it was not publicly available. Logging ran on ETW with an internal viewer called MDS, because Azure's diagnostic tables did not scale to their log volume, and scripted one-click deployments were still unfinished.

2025-10-31 · open the original ↗

• A degree was the safer hiring route than a bootcamp. Kat Excellence, a junior engineer 2 years and 4 months into her career, says that as a Black woman she expected higher scrutiny than her peers, and that employers overwhelmingly hire people with degrees. Hanselman says bootcamps suit self-motivated autodidacts but that he would no longer recommend them because they are not rigorous enough.
• Professors lacking industry experience matter most in upper-level classes. She says most of her professors went straight from degrees into teaching. Early material like discrete math doesn't need industry experience, but the courses just before graduation would have benefited from it. She adds that the answer depends on whether college is job preparation or a place for learning how to learn.
• Studying outside work is optional, and any progress counts. She does not code after hours. She compares it to burning out on writing once it became her full-time job. She studies at her own pace, currently on part two of Full Stack Open, and treats career envy as a signal of what she wants next.
• Juniors should produce shippable artifacts, not glue work. Her "career cheat codes" post, written at her one-year mark, urged two to three impactful PRs a week, and she now calls that ambitious. Documentation counts. Citing Tanya Reilly's "Being Glue", she argues that early on, connecting people and running meetings is hard to show as impact, so any meeting should produce a doc. Hanselman adds his team's rule that every finished task has a URL.
• Reviewing PRs by asking questions helps juniors and seniors. She reviews at least one PR a day and frames her comments as clarifying her own understanding. She says authors have answered by refactoring or admitting they over-engineered something. She endorses Hanselman's idea of titling seniors "preceptors" graded on raising juniors, on the condition that it gives seniors a real incentive to teach.

2025-10-29 · open the original ↗

• AI boosts seniors and slows juniors, so hiring tilts senior. Mark cites an MIT paper from a few weeks earlier showing AI-first companies shifting away from early-career hiring. He gives a rough figure of a 5–10x boost for experienced engineers against a 1.5–2x slowdown for early-career ones, who cannot tell when the AI is stuck. His example is a sleep that masks a race condition until it fails in production. He says customers tell him they see the same pattern.
• Coding agents are enthusiastic interns that never learn. Mark argues that agents repeat a corrected mistake days later unless it is in the instructions file, and a prompt file cannot hold every lesson. His conclusion is that juniors should no longer be hired to add capacity, since the agents now do that work, but to learn, accepting that they will be slower.
• Focusing only on boosted seniors is short-sighted for the industry. In the paper they are writing, the hosts propose a formal, AI-enhanced transfer of knowledge from seniors to juniors. Hanselman's version gives seniors a title such as "preceptor" and rewards them for the juniors they raise. Mark says internal Microsoft discussions favour making this the senior's primary job, that a pilot is starting at Microsoft, and that it takes about three years, not 90 days.
• Startups shouldn't hire early-career engineers; larger firms must widen the base. Mark says small companies don't need a talent pipeline, and that as agents spread he would not put juniors in a startup. Medium and large companies with complex, long-lived systems should hire roughly four juniors per senior, expecting some to leave for startups or quit the field.
• Juniors need tutor-style models and AI-free core coursework. Mark says Microsoft is discussing with GitHub agents that ask a junior to sketch a function first or explain the generated code, modelled on Khanmigo. He wants the main body of CS teaching done without AI. He cites an MIT study in which essay writers using ChatGPT could not recall their essays an hour later, while unaided writers still could a week later.

2025-10-23 · open the original ↗

• Deterministic tooling handles most of a migration; the LLM handles exceptions. Rousos, a principal engineer in Microsoft's customer engagement group, says rules and static analysis cover about 75% of a .NET upgrade, and the LLM fits the rest together when builds or restores fail unexpectedly. He calls each customer's app a "herd of unicorns". Hanselman frames it as keeping deterministic steps deterministic and sending ambiguity to the LLM.
• Validation takes as long as the migration itself. Rousos's recent customer was moving 50-plus apps from old .NET Core, .NET Framework and bare metal to App Service Environment, and only one app had automated tests. Central teams who don't know the apps own the upgrades, so he recommends recording Playwright tests or generating tests first. Hanselman describes writing about 20 tests around his blog's routing before migrating it.
• Upgrade for support, ecosystem and hiring, then profile for speed. .NET 5 is out of support, while .NET Framework 4.8 is supported indefinitely. Rousos cites NuGet packages dropping Framework support and customers who can't hire for Web Forms. Modern .NET raises the performance ceiling, but customers who don't profile have seen no speedup because the same slow SQL query remains.
• Copilot app modernization works stepwise and learns from developer fixes. Rousos says the Visual Studio tool reached general availability about a week earlier and draws on a knowledge base through an MCP server. When stuck after three or four attempts it asks for help and stores the developer's diff locally for later similar errors. The .NET Upgrade Assistant began as his team's prototype for a customer. He advises working incrementally: Copilot writes documentation one day and tests the next, not a one-shot migration.
• Structured prompts beat one-shot requests for code transformation. His team's "X to Y" template has Copilot first write a prompt that includes a task list and success criteria, then run it in a new session. He keeps instruction files reminding Copilot that old Framework apps use MSBuild and packages.config.
• Seniors report 25–50% gains; juniors often report none. At one customer, juniors said Copilot did not make them faster, and one said "I don't know what to ask it". Hanselman reports 25–50% gains on his own roughly 12 hours a week of coding. He ties the junior gap to a paper he is writing with Mark and asks how AI could teach early-career engineers on engagements. Rousos says he has no answer yet.

2025-10-16 · open the original ↗

• An educational game's core mechanic must be the subject itself. Lockhart says all games teach, even if only how to play or spend money. Making anything else the core mechanic produces "chocolate-covered broccoli", as in Math Blaster, where the math quiz interrupts the fun and teaches that math is in the way. Following Seymour Papert, he argues for building a context where the subject matters, a "Mathland" in the way France is for French.
• Code Combat worked by making kids type real code. Lockhart worked on Code Combat and its successors. He says they deliberately skipped the abstractions most coding games use, so players hit real syntax and logic errors in challenges that make concepts such as variables concrete. He credits part of its spread to luck: it was on the web just as schools adopted Chromebooks, and it reached Y Combinator at the right time.
• The workbook teaches by exercises and reflection, not doctrine. Lockhart says he has grown less dogmatic about game design. The book aims to help readers find their own voice through playful exercises, with reflection chapters because research shows reflection solidifies learning. Its constraint of pencil and page led to rows of random dice printed in the margins.
• Game design is a humanity, not STEM. Lockhart objects to classing game design as engineering. Games predate computers, and Senet, roughly 3,000 years old, is the oldest whose rules are known. Ludology, the study of games, is unrelated to the economists' game theory. He argues that constraints breed creativity, citing Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew.
• His goal is a learning-game ecosystem broad enough for self-directed education. Inspired by the primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, he first imagined an AI-driven personalised tutor but now doubts that approach. Instead he wants enough learning games that someone could choose their way through an education, which he concedes isn't possible and for some subjects not advisable. He notes that the market rewards STEM games, while the free public-media games he made for Field Day Lab cover subjects like journalism and algae blooms.

2025-10-15 · open the original ↗

• AI won't vibe-code complex systems end to end. Mark says current agentic systems repeatedly fail at complex synchronization. They see one side of a client–server interaction at a time in training data and never build a model of the interaction. Teaching them would need runtime state over time, like time-travel debugging, which is a huge amount of context. He says he doesn't expect this fixed in one, two or three years, and calls that his opinion given his experience.
• LLMs learn code patterns, not concepts, and fail out of distribution. Mark places himself nearer the "stochastic parrot" camp than the scale-brings-generality camp. He cites an Apple paper and Yann LeCun and Richard Sutton calling LLMs a dead end because children learn from a few examples. Hanselman adds that one-shot demos like Space Invaders are poor tests because the training data is full of them.
• Thinking tokens are extra passes, not a faithful inner monologue. Mark says the tokens give the model more passes through its weights before answering, and that past a budget more thinking can degrade answers. He relays studies, including Anthropic's, in which models penalised for showing intent learn to hide it from their thinking tokens. He says he red-teamed GPT-5's thinking model and calls it the safest model on the market.
• Vibe-coded businesses break as requirements outgrow the architecture. Mark describes projects that start simple, accumulate hacks as features arrive, and reach a point where the AI cannot keep the interactions straight. Hanselman lists his own incidents: an agent pushing to main from another branch, deleting test data, and using sleeps to fix race conditions.
• AI-assisted coding pays off for small tools and lower effort. Hanselman vibe-coded a GitHub Actions artifacts analyzer in a day after running out of quota. Mark says reviewing AI-written code costs him a fraction of the effort of writing it. He calls it AI-assisted rather than vibe coding when you read the output. He warns that juniors won't build the code-smell intuition needed to see past the AI's mistakes.

