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Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been their most useful public-facing initiative since 1971 and a cornerstone of the public internet since 1997. In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including t...

Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025 . Voxtral Realtime - official name Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 - is the open weights (Apache-2.0) model, available as a 8.87GB download from Hugging Face . You can try it out in this live demo - don't be put ...

I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it turns out publishing Go binaries to PyPI means any Go binary can be just a uvx package-name call away. sqlite-scanner sqlite-scanner is my new Go CLI tool for scanning a filesystem for SQLite databa...

Introducing Deno Sandbox Here's a new hosted sandbox product from the Deno team. It's actually unrelated to Deno itself - this is part of their Deno Deploy SaaS platform. As such, you don't even need to use JavaScript to access it - you can create and execute code in a hosted sandbox using their deno-sandbox Python library like this: export DENO_DEPLOY_TOKEN= " ... API token ... " uv run --with deno-sandbox python Then: from deno_sandbox import DenoDeploy sdk = DenoDeploy () with sdk . sandbox ....

I just sent the January edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . In the newsletter for January: LLM predictions for 2026 Coding agents get even more attention Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw went very viral Kakapo breeding season is off to a really strong start New options for sandboxes Web browsers are the "hello world" of coding agent swarms Sam Altman addressed the Jevons paradox for software engineering Model...

This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...] The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It's important, but in a way it's a receipt. It's a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it's also a mar...

Introducing the Codex app OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills , and Automations for running scheduled tasks. The app is built with Electron and Node.js. Automations track their state in a SQLite database - here's what that looks like if you explore it with uv...

A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed. I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day. In a first for me, they decided to send a photographer, Jason Henry, to my home to take some photos for the piece! That's my grubby laptop screen at the top of the story (showing this post on Moltbook). There's a photo of me later in the story too, though sadly not one of the ones that Jason...

TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer it. Use their Docker Compose configuration Answering all of those questions Running administrative commands Setting up a Telegram bot Accessing the web UI Running commands as root Here's a screenshot of the web UI that this serves on localhost: Tags: ai , docker , til , generative-ai , llms , ai-agents , openclaw

Originally in 2019, GPT-2 was trained by OpenAI on 32 TPU v3 chips for 168 hours (7 days), with $8/hour/TPUv3 back then, for a total cost of approx. $43K. It achieves 0.256525 CORE score, which is an ensemble metric introduced in the DCLM paper over 22 evaluations like ARC/MMLU/etc. As of the last few improvements merged into nanochat (many of them originating in modded-nanogpt repo), I can now reach a higher CORE score in 3.04 hours (~$73) on a single 8XH100 node. This is a 600X cost reduction ...

Singing the gospel of collective efficacy Lovely piece from Matt Webb about how you can "just do things" to help make your community better for everyone: Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody started a group to get swift nest boxes made and installed collectively, then applied for subsidy funding, then got everyone to chip in such that people who couldn’t afford it could have their boxes paid for, and now suddenly we’re all writing to MPs and following the le...

Getting agents using Beads requires much less prompting, because Beads now has 4 months of “Desire Paths” design, which I’ve talked about before. Beads has evolved a very complex command-line interface, with 100+ subcommands, each with many sub-subcommands, aliases, alternate syntaxes, and other affordances. The complicated Beads CLI isn’t for humans; it’s for agents. What I did was make their hallucinations real, over and over, by implementing whatever I saw the agents trying to do with Beads, ...

The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot , renamed to OpenClaw . It's an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It's two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub and is seeing incredible adoption, especially given the friction involved in setting it up. (Given the inherent risk of prompt injection against this class of software it's my current pick for m...

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab , a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed to automate lighting and audio for live theater productions. I recently started following him on TikTok where he posts about his business and theater automation in general - Chris founded the Voxel theater in Baltimore which QLab use as a combined performance venue, teaching hub and research lab (here's a profile...

Datasette 1.0a24 New Datasette alpha this morning. Key new features: Datasette's Request object can now handle multipart/form-data file uploads via the new await request.form(files=True) method. I plan to use this for a datasette-files plugin to support attaching files to rows of data. The recommended development environment for hacking on Datasette itself now uses uv . Crucially, you can clone Datasette and run uv run pytest to run the tests without needing to manually create a virtual environm...

My blog uses aggressive caching: it sits behind Cloudflare with a 15 minute cache header, which guarantees it can survive even the largest traffic spike to any given page. I've recently added a couple of dynamic features that work in spite of that full-page caching. Here's how those work. Edit links that are visible only to me This is a Django site and I manage it through the Django admin. I have four types of content - entries, link posts (aka blogmarks), quotations and notes. Each of those has...

The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory Dan Shapiro proposes a five level model of AI-assisted programming, inspired by the five (or rather six, it's zero-indexed) levels of driving automation . Spicy autocomplete , aka original GitHub Copilot or copying and pasting snippets from ChatGPT. The coding intern , writing unimportant snippets and boilerplate with full human review. The junior developer , pair programming with the model but still reviewing every line. The developer...

One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch embedding-shapes was so infuriated by the hype around Cursor's FastRender browser project - thousands of parallel agents producing ~1.6 million lines of Rust - that they were inspired to take a go at building a web browser using coding agents themselves. The result is one-agent-one-browser and it's really impressive. Over three days they drove a single Codex CLI agent to build 20,000 lines of Rust that successfully renders HTML+CSS with no Rust cr...

Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence Kimi K2 landed in July as a 1 trillion parameter open weight LLM. It was joined by Kimi K2 Thinking in November which added reasoning capabilities. Now they've made it multi-modal: the K2 models were text-only, but the new 2.5 can handle image inputs as well: Kimi K2.5 builds on Kimi K2 with continued pretraining over approximately 15T mixed visual and text tokens. Built as a native multimodal model, K2.5 delivers state-of-the-art coding and vision capabili...

Someone asked on Hacker News if I had any tips for getting coding agents to write decent quality tests. Here's what I said: I work in Python which helps a lot because there are a TON of good examples of pytest tests floating around in the training data, including things like usage of fixture libraries for mocking external HTTP APIs and snapshot testing and other neat patterns. Or I can say "use pytest-httpx to mock the endpoints" and Claude knows what I mean. Keeping an eye on the tests is impor...