Kyle S. Johnston
@ksj.social
Uses ink for crossword puzzles. Views are my own; posts are never advice; links/reposts/likes are not endorsements.
how do you make workflows not suck as a team gets bigger it's just easier when people have access to things. but then there's risk with people having access to things i hate when people get blocked because they have to ask someone to do something, this is 10x worse now that we have agents
Came across this fantastic post by Slava Shestopalov randomly while looking for something else medium.com/design-bridg... In the usability & web tech class we used to teach at MIT with @karger.bsky.social I’d give a lecture on graphic design that included this, but this is so much better presented.
Optical effects in user interfaces
How to make optically balanced icons, correct shapes alignment, and perfect corner rounding
medium.com
If anyone can suggest a good "how I used Prime Agent" article, that might help me to understand whether to try it. I agree that an IPython REPL has better properties than a stream of markdown. I want to see how that compounds into a different user experience.
right now i’ve got it setting up SQL Server on Mac, and it’s written a whole set of helper functions & classes to rerun various tasks “code is liquid” Prime Agent is the full recognition of that statement
i think Prime Agent is likely a watershed moment, there’s a ton of overhang captured just by a better harness RLMs aren’t new, but no one’s made a coding agent based on RLMs for big problems, it seems likely that the ReACT pattern has been replaced by RLM
Such a brilliant idea to generate your own data and then do a dataviz piece on it 🤯 pudding.cool/2026/06/mow/
Why some people mow a lawn better than others
We analyzed 132,003 attempts to mow a virtual lawn efficiently.
pudding.cool
There’s something like a “responsibilities treadmill” in middle-age where if the quantity of your responsibilities increases by 75% and you maintain a 85% completion ratio you have the same feeling of falling short even though you got done 75% more.
Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.
I promise I was looking for the share button before I realized you linked my post @mcmullarkey.bsky.social I really liked this one. Provocative! buttondown.com/datadash/arc...
Coding taste is like depression
And we should stop pretending otherwise
buttondown.com
The core genius of the [neo]vim editor: medium.com/@mkozlows/wh...
Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim
Learning the lesson of vi
medium.com
Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
huggingface.co
Feels accurate: "...switching between LLM-assisted and manual work is jarring and uncomfortable, two very different modes of thinking, and it takes a kind of maturity and confidence to give yourself permission to switch." pydantic.dev/articles/the...
The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
On reward functions, dopamine, and what it actually feels like when the code starts writing itself
pydantic.dev
the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture, a graph theory problem that’s gone unsolved for 30 years, was solved with this prompt
Great comment from @patrick.risky.biz describing LLM guardrails as "reverse Clippy": risky.biz/RB845/
Risky Business #845 -- OpenAI's Skynet moment - Risky Business Media
On this week’s show special guest co-host Chris Krebs joins Patrick Gray and James Wilson to discuss the week’s cybersecurity news. They c [Read More]
risky.biz
On helpful parenting tip I discovered during covid is that a new lego set is always cheaper per hour than childcare.
I’ve been sent this lovely chart showing nested synonyms for popular adjectives without a source. Still worth sharing. I love it!
As a person who has lived in both Fahrenheit is simply superior. It’s finer grained and saying “three digit temperatures” accurately describes The Horror. The trade off of having freezing point be a big round number just isn’t worth the compressed scale
geoffrey 💀 (scary now)@parsnip.bsky.social · 4mo agoi will accept universal greenwich mean time if the rest of the world admits that celsius is a stupid way to measure temperature
Here @fil.rezo.net reproduces @climatecasino.net’s chart, using warped gridlines to represent both the absolute temperature and the deviation from the historical mean for each day of the year. new.observablehq.com/@fil/godzill...
Prof. Eliot Jacobson@climatecasino.net · 4mo agoBreaking News! Code: y-axis alert. Nino 3.4 SST is now up to 3.63 SD above the 1991-2020 baseline, about 1-in-7000 in the absence of anthropogenic warming. There's not enough room in a single post to express just how crazy this is. Please read: climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monst...
Breaking News! Code: y-axis alert. Nino 3.4 SST is now up to 3.63 SD above the 1991-2020 baseline, about 1-in-7000 in the absence of anthropogenic warming. There's not enough room in a single post to express just how crazy this is. Please read: climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monst...
I always liked Ben Evans. this is an especially good example of what a good version of Zitron's analysis would look like: axes of variation, how they could play out, this or that is more likely. as opposed to "I'm certain what will happen next despite having been wrong every day for three years"
Ways to think about token pricing — Benedict Evans
AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price,...
ben-evans.com
Taking a vacation with kids is like "hey, would you like to do all the same labor you do every day, but in a more expensive place where you don't have all your stuff?"
The love that professors I follow on here are showing student 22 in the comments is so heartwarming. Something I hope college students can internalize is how much love there is in the academy for student 22.
Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li@sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 4mo agoabsolutely insane story, and yeah, just looking at this chart... with the exception of maybe two people, this entire class was cheating like motherfuckers
Can anyone explain to me why downloading from Disney+ is such a challenge? Why should it take three days and then simply fail?
I've returned from my writing hiatus to bring you some research I did on determining an explosive play threshold. Using scoring-probability added, I found the yardage at which a gain starts acting differently in terms of its impact on scoring. Read it FREE on my Substack 🔗⤵️
Kyle (couldn’t find his bluesky acct) is grieving the flow state coding used to give him. I’m hearing this a lot, but not universally. Has anyone found good ways to use AI but achieve flow? www.tiktok.com/t/ZTSHq2ucE/
AI has stolen the parts of the job that allowed me to get into flow state. Has it done that for you too? #AI #softwareengineer
TikTok video by kyleshevlin
tiktok.com