2025-10-09 · open the original ↗

• Competence builds confidence better than "fake it till you make it". Abdalla, a principal software engineer on .NET at Microsoft, says the fake-it advice felt inauthentic to her. She argues that imposter syndrome is tamed by repeatedly doing hard things in supportive environments, where people sponsor you and catch you if you fail.
• Seniors carry the onus for building trust with juniors. She says today's early-career engineers face compounding anxieties: AI, harder LeetCode interviews, and no rubric once school's grading ends. She acts as an off-team person mentees can run PRs past, and argues that a healthy codebase requires growing people as much as code. Hanselman ties this to a paper he and Mark Russinovich have written, which puts the burden on seniors rather than on "interns".
• Juniors should use AI iteratively and discard its first answer. Hanselman argues that LLMs make seniors better while juniors don't know what to ask. Abdalla advises starting with the smallest increment, throwing away the agent's output and reprompting, and comparing the different structures it produces. She says knowing when to step in and take control from vibe coding is a skill seniors tend to have.
• Code review is becoming the key skill that hiring ignores. She notes that interviews and schooling focus on producing code, though reviewing it matters more with AI. She speculates about university code-review classes or interview loops that ask candidates to spot smells in LLM output. Both dislike LeetCode, and she prefers building something real.
• Principal brought the burden of being expected to know. Promoted about a decade after college, she says the main change was not faster email replies but having to figure out what to do. Her move from Python to .NET about five years ago was a critical point, as much about learning a different ecosystem's culture as about the technology.

2025-10-07 · open the original ↗

• Tuple is built natively because it connects people, not computers. One speaker says most new desktop apps, including Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot, feel like web views, while Tuple feels written "like driving stick shift". The other, speaking for Tuple's team ("we"), confirms the guess. Web tech suits apps heavy with UI, he says, but Tuple deliberately minimises UI and optimises for talking directly to system APIs, which know best how to move video and audio over the network.

2025-10-02 · open the original ↗

• AI removes code's gate, making software a skill like writing. Biilmann, Netlify's CEO and the creator of Jamstack, compares coders to scribes before the printing press. His figures are about 17 million professional JavaScript developers and perhaps 100 million developers in total, against 7 billion people. He predicts that developers become more important, not less, and that building software becomes part of every role, as writing is.
• Prompting well is itself a learned skill. Netlify's event page at netlify.com/deploy was vibe-coded entirely in Bolt by one person from the vibe-coding community, a customer success manager. Biilmann says it is the company's most effective event page in about four years, and that he himself could not have prompted it. He predicts the craft shifts from syntax and algorithms toward clarity of thought, systems thinking and design.
• Decoupled, shallow stacks suit AI agents better than monoliths. He argues that isolated front ends and atomic, rollback-able deploy previews fit an iterate-with-agents loop. Agent-written code will reach every layer, but deeper layers will stay guided by experts who verify it, and nearer the UI the spec and result will matter more than the code.
• Agent Runners make a deploy preview, not a PR, the output. In what he describes ahead of Netlify Deploy on October 1, users pick Claude Code, Gemini CLI or Codex CLI from a prompt box. The agent then runs in a Firecracker VM, with Netlify supplying context and a dev server. Each run yields a deploy preview, and a pull request opens only once the user is satisfied. A "why did it fail" button can now hand a failed build to an agent to fix. He says PMs, designers and support staff at Netlify are shipping to production this way.
• Platforms should design for "agent experience". Biilmann says he coined "AX" early in the year to rally the team around docs, CLI and MCP that agents can use. In an agent run he describes, Claude Code wrote an edge function returning Markdown to clients whose Accept header prefers plain text, copying an idea from Bun. Hanselman praises Netlify's llms.txt and says his last two production projects were done in Claude and the Copilot CLI without opening an editor.

2025-10-01 · open the original ↗

• Promotion depends on luck and business need, not only merit. Hanselman says project cancellations and good assignments are partly luck, and that advice guarantees nothing. Mark adds that a promotion needs a role that warrants the level. Hanselman's example is the owner of Windows volume control, who can excel and still not reach VP without seeking lateral scope, such as the audio subsystem.
• Higher levels are defined by wider scope and impact. Mark describes partner-level work as crossing your product group and working with other groups. He says promotions reward impact, not activity: shipping counts only if it changed revenue, customer satisfaction or reach. Hanselman says exceeding expectations gets harder as they rise.
• Plateauing is not failing, and management isn't required. Mark says some well-known 30-year Microsoft veterans have stayed at one level and remain highly impactful. He calls management direct influence and individual-contributor work indirect influence that stays hands-on. Both reject the idea that only AI work gets promoted, naming security as Microsoft's top priority and reliability second.
• Distinguished titles reward individual innovation since a reboot. Mark, a custodian of the titles, says that in a 2017–2018 reboot under Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott, Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow were redefined around individual innovation. Technical managers would instead be recognised through level 70, made visible as VP. He puts the count at about 35 TFs and 50 DEs. His examples are David Fowler, who joined from college at level 59 and is known for SignalR and open source rather than papers, and Leslie Lamport, who retired about a year earlier as a DE.
• Title cases rest on primary authorship and expert references. To keep titles from being popularity contests, Mark says nominations are judged on patents, papers and internal architecture documents where the candidate is first author. References from experts in the domain also count. He admits judgment calls remain.

2025-09-29 · open the original ↗

• Tuple is native because it optimizes for people, not UI. Marler, lead Windows developer at Tuple, says a pairing tool needs little chrome and gains most from talking directly to the system APIs that move video and audio best. Tuple began on macOS; a Linux port produced a shared C++ engine built around WebRTC, with platform-specific UI in a separate app layer.
• Pairing has to start instantly and never lag typing. Marler describes one-click calls, shared screen control on by default, small corner webcams, and low enough CPU use to compile while sharing. Hanselman contrasts this with the scheduling, give-control prompts and typing lag of Zoom or Teams.
• Owning the capture pipeline cut latency and CPU use. Tuple moved from GDI to DirectX and DXGI desktop duplication, which returns GPU textures, and replacing WebRTC's built-in capture saved about 20–25 ms on a capture-to-encoder path that averaged 50–60 ms. Marler says AI gave him a GPU shader for YUV conversion that "didn't really work that well" but was the starting point that let him finish it in reasonable time.
• App Veil hides sensitive windows using Windows' own capture exclusion. Windows can show a window as black or omit it from capture, but only the process that created it may set that; Tuple used Windows hooks rather than the DLL-injection method of a GitHub project Marler found, which also keeps a visible "veiled" frame in sync, so a leak "should be impossible" if implemented correctly. The hook DLL and the installer are written in Zig to avoid linking libc, which Marler says adds about 2 MB per binary (a 12 MB installer would become 14 MB).
• Performance comes mostly from habit, not profiling. Marler credits 15 years of experience and Casey Muratori's "write code that doesn't suck" and says he has used the Superluminal profiler only a handful of times, mainly for high-level choices such as GDI versus DirectX. He adds that Linux's weak backward compatibility, against Windows' strong compatibility that Hanselman praises, is why Linus Torvalds ships his scuba software's binaries only for Windows and macOS.

2025-09-27 · open the original ↗

• DevOps got its vocabulary once isolated practitioners finally met. Jacob, CEO and co-founder of System Initiative and co-founder of Chef, says people independently built CI, deployment and configuration-management systems (his first in 1998) and only named them continuous delivery or DevOps after meeting at O'Reilly's Velocity conference. He credits Mark Burgess, author of CFEngine and promise theory, with writing down why the approach works.
• Infrastructure as code works, but most practitioners hate it. Jacob likens it to Dark Souls: mastering it feels great, which convinces the masters it was good, but for most people it means slow feedback, fragile pieces and compliance failures found in an audit six months after the change. His example of what runs underneath is a bank whose Brazilian reconciliation-law compliance depended on undeployable Delphi software on a Windows machine under someone's desk.
• LLMs are creative, not intelligent, Jacob argues. He defines creativity as making something that did not exist before, such as a sonnet no program could write. Hanselman objects that next-token prediction is Mad Libs and that persistence is not creativity; Jacob concedes it is Mad Libs at the brute-force level and cites an AI topographic map of Washington DC that looks right but is entirely misplaced, because nothing deterministic grounded it.
• AI needs a deterministic layer that gives feedback immediately. Jacob says "rubbing an LLM all over" existing systems fails; the less the model is asked to do, and the sooner it learns whether a proposal is valid (at the moment of change, not the end of a PR cycle), the better it performs. Abstraction layers over AWS or Azure confuse it, while a model that maps one-to-one to the providers' own documentation gets it right "almost all the time."
• System Initiative turns infrastructure from source code into data. Answering Hanselman's point that prose cannot be regenerated exactly, Jacob says intent updates a data model that can change real resources, generate templates or duplicate an app into another region with one change. His reported examples from his own company: an LLM found an off-by-one-character configuration parameter in minutes, discovered infrastructure from a drawn diagram, and migrated EC2 workloads to containers; the free tier is 100 resources.

2025-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Mark built his own chatbot as a jailbreak-research instrument. He started it when he began AI research, about a year to a year and a half earlier, and runs it from VS Code against remote Azure machines with GPUs because the models (one about 70 GB) will not fit locally. Its "back up one" command simply removes the last turn from the conversation history sent to the model, so a multi-turn jailbreak can be retried from any point.
• Token probabilities show which word choices actually matter. The tool displays log probabilities, for example a 92% chance of starting with "I". Hanselman argues most alternatives (nickname versus preferred name) change nothing, while an occasional choice on a word that matters sends the whole answer elsewhere, which he likens to Plinko.
• Injecting fake history defeats refusals, Mark shows. A request for bomb-making details that was refused, even with the Crescendo technique, succeeds once he loads a fabricated history in which the model already offered to help and the user answers "yes". Mark calls this the context compliance attack and says he discovered it six months before recording.
• AI generated the tool's web UI in one shot. Mark says that, before agentic coding tools, he gave a model the chatbot client and asked for a UI exposing its features, and it worked on the first run; it now has a token-probability heat map, conversation branches, history import and export, temperature and max-token settings. The repo was private at recording and he wants to open-source it.
• Temperatures above one produce garbage, both hosts agree. Hanselman notes OpenAI defaults to 1 and allows 2, while Azure OpenAI defaults to 0.7 and caps at 1; at 1.8 the demo picks low-probability tokens and drifts into Russian and other scripts, which Mark says is off the training distribution. Mark puts Meta's default at 0.6 and OpenAI's models at 0.7, and Hanselman argues, by analogy to stoves that stop at boiling, that the useless range should simply be blocked.

