August 2026
70 posts: 5 entries, 22 links, 10 quotes, 3 notes, 30 beats
Aug. 19, 2026
Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of “How AI is changing software development”. We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: “very minor edits to remove disfluencies”).
[... 610 words]My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users to safely extend it in many directions by having LLMs fill in the missing pieces. We can give our users super powers.
— Jeremy Morrell, Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task:
Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox. Explore what it would take to use this to run untrusted Python and JavaScript code in a way that is limited in what RAM and CPU time it can take up (protection against "while true") with no network access and filesystem access only to designated files
Goal is to be able to use this to execute user-provided tasks for things like data transformations
It quickly ran into a problem: the Claude Code for web environment can't run smol machines. Quoting the notes it wrote:
- This Claude Code container: Linux 6.18.5-fc-v20 (itself a Firecracker guest), 4 vCPU, 15GB RAM. No /dev/kvm, no vmx/svm CPU flags → no nested virt.
smolvm machine runfails as expected: "kvm not available".- Plan B: GitHub Actions ubuntu runners DO expose /dev/kvm → run the real test battery via a temporary workflow on this branch, collect logs, remove workflow in final commit.
And Plan B is what it did, installing smolvm and running these tests directly in a GitHub Actions runner against that branch.
That was a creative solution to the environmental limits posed by Claude Code for web. Another example of Fable being relentlessly proactive.
Aug. 20, 2026
Today saw the long awaited release of Bun 1.4, the first stable version since the infamous Rust rewrite a few months ago.
Interestingly, the Rust rewrite was downplayed in the release notes, which introduced a bewildering array of new features and claimed 2,900 additional bug fixes:
Bun 1.4 adds +1,517 tests from the Node.js test suite - our biggest jump in Node.js compatibility since Bun 1.0. Bun v1.4 also fixes over 2,900 issues. It reduces idle CPU usage by 5x, reduces memory usage by up to 35%, and starts 50% faster on Linux. It adds
Bun.Image,Bun.WebView,Bun.markdown,Bun.cron(),Bun.Terminal,bun run --parallel,bun test --parallel,bun audit fix,bun dedupe, andbun prune. And it rewrites Bun from Zig to Rust.
Of these the one that most caught my eye was Bun.WebView, which adds first class support for browser automation to Bun core using either macOS WebKit or control of a local Chromium process via the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP).
I had Claude Code for web build a prototype of a web API providing the ability to load a web page and then execute JavaScript against it, inspired by my shot-scraper javascript CLI tool - partly to see how much RAM would be needed by such a service.
Here's that TypeScript server implementation, which appears to need a 192MB-256MB container to run a full Chrome against complex web pages - tested using cgroups.
ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale. Promptwatch is part of the emerging "GEO" space, for Generative Engine Optimization - the chatbot version of SEO, where companies offer tools and consulting to help your site increase its presence in replies to prompts inside tools like ChatGPT.
The Promptwatch product uses automation to track responses to prompts across end-user chat products like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. They publish aggregate reports on this as part of their own content marketing strategy, which do seem to provide credible hints as to otherwise invisible design changes to those products.
Their own tracking shows a notable change aligned with the GPT-5.6 rollout earlier this month:
The percentage of all ChatGPT Search fanout queries that contain the site:operator, per day. The share hovered between 0.3% and 0.5% for weeks, dipped briefly to 0.15% on August 3 to 5 (consistent with a staged rollout or pre-launch experiment), then jumped to 16-17% on August 8.
It's important to note that these figures only reflect the prompts for which they have automated tracking enabled.
This corresponds to OpenAI's somewhat vague August 6th announcement:
For Plus and Pro users, we’re updating GPT‑5.6 Sol in Chat to be more reliable with facts and provide more focused answers.
Once again I am hampered by OpenAI's decision to actively obscure their system prompts, but from poking at ChatGPT I believe their latest search tool has a shape like search(query, recency, domains) rather than encouraging a site: operator directly.
In a follow-up on August 18th Promptwatch reported that ChatGPT appeared to have greatly reduced the likelihood of Reddit being used in those searches. My own attempts to ascertain if the system prompt has been updated to discourage Reddit sourcing have been unsuccessful - the most thorough leaked system prompt collection I know of doesn't yet show any relevant changes.
Aug. 21, 2026
After I released version 1.0, I figured I would have to do the rotations myself. So I sat down with ChatGPT and I didn’t get it to write the code, but I got it to educate me. With a patient, interactive tutor, I was able to finally do what I hadn’t by reading books and asking mathematician friends – I learnt how to use quaternions just enough to make the app work.
So learning doesn’t stop just because I outsource a bunch of thinking to AI. It pushes me to learn more. I like that as an outcome.
— