help me I’m addicted to social media posts turning 90s games into pastries. It’s got me DOOM scrolling

I hope the iPhone Duo supports Sidecar — the feature that lets you use an iPad as Mac’s external display. I currently carry around a MacBook Air and iPad Pro. Being able to use my iPhone as an external display would be a killer feature.

The fallacy of agentic coding is believing you don’t need to understand the fallacies of distributed computing.

Prototype in one programming language, ship in another. A great way to make state smaller, APIs more obvious, implementations simpler.

Coding agents are infinite state machines. Your job is to make them produce useful finite state machines.

Henry Ford supposedly said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Faster pull requests sounds to me like a faster horse. We need to find the automobiles for the agentic coding age, and master their manufacturing. royalicing.com/2026/faster-...

Faster pull requests are faster horses

royalicing.com

Markdown specs are a laundering scheme for decision-avoidance.

“Nothing is overdue.” A perfect example of how fewer features can make a better product. marco.org/2026/08/14/u...

Making informed decisions is the bottleneck, and you can use AI either to help make informed decisions, or clog the bottleneck with even more decisions.

Being a systems programmer is a bit like being a crackpot dictator Finally you get to run the state Only to be brought down by resource management

Reading “Steve Jobs in Exile” what’s surprised me most is how he doesn’t sound too different to the post-1997 Jobs from “Apple in China”. There’s still obsessiveness that leads to people endlessly toiling. It’s not until iPod on Windows that his approach seems to succeed!

(Someone looking at my PR) “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Fable-line”

Everyone talks about web scale but not enough people talk about web rotate

Is Google Gemini the Macintosh, Google Search the Apple II, Jeff Dean akin to Woz or Bill Atkinson, and Discovery Loop like General Magic?

QIP lets you write cross-platform components in Zig or C, which are imperative languages. But I love opening a file and seeing how declarative it feels. Here we see clearly what the memory capacity is and what the input/output types are.

Indispensable atoms of the computing universe: - Transistor - Datagram - TCP segment - Transaction - URL - S3 object - Token Each invention carefully draws a boundary around essential complexity, encapsulated as a dependable unit with a stable contract and clear failure modes.

I’m concerned our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy.

Here are the numbers running in Chrome to convert a SQLite table to CSV:

Patrick Smith@royalicing.com · 2mo ago

I’m exploring reading SQLite databases via custom WebAssembly vs using the official sqlite3.wasm

I’m exploring reading SQLite databases via custom WebAssembly vs using the official sqlite3.wasm

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask Claude what you can do for your country when you’ve been replaced by AI

If programming languages are said to be Turing-complete, are coding agents Turing-autocomplete?

Instead of primarily more code what about using coding agents to reduce state? Less state means fewer moving parts, fewer possible failure modes, and fewer bugs. The code will be easier to digest and understand as a reviewer.

Coding agents offer a reset of software orgs. Over years we’ve separated frontend from backend, devops, ux, etc. Zoom out and you’ll see latency, durability, consistency & simplicity are what makes good software. We can bypass silos that lead to these qualities being worse.

Getting excited by coding agents because they’ll let you write way more code is a bit like flooding a lake and getting excited because you’ll be bit by way more mosquitoes.

QIP Components: - Quick for AI to make & quick for users to run. - Isolated sandbox with no file system, network, or environment access. - Portable components that work identically on web, server, and native.

Agree with this. The everything upfront spec approach just doesn’t sense to me. I need to run and use what I’ve made to know to do next. youtu.be/IZRWzXjaXxM

Sculpt, not Spec

YouTube video by Scott Hanselman

youtu.be

What if the power of AI-generated UIs is not in assembling bespoke UI components on the fly, but in accelerating the user to navigate and knowing which parts to *remove* to help them focus?

AI coding agents can add more entropy to your project. The hard things are: - Adding value for users. - Removing entropy.

Bragging about your AI token spend is like boasting how much fuel you used driving to the gym.

The purpose of my software is to remove entropy from the world. A person uses my software and their life is simpler so they can focus on what matters to them. We do this by consuming a little electricity and a little storage space. This is design *and* engineering of systems.