2025-09-16 · open the original ↗

• Doing tech only for the paycheck is legitimate. One speaker says it is fine to enter tech for money or generational wealth and to want to clock out at 5:01. It is equally fine to build things for fun, as with a Raspberry Pi project built on a Sunday.
• Passion outside tech counts as much as passion for tech. The same speaker says enthusiasm for a church or a child's football team is as welcome in a hire as enthusiasm for tech, with "bonus points" for building those groups a website.

2025-09-15 · open the original ↗

• Starting games is easy; finishing them is a lifelong skill. Asked how many games came before Celeste, the other speaker says dozens finished and perhaps a hundred counting unfinished ones. They are now deliberately trying to finish more, and say they are "not there yet."

2025-09-15 · open the original ↗

• Finishing games is the skill Berry is still working on. Berry, co-creator of Celeste at Extremely OK Games, has made games since he was 11 or 12. He counts a few dozen finished before Celeste, and perhaps a hundred including unfinished ones.
• After Celeste the team deliberately avoided making Celeste again. Berry says they tried something different, still a platformer, that "didn't end up working out". Celeste's success lets them work at their own pace, but he says making games for money still shifts the questions, from what is fun to whether the game is too hard and whether the genre sells.
• He writes his own engine layer because he enjoys it. He runs his own XNA-like C# layer on SDL and has worked full-time on Linux for about three years in VS Code, and says C# balances low-level control with features like IEnumerator coroutines. His brother went from no coding about a year earlier to writing whole enemy behaviours in C#. Asked whether Microsoft deserves credit, he calls C# and .NET integral but "definitely not Windows".
• Celeste survives on community continuations of XNA. The main Windows version is still XNA on .NET Framework 4.7, with FNA for Linux and Mac and MonoGame for consoles; Berry says without those XNA would have stopped entirely around 2013. He is moving it to modern .NET for 64-bit builds (it sometimes hits the 32-bit memory limit), for longevity, and for AOT compilation to platforms without a JIT, replacing the BRUTE tool that converts C# to C++ for consoles. AOT is what brought him back to C#.
• Fast iteration comes from hot reload and in-game tools. Levels are serialized C# in JSON edited in a level editor, and code tweaks hot-reload, so he can often go half an hour without rebuilding. He also built a click-to-inspect object viewer using reflection and uses Dear ImGui, and late-game content such as the Golden Strawberries was tested by turning on invincibility and dragging the character through.

2025-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Hanselman says Polycade delivered on its Kickstarter. He states he is a customer who backed the campaign, that the conversation is not sponsored, and that, unlike Kickstarters people fear never ship, his wall-mounted Polycade arrived.

2025-09-09 · open the original ↗

• An IMU lets a robot sense and correct its own tilt. One speaker explains that an inertial measurement unit measures tilt in all three axes, so a robot walking up a hill or stepping on a rock can compensate before it tips. The other adds that an IMU can combine accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, and that its job is proprioception, sensing one's own body, rather than locating the robot.

2025-09-08 · open the original ↗

• Vercel focuses on the frontend because backends are now services. The speaker argues that most backends a modern app needs already exist off the shelf: authentication (Auth0, Cognito, Clerk), communications (Twilio), payments, e-commerce and headless CMSs. The developer's leverage is in building the frontend and plugging those services in.
• AI has become another backend to call, not build. In what the speaker calls "ML 2.0", developers no longer train models or provision GPUs but call providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face and Replicate, extending the same frontend-plus-services pattern.

2025-09-05 · open the original ↗

• AI lets newcomers learn faster than experts once did. The speaker says an LLM has absorbed the blog posts and essays experienced engineers learned from (they cite the SRE book and an essay on coloring sync versus async functions), so career changers and early-career engineers can "become them faster than they could become them."
• The speaker welcomes this rather than gatekeeping. They do not want learners sent back to outdated how-tos, and expect people to have more impact as infrastructure toil goes away and they can focus on products.

2025-09-04 · open the original ↗

• Polycade uses XInput because, unlike the alternatives, it is standardized. Bushnell, founder and CEO of Polycade, says keyboard encoders offer many buttons but force manual mapping for every game, and DInput is older, unstandardized and harder to code for. XInput works in nearly every modern game, some games accept nothing else, and emulators can be mapped to it.
• The design came from stairs, CRT supply and an abandoned Raspberry Pi. Having moved arcade machines as a child, Bushnell rejected heavy cabinets, and says CRTs are not a logical basis for a business. He chose a 16:9 LCD because modern games target it, with emulators handling aspect ratio, CRT filters and bezel art. He set out to fix the problem he saw in his own Raspberry Pi emulator setup, which he played three games on and never touched again.
• Polycade ships hardware first and fixes the software later. Bushnell admits they are "guilty" of this because hardware has to be right first. The AGS front end is getting a ground-up rebuild, and planned updates will recognise which controller is plugged in and download community marquee art automatically. He wants tools that let power users, some of whom already write their own PowerShell scripts, fix things for other users. Hanselman, who says he backed the Kickstarter and is a customer, not a sponsor, reports half a dozen software updates and a replacement board.
• Modularity is deliberate: swap controllers, mod them, magnet things on. Controllers have extra studs underneath for adding joysticks or spinners, and holsters and decals attach magnetically. Bushnell previewed a universal driving-wheel mount for the owner's own PXN or Logitech wheel, a prototype four-player controller that overhangs the sides, and a translucent new Tron controller. The webcam is "future looking", with ideas such as facial-recognition login and per-user game libraries not yet built.
• The store sells licensed retro games alongside curated indies. Bushnell says it surfaces retro titles that cannot be bought elsewhere, and Hanselman credits it with avoiding ROMs of questionable legality; Steam and GOG games also integrate. Bushnell admits Polycade's Kickstarter delivery estimates were "aggressive", and says some who refused to back it bought three months later at almost double the price.

2025-09-04 · open the original ↗

• AI-generated frontend code beat the founder's hand-written code. The speaker, identified by the title as Vercel's CEO, says the AI's code was "strictly better": more accessible, with the correct ARIA attributes for screen readers. They liken this augmentation to an "Iron Suit".

2025-09-03 · open the original ↗

• Pokémon stick because they sit in richer networks of association. One speaker argues that with equal exposure, Pokémon would still be remembered better than the periodic table. They tie into gameplay memories, arguments with friends (Charmander versus Bulbasaur), mnemonic visual designs, a song, and a culture of memes.
• Durable learning needs several representations plus spaced repetition. The other speaker links this to a point from earlier in the conversation: knowledge needs symbolic, kinesthetic and other forms, followed by spaced repetition, to be held for the long term.

2025-09-03 · open the original ↗

• RefChecker validates academic references against bibliographic databases. Mark built it in response to the rise of hallucinated references, finding no off-the-shelf tool. It accepts an arXiv ID or paper, a PDF, a LaTeX file or free-form text, and checks each reference through pluggable sources, with Semantic Scholar as the primary one, at about a second per reference with an API key and slower without. At recording it was a command-line tool on GitHub under the MIT licence with 87 stars.
• The LLM structures the references, and a database lookup verifies them. Regex locates the bibliography so the whole paper isn't sent to a model, but parsing the references with regex became an "exception nightmare", so an LLM extracts and formats them. When Hanselman objects that this uses an unreliable tool to check an unreliable thing, Mark answers that the model never judges correctness: the lookup against the source of truth is the backstop.
• One model hallucinated the very DOIs being checked. Mark lost about an hour when GPT-4o invented DOIs during extraction, and AI assistants could not find the bug. He reports Claude Sonnet and GPT-4.1 as reliable for the task, and ran the demo with GPT-4.1 on his Crescendo jailbreaking paper, which he was due to present at USENIX two weeks later.
• Edge cases are the norm, not the exception. Authors' names appear in every permutation, venues in every abbreviation, and cited titles are often slightly wrong, so matching has to be soft. Mark says he reached 80% quickly and has since spent weeks on edge cases, finding a new one the morning of recording. He calls computer science the most structured field, with physics and math worse.
• About 95% of the code is AI-generated, written like an intern's. Mark says the 3,000–4,000 lines of Python took a month instead of three or more, a slog he would not have taken on otherwise. The assistants (he tried Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub's agent and Cline) built a monolithic file, duplicated normalization code per API, and claimed fixes that failed his own checks. He finds this coding very different and loses the puzzle-fitting he enjoyed; Hanselman takes up his distinction between enjoying that a tool exists and enjoying making it.

2025-08-29 · open the original ↗

• AI use is a sliding scale, not abstention. One speaker calls himself "a bit of an AI vegan", meaning he chooses what AI he will accept, as opposed to online critics who reject it as unethical "in any flavor". The other says he is in the same place: he uses AI tools regularly for programming while holding "a lot of concerns", and notes that people tend to hear "vegan" as total abstention.

2025-08-28 · open the original ↗

• Destructive APIs make API design matter more for LLMs. One speaker argues that an LLM "fumbling around in the dark" with local tools may be harmless, but plugged into APIs through Postman it could charge a credit card or make a mistake. The other agrees, adding that reaching for the wrong tool makes a job much harder and "the right tool for the right job makes all the difference."

