"When I added the search feature I was thinking mainly of my own need to find things scattered across these buckets. But of course agents can use this unified search too!" https://blog.jonudell.net/2026/08/01/make-agent-memory-searchable/

Make agent memory searchable

The Bram binary now embeds SQLite with its FTS5 fulltext indexer and search engine. When you run Bram in a local GitHub (or GitLab) repo, here is what it indexes: – the JSONL session files wr…

blog.jonudell.net

“You’re only getting out deported or dead.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/30/ice-detention-center-camp

Don’t call them ICE detention centers. Call them camps | John Washington

I’ve spent a decade reporting on immigration enforcement. The word ‘camp’ best captures the political function of these facilities

theguardian.com

"In a talk at the Open Education Conference I cited open source software development as a model for observable work. Because the processes and products yield digital artifacts, anyone can learn how the work is done and — if motivated — become a participant.

"My family left Russia in 1917. My relatives left Germany in 1933. In both generations, leaving was called excessive; staying was the reasonable position. But an alarm that was right both times it sounded is not overcaution. On Thursday, it sounded a third time."

When I publish a blog post, a growing flock of idiotic bots pile on instantly. Fastmail's filters aren't smart enough to recognize this slop and route it to spam. There are so many useless AI features that nobody wants, that's one I would welcome.

Encouraging agents to be prolific writers and readers of trace logs is a strategy that keeps paying dividends. https://blog.jonudell.net/2026/07/08/dont-infer-behavior-from-code-observe-it-in-logs/ #claude_code #codex #logging #debugging

Don’t infer behavior from code, observe it in logs

Agents are hardwired to be prolific writers and readers of code. As my work on Bram progressed I found that their code-first instinct wasn’t serving me well. So I began pushing them to be, al…

blog.jonudell.net

"In the Before Time you could imagine a function that takes in event titles and descriptions and uses regexes and word lists to map an event to a category. But that was unsustainable. What we always needed, and now can have, is a function that requires no procedural code to effect that mapping."

If you need a coworking space in Silver Spring, Kaldi's Social House is the place to go. I have no idea if the story about the Ethiopian goatherder is true but I like to think that it is. #coffee

RE: https://ruby.social/@samruby/116871040624046701

RE: https://mastodon.social/@buttondown/116857701527883108 A little-known addendum: when Ray Ozzie became Microsoft's CEO he built LiveMesh on an RSS/Atom transport. https://blog.jonudell.net/2008/04/23/a-conversation-with-ray-ozzie-about-live-mesh/

"These humble commands — I love that perl makes the list! — always were the foundation of computing. That hasn’t changed. What has is that newcomers are running them, indirectly, as they talk with agents to summon software into existence. For many, the terminal is a foreign and hostile environment.

Can anyone see that miniature arch and not think of Spinal Tap?

I am really going to miss the Al Franken podcast.

"The reasoning layer owns intent. The control plane owns consequences. Seven factors for governing what AI agents do to enterprise systems of record." Excellent talk by Zayne Turner at Sonoma AI just now. https://github.com/workato-devs/seven-factors

GitHub - workato-devs/seven-factors: The reasoning layer owns intent. The control plane owns consequences. Seven factors for governing what AI agents do to enterprise systems of record.

The reasoning layer owns intent. The control plane owns consequences. Seven factors for governing what AI agents do to enterprise systems of record. - workato-devs/seven-factors

github.com

"“The agent has access to the payments tool” is not a useful grant. “This agent may move at most $3,000, to this payee, once, before Friday” is." https://blog.hello.coop/2026/06/anthropics-zero-trust-for-ai-agents-sets-the-right-test-the-bearer-token-fails-it/

A million deaths are already attributed to the USAID chainsaw, according to one recent estimate. When I read "world's first trillionaire" I mentally transpose to "mass murderer". #polpot #holocaust #elonmusk

"XMLUI turns conventions into contracts. Component metadata defines the allowed props; markup defines the reactive graph; framework-owned components manage resource lifetimes.

"We spend all our attention on what the tools can do. We’ve barely started on what running them does to the person doing it." https://joe.dev/posts/new-20pct-time/

The new 20% time, minus the time

Attention is replacing hours. But is it 120% time all over again?

joe.dev

"Rather than allowing slop to collapse the phase space of our imagination into a fascist aesthetic of sameness, we must build worlds that leave space for empty coordinates, directions to aim for that resist the behaviour of the dominant stories."

"When you externalize parts of session logs to a shared space where people and their agents can collaborate, multiple benefits accrue. For people it provides transparency and accountability. Decisions and tactics aren’t squirreled away in dot file on a per-machine-per-user basis.

This is the latest release of a new desktop app (Bram) that helps you make best use of git and GitHub for AI-assisted software development: https://github.com/judell/bram/releases/tag/v0.1.35

Release v0.1.35 · judell/bram

The through-line this cycle was the reliability of Codex driving issues through the full worklist cycle (propose → apply → commit → close). Exercising Codex end-to-end drove both the features it ne...

github.com

I don't know anything about Amy Grant or her music but I heard her on a radio interview and I thought this was excellent advice. "Stop looking for what you can't find. Figure out what space you're meant to occupy in the universe and then fill that."

Things are moving too fast to plan a sequel to Practical Internet Groupware. But this prompted me to think about it! https://github.com/judell/bram/issues/54 #collaboration #groupware #github #bram

Mirror design conversations into the GitHub issue that spawned them · Issue #54 · judell/bram

What this would do When a Bram session discusses the shape of a feature — proposing approaches, weighing alternatives, redirecting on specifics — that discussion is exactly the kind of thing that c...

github.com

The 75 mile stretch of Hwy 1 from Carmel to Ragged Point was closed for 3 years, now open since January. Who knows for how long this impossibly beautiful and vulnerable road will remain drivable? I figured don't wait, do it now.

Two lizards locked in a death struggle, neither survived. #lizard #gladiators

I normally feel sympathetic when I see a car with a parking ticket. In this case, not so much. #cybertruck #schadenfreude

It is cold comfort that, having created systems of inhuman complexity (smartphone settings for civilians, JavaScript bundling for developers) we can now throw inhuman intelligence at the messes we've made. I would rather apply that intelligence to novel challenges.

The community calendar pipeline was getting hard for me to understand, this interactive explainer helps. https://judell.github.io/cc-architecture/

Towards the end of this interview, Clive Thomson points to the coming boom in software customization. It's true that we have forever been ill-served by systems that we can't create for ourselves, nor afford to hire programmers to make for us.

Towards the end of this interview, Clive Thomson points to the coming boom in software customization. It's true that we have forever been ill-served by systems that we can't create for ourselves, nor afford to hire programmers to make for us.