October 2025 bakery
A record of what has caught my attention and ideas I've been thinking about this month.
Half baked
Some written thoughts, but not enough for their own post.
One of my favorite new things to do with LLMs is to get them to snitch on each other. Here's what I mean.
In tab one I'll open Claude and use its research feature with prompt:
Please create a detailed integration guide for XYZ api.
Once the report completes I open up tab two again with Claude and its research feature with prompt:
Please assess the veracity of this integration guide.
Which produces something like:
The guide contains mostly accurate information with three significant errors and two important contextual gaps. Of 13 technical claims verified against official XYZ documentation, 8 are fully accurate, 3 contain errors, and 2 require important clarifications about API context.
Followed by the exact items that could not be verified.
Raw
Naked links
AI
The idea that LLMs could be distilled down to just the thinking bits, without so much memorized context was interesting. Also enjoyed the end section on teaching and AI tutors.
Simon Willison
I like, "Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent. Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit.""
Simon Willison
Always a good read - I like the joy of yolo mode.
Even if AI makes developers 30% more efficient, that is a total game changer.
I work on this!
Really good vibe coding workflow demo
I started using Superpowers. It's very good.
Music
Their greatness cannot be denied.
Dear lord.
Software
Patrick McKenzie
Come for the talk on the CrowdStrike incident, stay for the dive into Tether and AI! This is one of my favorite Patio11 talks of the year. I really love when he reads one of his essays and interjects parenthetical remarks during the narration.
Patrick McKenzie
Not really software, but a great essay.
Good real talk.
In fact, we already have an excellent example of (deterministic) agents making micro-transactions at scale: the entire digital ads ecosystem! Every time a human loads a webpage, an awe-inspiring amount of computation and communication happens in milliseconds, as an auction is run to fill the inventory on that page with an ad that is likely to appeal to the human. These micro-transactions are only worth fractions of a penny, but the aggregate volume of them drives trillions of dollars worth of value.
Craft and beauty
Admittedly impractical and irrational objects.
If only I looked this cool when I reconfigure my development environment. brew install neovim just doesn't have the same theatrics as wielding a circular saw. But if you think about it, it is essentially the same thing.
Meticulous craft.
We have become a society of convenience above all else.
Politics
Member discussion