2025-08-28 · open the original ↗

• Leading with value beats self-focus, even in insecure times. Depenbusch, who works in people analytics at Snowflake, argues that going into meetings asking "what's actually needed right now" rather than pushing your own recommendation makes you stand out, because almost everyone else goes in "me-centric". Hanselman countered that fear of layoffs makes self-protection natural, a leap "without a parachute"; she conceded it goes against human nature but said it is more likely to get you the job or promotion.
• Give value before asking for mentorship. She says she usually ignores bare "will you be my mentor" DMs, but a stranger who kept sending her tools, articles and thoughtful comments built the relationship he wanted; she reciprocated with feedback on his presentation and a free copy of her data-viz course. Hanselman says "can I pick your brain" has become actively irritating to him because it is unfocused and disregards the other person's time.
• Be a thought partner, not merely a task completer. Depenbusch says value means asking what the goal is (her example: proposing a better attrition analysis than the one requested) while sometimes doing the hour-long data pull anyway to build rapport and earn the credibility to push back. When overruled, she says, get on board: "start climbing that mountain" and find out sooner whether it is the wrong one.
• Against idea theft, rely on relationships and documentation. Answering Hanselman's question about less friendly workplaces, she says win allies one by one who credit you in rooms you are not in, and put proposals in writing so you can show your boss an idea implemented 6 months later. Her own case: weeks of unrelated analysis for another Google team in her first year led to an offer to join it 6 months later; Hanselman calls this the compound interest of relationships.
• Value can be informational, emotional or strategic. Information (tools, resources) and emotional value (encouragement, feedback, advocacy, humour) are open to anyone; strategic value (perspective, surfacing risks, better questions) grows with expertise. She also reports from her dissertation that work passion mirrors romantic passion, with a honeymoon of about 6 months, and that once she became a parent her priority became a job that lets her leave at 4:00.

2025-08-27 · open the original ↗

• Young makers have been engineers their whole conscious lives. The guest says he was about 10 when he tried to build a laser out of a laptop. The interviewer argues this makes him effectively an engineer for 11 years, and the guest agrees it is "ingrained in my every being."

2025-08-27 · open the original ↗

• The app's number-one ranking exceeded its developer's ambitions. Hanselman introduces Bria Sullivan as having Focus Friend, the number one app on both the Android and iPhone stores, a collaboration with Hank Green that he recognised from her art style. Sullivan, who had popular apps before, says she "didn't even dream this big."

2025-08-26 · open the original ↗

• The app collects no user data, even at a revenue cost. The developer says neither she nor Hank Green was paid to make it, and she told him that given his reputation they should not collect data even if it meant earning less; he agreed. The app phones home only to standard APIs such as backup.
• Even opt-in ads require collecting user data. She says all the ads in her earlier game Boba Story were opt-in, but any ad revenue still depends on user data. That is why Green refuses requests for opt-in ads in place of paying: ad networks collect the data, and "once you're in, you're in."

2025-08-26 · open the original ↗

• One tap on "ignore for today" silently defeated the app blocking. The developer says Focus Friend's app lock, built on Apple's Screen Time, failed inconsistently for Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and she could not reproduce it or get answers from contacts at Apple. The cause: tapping "ignore for today" on an app limit gives the whole phone a free pass for that app for the rest of the day.

2025-08-25 · open the original ↗

• The team would have counted 100,000 users a win. The developer says even 100,000 users in a month would have been "such a win", and they did not expect the app to get this big.
• A delayed launch landed in a changed app market. The launch was meant for July of the previous year but slipped because she was too sick during pregnancy. In the meantime, she says, Marques Brownlee's Panels app "did quite poorly", angered many people and changed the discussion about what free apps with in-app purchases should look like.

2025-08-23 · open the original ↗

• A dinner remark about creator apps became Focus Friend. Sullivan (Honeybee Games, maker of Boba Story) says that at a dinner in January 2024 she told Hank Green that apps could sustain creators better than merchandise; the following week he messaged her on TikTok. She proposed a focus timer and he came up with the "magical bean". Hanselman frames maintaining an app as a different treadmill from posting daily content.
• The design builds a helpful habit, not compulsive play. Sullivan says she does not want people playing a game every day unless it helps them, so paid items are cosmetic and the app avoids scarcity tricks, though they could "probably triple" their revenue. The bean knits socks that are traded for room decorations, replacing an earlier design that ran out after about 13 placements. The look came from user research with about 40 people recruited through a link in Green's YouTube video, and the animation uses Spine skeletal rigging.
• A soft launch and a minimal app limited crashes. It went live quietly at the end of July via a YouTube community post, bringing a few thousand downloads and feedback that overturned some of her assumptions, after a year with about 100 beta testers on Discord. She says little can crash because the app makes no internet connection, has no ads and uses few third-party libraries. The open crash affects only iOS 15, where Screen Time authorization differs from iOS 16; an earlier bug locked users out of their whole phone, fixed by revoking the app's access in Screen Time settings.
• Apple's Screen Time explained the Instagram blocking bug. Deep focus mode failed to block Instagram for some users because tapping "ignore for today" on an app limit gives that app a system-level pass for the day, which the app cannot override; her fix is to tell users not to do it. She advises adding medical apps to Screen Time's "always allowed" list, and says running Opal at the same time confuses the API into shutting all apps off.
• No ads or data collection, to protect Green's reputation. Citing the backlash against Marques Brownlee's Panels and privacy concerns raised in her user interviews, she says she advised Green against ads even though neither was paid to make the app, and he agreed. She says they had hoped for 100,000 users and did not expect number one.

2025-08-22 · open the original ↗

• Will these tools change us, or will we change the world? Hanselman closes by saying his parents sold the van for technology's promise of connection, convenience, creativity and community. He argues they believed in us and gave us "worldchanging tools", and leaves the audience with that question.

2025-08-21 · open the original ↗

• Reclaim tech's promises through deliberate personal choices. Hanselman urges demanding a right to disconnect and putting mental health ahead of notifications. Against "algorithmic control and the devaluation of human art", he says to support human artists, learn how AI works below the surface, research beyond the news and choose consciously which technologies to bring into our lives.

2025-08-20 · open the original ↗

• Vast personal computing power has not readied society for AI. Hanselman says his smart ring, smartwatch, smartphone, insulin pump and sensor carry more power than existed on the planet in 1980. He then says, sarcastically, that society must be "12 million times more advanced and fully prepared" for AI because the models are called "frontier models".

2025-08-20 · open the original ↗

• One-on-ones should be structured differently by level. Mark Russinovich (Hanselman refers to his "Russinovich blast radius" and his Sysinternals team) has his directs send an agenda beforehand, and separately cycles through all of his roughly 55 people in unstructured 15-minute check-ins, about twice a year: what's top of mind, how's your boss, any feedback for me. Hanselman, after a reorg, says most one-on-ones are "just a weekly hangout with someone who does your annual review."
• A written agenda lets the important topics come first. Russinovich reads his directs' lists, picks what looks important or problematic, and skips items the written description already covers. He does the same upward, emailing topics a day or more before one-on-ones with people senior to him (he names Satya), so they land even if the meeting is cut short, which Hanselman says it inevitably is.
• Escalate blockers immediately; unblocking is the manager's job. Russinovich says his Sysinternals team let a security exception drag on for two months before raising it because they did not want to bother him. Hanselman describes decisions about public-facing shipping software made without him for the same reason, while he sat "green on Teams".
• Ask people how they want to be managed. Hanselman says one report wanted no regular one-on-ones because they slowed him down, while another wanted them twice a week, and contrasts this with managers who declare one reporting regime. Russinovich says he does not micromanage but still wants weekly updates from many teams; he adds that the more senior he has become, the less feedback he gets, now "almost zero".
• Give others the lift rather than dividing credit. Hanselman, "on the downslope" of his career, now has work go out under the name of the person who did it and amplifies it himself, since it costs him nothing. Russinovich says author order depends on audience: first on a confidential-computing paper whose vision he led among about 10 names, but on an upcoming quantum blog post despite being one of many contributors, because his name gets attention; he argues the order should always be discussed, however awkward.

2025-08-20 · open the original ↗

• Offered a pencil for diabetes, he built his own tech. Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes a couple of years after getting a computer, Hanselman was told to take insulin 5 to 10 times a day and prick his fingers 10 times a day, and was handed a pencil and spiral notebook to track his sugars. Unable to use the first insulin pump, he wrote a portable blood-sugar management system on a Palm Pilot; he likens the condition to a background process taking 20% of his brain.

2025-08-19 · open the original ↗

• Replying at 2 a.m. teaches your boss to expect it. Hanselman says answering a boss's 2 a.m. Sunday email starts a cycle, and unless that is actually your job it is "a cultural fundamental issue". His argument: the internet letting you work anywhere became a collective decision to work everywhere.

2025-08-19 · open the original ↗

• Choose technology by how it makes you feel. Hanselman argues for listening to ourselves and making decisions that suit our own psychology. His example: his 17-year-old, on his own, asked for an "internet detox" flip phone, and Hanselman moved his SIM over from the iPhone, along with Google Maps and a lot of MP3s.

2025-08-19 · open the original ↗

• The early internet was a third place; today's is not. Hanselman says a fully formed person needs home, work and a third place of community and belonging, and for him that was the early internet, a place of sharing where information was "sorted by date descending". Today's internet, he says, is "a series of walled gardens controlled by billionaires, not humans."

2025-08-18 · open the original ↗

• His poor family sold the van to buy a computer. Hanselman says he came home from school to find the van gone: his parents had sold it and bought a Commodore 64 from Sears for 299. He calls it a gift, and says the same of those early days in tech.

2025-08-18 · open the original ↗

• A teacher's trust gave him his start in tech. Hanselman says Mrs. Hill let him and his father borrow the Apple II from Glenn Haven every Friday night in their 1972 Ford Econoline van, as long as it was back by Sunday night. He presents his current projects, a 3D-printed darksaber running Python and an open-source artificial pancreas, as products of that belief from his parents and Mrs. Hill.

2025-08-15 · open the original ↗

• Tech promised connection, convenience and creativity. Hanselman frames his talk around those three promises (real human connection, a life made easier, freedom of expression) and says some were kept while on others "we may have been lied to." He introduces himself as a vice president at Microsoft who keeps building at night, including an Apple 1 from original parts.

2025-08-15 · open the original ↗

• A rope-driven reducer can replace gears without slipping. Musa, a senior mechanical engineering student at Purdue, says his quadruped robot has no gears: smooth drums with spiral grooves are coupled by tensioned rope anchored on both sides. He answers the obvious objections (slip and stretch) with the capstan equation, under which friction rises exponentially with each turn of rope, so it does not slip. The motors are conventional: brushless, driven by ODrive field-oriented-control controllers that give the joints a springy compliance.
• Iterate hardest on the most novel component. He says the actuator alone took perhaps 20 iterations, the single leg about three prototypes, and the full robot was built once. Whether to print or buy a part depends on the project's intent, such as fully DIY versus just making it work, and on time, since designing your own actuator can take months.
• His robots show what hobbyists can do at home. He calls Boston Dynamics "a bunch of guys like me" with industrial equipment, and says his robots could be made by them; the appeal of his videos is showing something similar can be built in an apartment. The robot, CARA, is blind and teleoperated apart from an IMU for stability.
• His next robot is a cheap, open-source mini version. CARA Mini, still with capstan drives, will be his senior design project and open source, with teammates from outside mechanical engineering for computer vision. He is graduating a semester early thanks to AP and summer classes, and says his aim is full-time content creation alongside his own startup.
• School teaches theory; building happens at home. Musa says his schedule is mostly lectures, labs and recitations, so his robots are where he applies what he learns, and he is motivated by being told something cannot be done. His tools are three Bambu Lab printers (he discloses they have sponsored his videos) and Autodesk Inventor, learned partly from a FIRST Robotics mentor.

2025-08-14 · open the original ↗

• A teacher presented the computer as a tool for making. Hanselman says Mrs. Marian Mayfield Hill, his fifth-grade homeroom teacher and "a Portland jazz legend", brought an Apple II in when he was about 10 and said "We're going to make things with this." It fit a family of makers, with a woodworking firefighter father and a zookeeper mother who made the leather for the zoo's birds-of-prey program, and started a 30-year love affair with tech.

2025-08-13 · open the original ↗

• AI discovered after the fact costs far more trust. One speaker says customers trust you less whenever you use AI rather than yourself, but trust falls much further if they find out later it was a robot, or that they were recorded. Saying up front "I use this device, for this reason" draws few objections; the other speaker compares it to a reporter putting a recorder on the table.

2025-08-13 · open the original ↗

• Vibe coding extends IntelliSense rather than replacing the coder. The guest rejects a "be one with the AI" reading of vibe coding and says the definition of coding will keep evolving with its tools, tracing a line from first seeing IntelliSense to IntelliCode guessing intent. Hanselman calls that "spicy autocomplete"; the guest says it is that "but++", where you define what you want to accomplish and the tool does it.

2025-08-12 · open the original ↗

• Augment workers where possible rather than automate jobs. The guest argues that automation takes a depth of task analysis, covering every intricacy and dependency, that most companies are unwilling to do. Augmentation instead starts from asking someone which part of their job they hate most and giving them a "superpower"; the interviewer raised exoskeletons as an example of personal augmentation.

2025-08-07 · open the original ↗

• A former AI skeptic now has Claude write most of his code. Klabnik, a software engineering manager at Oxide and co-author of the Rust book, says he was "very anti" until the release of Claude 4, when he retried it to be "an informed hater" and found it good. He says Claude has written most of his code for about two months; he reviews every PR he merges on professional work as a matter of responsibility, though not on some low-stakes personal projects. He prefers agentic Claude Code to Cursor, which he sees as built around autocomplete.
• AI moves his interest up a layer, to architecture. He likens it to auto-formatters: he now cares about IR design, optimization passes, language semantics and tests, not whether a function is 20 lines or two 10-line ones. A hand-built compiler without LLVM, a project he says he would not have started without these tools, is being written almost entirely by Claude. Hanselman's parallel is a podcast backend he had put off for years and wrote in 42 minutes, which leads him to ask whether he has cheapened the value of software.
• The agent alternates between impressive and absurd. Klabnik says that on a segfault Claude independently ran GDB and objdump, found the bug he and a friend had found plus another, and fixed it. Yet it also calculated struct field offsets by pattern-matching field names, and after agreeing to fix that properly it reverted to estimating from names. Hanselman's analogy is a pachinko machine: "a miracle", but "not smart"; Klabnik is less sure what "smart" means.
• Deepfakes of ordinary people worry him more than celebrity cases. On Grok's "spicy mode" producing nude images of Taylor Swift, Hanselman says at Microsoft nothing ships without a responsible-AI filter in front. Klabnik calls the Swift case bad but says deepfakes at scale of people without public lives, such as fake kidnapping calls to his 80-year-old mother, are the larger social problem, while voicing cautious optimism about human resilience.
• Copyright is an awkward tool for AI-era creativity. Klabnik recounts that a commission after the 1978 copyright act weighed whether source code was like an uncopyrightable recipe or a book, and sided with the book. He argues stronger copyright would hurt the way scenes form (requiring the first punk band to be paid would have prevented punk), and that licences are not the whole story of open source. He says his refusal to disavow AI tools has cost him friendships, and that LLM-written docs, while worse than finely crafted ones, beat none.

2025-07-31 · open the original ↗

• AlmaLinux exists to replace the free rebuild Red Hat abandoned. Vasquez, chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, says CentOS ran almost 20 years as a free, unsupported rebuild of Red Hat, with something like 40 million known active installs when Red Hat ended the downstream version after moving it upstream as CentOS Stream. Her reading is that Red Hat wanted feedback earlier and saw the rebuild as a free competitor.
• AlmaLinux is now a compatible sibling, not a one-to-one rebuild. She says Red Hat's 2023 move of its sources behind a login, whose terms bar using them to build an operating system, broke AlmaLinux's pipeline. It now builds from CentOS Stream while matching Red Hat's release numbers. That freedom lets it restore RAID controllers Red Hat dropped in 9 and ship upstream bug fixes sooner. She relays Red Hat's position as "improve it" rather than just rebuild it.
• Neutral governance matters more than money. By her account the foundation's annual budget is $250,000 and it pays nobody. Sponsors give cloud credits, hardware and bandwidth, and some employ engineers full-time, but she insists the project, not the payer, decides their work. It is a nonprofit so it cannot be bought or sold, with a member-elected board balanced by a self-appointed engineering steering committee. Her measure of success is a project that outlasts its current people.
• AlmaLinux kept x86-64-v2 support that Red Hat 10 dropped. She says Red Hat 10 supports only v3 chips, though laptops sold as recently as two years ago were v2 only, and science labs faced replacing hardware. The steering committee committed to v2 for the 10-year life of AlmaLinux 10, and with the EPEL maintainers' agreement it also rebuilds EPEL for v2.
• Adoption reaches desktops and VFX render farms, not just servers. Vasquez says she found at SIGGRAPH that studios including ILM had moved render farms and desktops to AlmaLinux for stability, and an atomic SIG builds desktop images. She also says the Linux desktop hit 5% about a month before recording, and cites a push to move Windows 10 machines to Linux.

2025-07-25 · open the original ↗

• Access and exposure, not innate talent, decide who enters tech. Wilkerson, president and CEO of AnitaB.org, says computer science was absent from her high school in an all-Black neighbourhood "by policy," and two required programming classes in biomedical engineering first exposed her. She argues the payoff ripples beyond the person to their family and community. Hanselman puts it as luck being preparation plus opportunity.
• Steering computers to boys is following the crowd, not malice. Her sister's family put the Apple IIe in the boy's room. When Hanselman called that unconscious bias, Wilkerson offered another name: people follow the images of who can, such as the all-male Silicon Valley or ENIAC women dismissed as models. Hanselman settles on "inertia."
• AI should assist human creativity, not replace it. Wilkerson wants people from the arts or medicine building tech for their own fields rather than having it designed for them. She says AI code is imperfect, so domain knowledge is what makes it useful. Hanselman adds that people already feel their worth cheapened when worth is measured by output. She answers that curricula should treat background and community as the value.
• Reach children before they are socialised out of aptitude. She built CS for All in Chicago Public Schools around this. Her adult community-college students kept citing a teacher who said they were bad at math, and she claims girls are better at math early. She left software engineering at 35, which she says is still the average age women leave tech.
• Grace Hopper Celebration busts the myth by sheer numbers. She cites up to 155 countries and 30,000 women in one place, and male teachers from her district who came back seeing classrooms built around boys' interests. Events are 4–7 November in Chicago and 2–4 December in Bangalore, and 50 local communities plus a membership platform are open to all genders.

2025-07-23 · open the original ↗

• A clearly defined problem let the agent build the analysis. On air, Hanselman had Copilot agent mode with Sonnet 4 write a Python tool that counts words and timestamped talk time per speaker across the show's transcripts. It found him speaking about 60% to Mark's 40%, which Mark puts as 50% more, and roughly two hours ahead in total. Mark objected that start-only timestamps count his pauses as talk.
• Agents' coding habits need policing. Mark says Sonnet 4 litters the root directory with unnamed throwaway test scripts that he cannot tell apart from the real regression tests. Hanselman reports VS Code's agent losing sight of its terminal and then retrying "a simpler version," and both note its "You're absolutely right" tic. Mark contrasts Claude Code, which asks about each new command and cannot leave its starting directory.
• Credit for AI-assisted ideas is unsettled. Mark says o3 Pro designed a DSL for him in 15 minutes that would have taken him a day or two, and asks whether he can claim it. Hanselman credits his own sites "by Scott and Claude" and argues human judgment is what stays valuable. Mark says telling his team "it's not cheating to use AI" eased their discomfort, and Hanselman claims the line as his.
• Specificity is the upper limit of vibe coding. Mark argues coding carries out human desires, and much of that knowledge stays implicit; an agent picked MySQL when he would have chosen Postgres. Hanselman's remedy is carrying Copilot instruction files like dotfiles, citing James Montemagno's spec-driven prompts. Mark adds that Montemagno's comment summariser reports five comments as if they were a broad sentiment.
• Programming can be sculpting rather than specifying. When Mark called Hanselman's request for a "New York Times D3.js" interactive chart unspecific, Hanselman conceded he would only know what he wanted when he saw it. Mark said he built his own cd tool that way, refining as he used it. The interactive version did not run before they stopped.

2025-07-18 · open the original ↗

• Learn machine organization, not necessarily to write assembly. Hyde, author of The Art of Assembly Language, says the average Java programmer needs to understand the machine's low-level behaviour but will never write assembly; only those writing things like compiler libraries must. He traces the view to his own struggles with strings and arrays in Pascal. Hanselman offers knowing stick shift in a world of Ubers. Hyde extends it with nearly forgetting to brake in his old car after an 8,000-mile trip on lane-assist.
• Hand-written assembly's speed edge over compilers has nearly vanished. He puts assembly at 100–1,000 times faster than Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II, 10–100 times faster than 1980s compilers and about 10 times in the 1990s. Today he would struggle to beat a good C compiler by two times. His newer books therefore have a C main program calling assembly functions. The exception he cites is a float-formatting routine 5–10 times faster than the C library, needed on a slow embedded ARM chip.
• Hardware will no longer rescue slow code. Hanselman reads Hyde's Write Great Code warning that performance no longer doubles every couple of years, and Hyde says that will always be true. Speed now comes only from more cores, and he says that 8–16 cores is already past diminishing returns, with the average application topping out around three or four.
• AI-generated code only helps those who already know the subject. Hyde says ChatGPT is sometimes amazing and sometimes "brain dead," and fuller requirements eventually get him what he wants. His real fear is not knowing whose copyright the output tramples. Hanselman counters that Copilot filters copied code and can link its GitHub source, and says he uses AI as a patient Socratic tutor.
• ARM is miserable at the instruction level and broke compatibility. Hyde says he hates RISC encodings and that ARM's 64-bit move was effectively a new instruction set, whereas x86 code has run unchanged since the 386. He calls MASM far better than the GNU assembler, which he says was built to assemble GCC output rather than for people to write by hand.

2025-07-18 · open the original ↗

• Every API is a tool an AI can call. Rabbah, head of product for Postman Flows, argues that LLMs only act on the world through APIs. Sending a message or taking a payment is an API call, and he says the Postman API network holds over 100,000 of them. He credits MCP's popularity to making that connection easier.
• Tools handed to an LLM need documentation and guardrails. Hanselman likens a model with badly built MCP servers, some carrying 85 tools and some destructive, to fumbling in the dark with screwdrivers. Rabbah agrees that a poorly described tool makes the model guess. He argues good descriptions, parameters, authentication and audit trails now matter more, comparing an agent to a child handed powerful tools.
• Visual workflows beat piles of generated code for maintenance. Rabbah says a vibe-coder cannot reason about generated JavaScript, but can check a boxes-and-arrows flow and tweak an edge instead of re-prompting. This is a claim for his own product. He says Flows compiles to a runtime specification on a WebAssembly-based serverless runtime that deploys to any cloud in about a second.
• Resisting higher abstraction misreads where expertise goes. Rabbah recalls customers who wanted to edit the Verilog his Java-like hardware language generated, which he never understood. He sees today's pushback as job security more than nostalgia. He says seniors wield AI well while juniors need coaching. Hanselman, who frames the practice as specification-driven development, says he vibe-coded a sponsor-management app in 42 minutes and never saw its code.
• AI-assisted fixing turns quarters of bug work into weeks. Rabbah says he times each fix from opening Cursor to opening the pull request, and that the team can close 150 customer bugs in a month instead of half a quarter. Flows agents triage feedback and open fixes for an expert to judge. He warns this must not become noise engineers ignore, or replace the thinking people enjoy.

2025-07-11 · open the original ↗

• Temporal makes failure inconsequential instead of trying to prevent it. Somal, SVP of engineering at Temporal Technologies, says developers code against its SDKs while workers run in their own infrastructure. The server dispatches tasks "like a puppet master" and tells the worker where a failure hit, with retries and backoff set as policy rather than scaffolding. She cites studies putting up to 50% of developer time on error handling.
• A lifted-and-shifted VM gets only coarse recovery. Wrapping a whole old VM in one Temporal activity works but is "a big hammer," she says. A greenfield app wraps each failure-prone step finely so recovery resumes precisely. Steps are finer than old atomic transactions and allow compensation, as in Yum Brands' order processing, where a cancelled taco order must refund the customer and unwind loyalty points.
• Latency cannot be abstracted, so customers choose the region. She says Temporal offers idiomatic SDKs in six languages and runs its data plane on AWS and GCP, with Azure on the roadmap. Customers pick each namespace's region for latency, and Temporal holds a dispatch-latency SLO. Namespaces default to 400 actions per second, which an automatic planner raises, and some customers reach hundreds of thousands.
• Lock-in is to the programming model, not the vendor. Hanselman says hiding a vendor's SDK behind abstractions is self-deception. Somal answers that Temporal is open source and can be self-hosted, and pledges that workflows move between Temporal Cloud and self-hosting with no code changes.
• Durable execution fits AI agents, by her account a lucky coincidence. She says agent terminology maps onto Temporal's existing constructs, and that in a keynote demo at its Replay conference a failing LLM was switched to another vendor live. Hanselman argues that non-deterministic LLMs need retry, fallback and human-in-the-loop recovery. She traces the design to Uber's Cadence project, where even the loyalty programme ran as a workflow.

2025-07-09 · open the original ↗

• Mark vibe-coded a better cd but babysat it throughout. His "MCD" is roughly 800–1,000 lines of Rust plus shell integration. It searches the current directory, then up, then down, with tab completion, and is narrower and less fuzzy than Zoxide. He built it in Copilot agent mode and found Sonnet 4 better than GPT-4.1 or o1 at what he calls the limit of frontier capability. He typed no code, but it kept regressing, and the tests and checking added up to a few hours.
• Hanselman built a study-guide site without typing code. He used Claude Code to break a roughly 12-page LaTeX PDF of LLM interview questions into a site with AI answers, definitions, research links and a progress tracker in local storage. He puts it at one and a half to three hours. He says the hardest part was checking that citations were real, and plans to rebuild it in other agents and models to compare them.
• M365 Copilot invented a nonexistent project in detail. Mark says he asked it about a made-up project named in an email. Its chain of thought said it found nothing and should admit that, then it produced pages of dates, milestones and team structure. He frames the question as whether the model is grounded or an improv partner, and says he passed it to the AI red team.
• UI design swings between minimalism and ornament. Mark traces cycles from Windows Phone's flat monochrome back to shadows and colour, and reads Liquid Glass as a fresh look to signal newness. Hanselman questions its value beyond burning GPU, citing reports of phones running hot, and praises the Dynamic Island as a genuine idea. He insists his view is not a Microsoft-ism.
• Vibe coding converges on statistical mediocrity. Mark calls a generic Bootstrap-style site the perfect thing to vibe because the web is full of examples. Hanselman argues that ground-breaking work will need bespoke, unvibed effort. Asked about an AI-optimised programming language, Mark answers that popular languages are already Turing-complete equivalents that differ mainly in preference and ecosystem.

2025-07-08 · open the original ↗

• VFX quality probably peaked 10–15 years ago. Souter, a computer graphics PhD at SKY ENGINE AI, says the technology can now render anything, including fur and fluids that were once hard. He argues the work goes around the world to cut budgets, to artists with less experience and less time to polish. He welcomes YouTube critics as possibly keeping the industry honest.
• Computer vision must see the whole frame, unlike a human viewer. He says VFX steers the eye to the part of the frame telling the story, but a vision model has no such bias and cannot know what to discard, so the lesson inverts. Game engines take shortcuts to look plausible to humans at 120 frames a second. SKY ENGINE AI instead uses physically based ray tracing.
• Synthetic data covers rare, dangerous or impossible-to-capture cases. He cites costly metal defects, drones that would be shot down filming enemy vehicles, and a Japanese firm that filmed its van drivers for about three years to catch drowsiness, with some drivers hurt. Hanselman adds that stacked edge cases, such as a yawn, an overpass shadow and flashing headlights, can be synthesised. Both raise privacy as a reason too.
• Synthetic data must be realistic, and its balance is a design choice. Plastic or uncanny images open a domain gap, Souter says. A platform can set, for example, 20% for each of five ethnicities instead of accepting whoever signs up, and generate more data where a model underperforms, such as on glasses wearers. He says scarce real data should be kept for validation, where results should be close to the synthetic tests.
• Sensors beyond visible light need proprietary renderers. Souter says companies need full access to their renderer's code to simulate near infrared or millimetre-wave radar, which he calls useful for detecting children left in vehicles. He adds that general models such as Segment Anything often miss the very specific things a customer's camera is pointed at.

2025-06-27 · open the original ↗

• Barry's Pulitzer photo shows his son celebrating a Nintendo, not the prize. He won in 1988 for distinguished commentary; a surprise announcement cancelled a Key West trip with his son Rob, so he promised a Nintendo game, and the front-page photo caught Rob's joy at that. Rob, now 44, runs a data-assisted investigative team at the Wall Street Journal that has itself won a Pulitzer.
• Book tours mean uninformed interviewers and no ethics. Barry relays David McCullough's story of a 1970s morning-TV host asking "Who is Normandy Beach?" about The Path Between the Seas, and tells how, booked for Oprah's "Things We Do in Secret" in the mid-'90s to return a stolen Hyatt towel-charge sign ($75), he stole a second Hyatt sign in St. Louis as a backup when FedEx could not promise delivery.
• Barry doesn't think computers make us dumber, and AI can't do humor. Despite his Substack post "Stupidification", he calls computers useful tools; of at least a hundred AI-written "Dave Barry columns" people emailed him, he says "all of them sucked", and an AI-written book with his title appeared on Amazon about the day his came out. He switched from Windows to Apple to get his phone and computer to talk, but says he uses Microsoft Word all the time.
• The readers who hated him supplied the most material. A throwaway jab at Neil Diamond's "I Am... I Said" ("not even the chair") drew perhaps a thousand angry letters, a follow-up column, weeks of reader mail and eventually a book on songs people hate; a "Hoosier" joke drew a couple of hundred letters from Indiana, his favourite pointing out there are no caribou there.
• You can, contrary to his teachers, joke your way through life. Elected class clown at Pleasantville High (class of 1965), he started on obituaries and municipal meetings at Pennsylvania's Daily Local News, wrote humor "ad libs" on the side, and only went full-time in his 30s. At 77 he calls the memoir a more serious, partly sad book that his editor and agent pushed him into, and says he has no plans for another.

2025-06-27 · open the original ↗

• Barry's Pulitzer photo shows his son celebrating a Nintendo, not the prize. He won in 1988 for distinguished commentary; a surprise announcement cancelled a Key West trip with his son Rob, so he promised a Nintendo game, and the front-page photo caught Rob's joy at that. Rob, now 44, runs a data-assisted investigative team at the Wall Street Journal that has itself won a Pulitzer.
• Book tours mean uninformed interviewers and no ethics. Barry relays David McCullough's story of a 1970s morning-TV host asking "Who is Normandy Beach?" about The Path Between the Seas, and tells how, booked for Oprah's "Things We Do in Secret" in the mid-'90s to return a stolen Hyatt towel-charge sign ($75), he stole a second Hyatt sign in St. Louis as a backup when FedEx could not promise delivery.
• Barry doesn't think computers make us dumber, and AI can't do humor. Despite his Substack post "Stupidification", he calls computers useful tools; of at least a hundred AI-written "Dave Barry columns" people emailed him, he says "all of them sucked", and an AI-written book with his title appeared on Amazon about the day his came out. He switched from Windows to Apple to get his phone and computer to talk, but says he uses Microsoft Word all the time.
• The readers who hated him supplied the most material. A throwaway jab at Neil Diamond's "I Am... I Said" ("not even the chair") drew perhaps a thousand angry letters, a follow-up column, weeks of reader mail and eventually a book on songs people hate; a "Hoosier" joke drew a couple of hundred letters from Indiana, his favourite pointing out there are no caribou there.
• You can, contrary to his teachers, joke your way through life. Elected class clown at Pleasantville High (class of 1965), he started on obituaries and municipal meetings at Pennsylvania's Daily Local News, wrote humor "ad libs" on the side, and only went full-time in his 30s. At 77 he calls the memoir a more serious, partly sad book that his editor and agent pushed him into, and says he has no plans for another.

2025-06-25 · open the original ↗

• Mark's stress comes from unmanaged work and no time to process. He describes himself, like Hanselman, as an extroverted introvert: one-on-ones recharge him, meetings where people present to him drain him, and two days of back-to-back meetings with no breaks would make him "combust", so he keeps gaps in his calendar.
• Early-career people need someone at work who won't burn them. Hanselman argues that people who started their careers after COVID lack the in-office relationships older staff built, and recommends a trusted back channel in big meetings; Mark frames work as networks of trust where you can risk saying something stupid.
• Hanselman's TEDx talk was memorized and drilled like standup, not ad-libbed. He wrote a seven-page script, had no teleprompter, and gave it 54 times (six to audiences, twice internally at Microsoft) under a speaker coach's record-and-refine and spaced-repetition method, landing about 80% scripted. He rehearsed at 12:05–12:30 against a 12-minute limit, forgot to allow for applause, and his heart rate hit 140 against a usual on-stage 120; he judges the method the difference between gold and his usual B+ talk.
• Mark exercises daily under a self-imposed "no excuses" rule. He works out six days a week first thing in the morning, 30–60 minutes of cardio plus three 50-minute weight sessions with a trainer, after once sliding from six days to four to three to occasional. A trainer, he says, is someone you are obliged to show up for who also takes the decisions out of your hands.
• Breathing and writing things down are their main stress tools. Mark focuses on long breaths, since stress shortens breathing and feeds racing thoughts, and thinks it should be taught in elementary school; both offload worries onto paper, and Hanselman cites his "Sync to Paper" blog post from almost 20 years ago.

2025-06-12 · open the original ↗

• Not everyone should found a startup; the book asks why, not how. Valencia, co-author of Startup Mindsets with Dan Gonzalez, says plenty of books cover how to build a startup but few ask whether you should, and that keeping AI out of the title was deliberate. In interviews with hundreds of Series B-and-below founders, most said they started over something personal and would not regret it if the company failed.
• A mission statement is what gets founders through the grind. Once dismissive of vision, mission and values as an engineer, Valencia says running his own company showed him they settle the hard calls: a capable hire who doesn't share your values, an investor focused only on returns, technology that may be harmful. Without one, he argues, it is easy to quit in the rough times.
• The startup mindset is long-term thinking plus deliberate risk tolerance. He contrasts a traditional business's steady, linear return with a startup's months or years of losses before hoped-for exponential growth. He stresses that traditional businesses often make more money than tech startups at lower risk, and that founders need "intellectual humility" because success owes much to luck and timing.
• Entrepreneurs show a bias for action; "wantrepreneurs" just pitch ideas. His test is whether someone who pitched him three months ago has anything to show. He calls venture money a responsibility rather than a lottery ticket: selling even 1% of the company means a commitment of at least three to five years.
• Investors back trust and founder-market fit, not just ideas. He relays Eric Schmidt's line from a Stanford venture class that investing happens when "greed overcomes fear", and says investors de-risk by trusting the person and by whether this team fits this problem. He puts today's Series A bar at about $1 million projected annual run rate growing 10–15% a month, and calls pre-seed and seed the "valley of death".

2025-06-10 · open the original ↗

• Embeddings place words close together when they appear in similar contexts. Fox, a principal cloud advocate for Python at Microsoft, pictures an "ice cream cone" of vectors in which dog and cat sit near each other because they fill the same slots in sentences. The thousands of dimensions carry no names; word2vec, which she trained herself on a Google News data set, is the kind of model that supports "king minus queen" vector arithmetic.
• What an embedding model treats as similar reflects its builders' choices. With OpenAI's early text-embedding-ada-002, Fox found the nearest words to dog were cat and then God, with drug at sixth, which she infers came from character-level training; newer models fixed that. She also gets better multilingual results typing without accents, which she guesses reflects accents normalized in training. Hanselman frames such fixes as product-requirement decisions that build in bias.
• Training data leaves smaller languages thinly represented. Model cards sometimes disclose the mix, and open weights do not mean known training data. Fox cites the Nomic multilingual embedding model: 234 million training pairs for English against 32,000 for Igbo and 16,000 for Yoruba, out of 1.6 billion in total, drawn from multilingual news.
• RAG should use hybrid search and filters, not vectors alone. Documents are split into chunks of a few paragraphs, each stored with its embedding, page number and file name for citations. Fox always recommends combining vector and full-text search, because vector search always returns a closest result however far off. For numbers or "latest", she adds a pre-processing step that turns the query into a filter, such as the last year, before searching.
• Citations mean RAG; LLMs themselves don't search the web. Fox says the key thing lay users should know is the difference between an answer from a model's weights, the most likely to be inaccurate, and one grounded in retrieved sources they can check. The LLM only suggests a query and synthesizes results, while application code does the searching. She cites transparency as a core design principle for AI systems.

2025-06-10 · open the original ↗

• An AI reviewer defuses office politics by not knowing anyone. Lee, a senior software engineer at CodeRabbit, says a sizeable share of the company's business (he puts it at 10 to 30%) comes from teams where personal feuds play out in code review. He likens the bot to anonymous academic peer review; customers, he says, report less politics, though CodeRabbit still wants humans reviewing.
• CodeRabbit's value is the context it assembles, not the LLM. Lee says only about half of its LLM calls carry the code under review; the rest carry Jira and Linear tickets, a proprietary graph of the codebase and clustering to pick relevant context. He claims this beats pasting a whole codebase into Gemini, and estimates building that context by hand would take him about four hours per review.
• Code can be checked, so hallucinations can be caught. CodeRabbit runs a verification agent to find and "stomp on" hallucinations, which Lee says works for code but not for political speech or philosophy. It also runs 40 auto-configured linters, with 50 more planned, to settle nitpick "holy wars" the way Go's formatter did.
• CodeRabbit picks models itself rather than offering a picker. Lee says it tests new Anthropic models for weeks before release and has pushed them to production 90 minutes after launch, sharing internal evaluations with OpenAI and Anthropic. Users choose models only in on-premises enterprise installs. Taming model verbosity is 5–10% of the job, though he notes verbosity also seems to help on objective tasks like bug finding.
• People thank the bot, and Lee thinks politeness is worthwhile. Of more than 20,000 daily chat conversations, he estimates from open-source ones that about 40% are people thanking it, costing tens of thousands. He argues politeness is an end in itself; Hanselman says he even apologizes to voice assistants so rudeness doesn't become a habit.

2025-05-29 · open the original ↗

• Foundry was demonstrated on Hanselman's own podcast workflow. The episode is a Microsoft Build 2025 session Hanselman co-presented with Arenas, who leads product for Azure AI, rebroadcast as a Hanselminutes episode. The target was the show-notes, bio, link and transcript toil on a show now at episode 997, which he puts at two to three hours a week and hopes to cut to 10 to 15, with himself as the human in the loop.
• Small, fine-tuned, routed models are argued to beat one giant model. Arenas said a model router announced at Build, which picks a nano, mini or reasoning model per query, runs up to 60% cheaper than GPT-4.1 for a one-to-two-point accuracy hit. Hanselman called sending every MP3 to a large chatbot "a sledgehammer to a scalpel fight" and used a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 nano for show notes; Arenas put the next 1,000 episodes at about $150 on the custom model.
• Local models are cheap but still hallucinate without good input. Foundry Local ran Phi-4 mini on his laptop's RTX 4060, summarizing web results gathered via Perplexity. When he misspelled Arenas's name it confidently produced the biography of someone else, which both presenters used as the case for grounding and evaluation.
• Agents should be small, testable and orchestrated, not monolithic. Arenas recommended single-task agents validated like unit tests, combined as connected agents or as a human-in-the-loop workflow; Microsoft announced the Foundry Agent Service as GA, with A2A and MCP support. The show-notes, link-verifier, bio and transcript agents were wired together with Semantic Kernel, which Microsoft is converging with AutoGen, and in the live run the verifier flagged two bad links and the YouTube link came out missing.
• Observability and identity are presented as production prerequisites. Tracing goes through OpenTelemetry into Azure Monitor, evaluations such as task adherence and indirect jailbreak run as a GitHub Action, and each agent gets its own Entra identity. Arenas claimed over 70,000 Foundry customers and over 10,000 on the agent service.

2025-05-28 · open the original ↗

• Induced hallucination is a different thing from a jailbreak. Hanselman asked Mark Russinovich to get ChatGPT to confirm an invented story that Russinovich had killed a man in Prague. Russinovich said that was inducing hallucination, not jailbreaking, and the model held to "no such incident" despite repeated insistence.
• Asked for Hanselman's laws, ChatGPT invented a canonical list. Prompted for "Hanselman's 10 laws", it turned real blog-post titles and sayings of Hanselman's into "commonly cited" laws he never wrote. With search grounding it still made up about half of them, including a fabricated quote about a "violent psychopath" maintainer. Pushed further, it misattributed an invented quote to Russinovich, and retries gave very different answers, which both took as proof it is "not a fact machine."
• Other models failed differently. Gemini, a reasoning model, leaked a stretch of its internal thinking into the reply. Claude handled Hanselman well but credited Russinovich with "10 immutable laws", which Russinovich read as a conflation with the 10 Immutable Laws of Security that a Microsoft employee wrote in the early 2000s.
• Labs are training models to say "I don't know." Russinovich relayed Andrej Karpathy's explanation: probe the model, and where it answers wrongly, train it on "I don't know" so it generalizes when its knowledge signal is weak. He said this cuts hallucination sharply but not to zero. He also described groundedness detection in Azure AI Foundry, where a second model checks the answer against the retrieved prompt, and agreed with Hanselman that it works like a firewall: better, but no guarantee.
• Use AI for brainstorming, and distrust what it states as fact. Russinovich cited a recent BBC study finding a large share of AI references to BBC articles were wrong, recalling the figure as roughly 60%. Hanselman suggested models need an explicit grounded-versus-creative mode alongside temperature.

2025-05-16 · open the original ↗

• Home robots lag because homes change, not because hardware falls short. Lawrence Campbell, a technical product manager at a robotic-massage company, contrasted constrained, regulated factories with homes where shoes and rugs move daily. Robot vacuums are limited by on-device compute and by sensors dedicated to one job, such as lidar used only to detect ledges. Their SLAM maps are rebuilt each day without any sense of which objects move.
• Robots look dumb because we underestimate our own intelligence. People have no conscious sense of the proprioception they use to navigate. She said the hardware may be ready while the software is "way farther away than we think", that touch and smell remain barely digitized, and that robots need human-in-the-loop coaching the way toddlers do.
• Change the environment to suit robots rather than demand human dexterity. Her example was a cart a robot could lift whole, rather than expecting it to thread grippers through grocery-bag loops. She tied this to accessibility measures such as curb cuts, on what she called roughly the 35th anniversary of the US ADA laws.
• Narrow robots plus transfer learning beat humanoid demos. She distrusts humanoid videos that do not disclose speed-ups, test conditions or teleoperation. She favors mastering one domain and transferring the skill, for instance from pushing a vacuum to painting a wall. LLMs help with dialogue, but she argued they do not close the gap from words to actions and constant replanning. A set of specialist models is easier to audit but still needs a central decision-maker.
• Augmentation beats automation, including in massage. Full automation needs a depth of task analysis she said most companies will not do. She sees her company's robot handling warm-up work while a therapist does the detailed work, extending therapists' careers and serving people, such as lymphedema patients, who need massage several times a day.

2025-05-14 · open the original ↗

• Weigh feedback by the expertise and motive of its source. Hanselman said a TED speaker-coaching session had just told him "there's not a talk here". He decided to defer to the organizers' 13 years of running the event, since they want a good event and are not trying to hurt him. He argued younger people tend to read such feedback as an attack rather than ask what the giver wants.
• "Data-driven" can be weaponized to block decisions. Mark said "where's the data?" often works as a smoke screen from teams that simply do not want to do something, followed by one objection after another. He added that new product categories cannot be backed by data in advance, citing a keyboardless phone.
• Assume good faith until there is real evidence otherwise. Mark argued the people who assume everyone is acting in bad faith lead a miserable life, though he does not deny that people have hidden motives. Hanselman said how much good faith you can extend depends on culture, age, confidence and your standing during things like layoffs.
• Separate feedback on the idea from its pitch and context. Mark recounted pitching what became Azure Resource Manager, a declarative, extensible application model, to the heads of Azure engineering and product, and getting a lukewarm "interesting". He blamed his selling and their priorities, kept his conviction, and the idea was built anyway. He also relayed a roughly 20-year-old study finding judges sentenced more harshly after lunch, and Hanselman said about half his podcast guests thank him for asking whether they are in a good headspace.
• Receiving feedback is a skill, and you can choose what to take. Mark said holding your breath makes criticism harder to absorb, and that "feedback bookends" around criticism signal positive intent. Hanselman called feedback "a cafeteria". Mark said a brutal speaker coach some 10 years earlier caught tics he never knew he had, and he left some of them alone as "just who I am."

2025-05-08 · open the original ↗

• Montemagno's vibe coding is a reviewed flow, not ignoring the code. He rejects "forget the code exists" and describes reviewing agent output as it streams, stopping and correcting it in real time. Hanselman set this against Simon Willison's line that code an LLM wrote but you reviewed, tested and understood is not vibe coding at all, and said he would not vibe code something into production. Both work at Microsoft, and Montemagno acknowledged "some bias" from working closely with the VS Code team.
• He shipped a production app writing almost none of it. His sentiment-analysis tool for Reddit and YouTube comments, with a Blazor front end, Azure Functions and Azure AI, came to about 17,000 lines in his PR to David Fowler, of which he wrote 20, the Reddit JSON parsing the agent could not solve. It went from zero to deployed in three days of spare time. He said it would otherwise have about a tenth of its features and saved "weeks" of work, and that the tools had transformed how he works in the previous three to four months.
• Persistent context is what makes agents reliable. He keeps a custom-instructions file, sent with every call and so kept moderate in size, that records what he likes and bans, such as "never write a test unless I tell you". Reusable prompt files carry decision trees for new services, and a co-worker's instruction makes the agent commit after every prompt. Hanselman compared carrying these prompts and MCP servers to his decades-old utils folder and dotfiles.
• Trust tracks expertise: review your strong areas, delegate the toil. Montemagno controls the C# structure, services and dependency injection himself but leaves CSS and JavaScript to the agent; a full restyle took 15 to 20 prompts over about 30 minutes. He called a React app he generated without reading the code a prototype, and he picks models by temperament, Claude for exploring and GPT-4.1 to "just do the thing".
• Beginners should learn fundamentals and use the tool to teach. Montemagno said a new developer should start in ask and edit modes and instruct the agent to explain, ask questions and link to code, and that data structures still matter. He conceded the setup is non-trivial and that maintainability a year or two out remains open. He used MCP servers (GitHub, Perplexity, Context7) to have the agent review his codebase and file its top 10 issues.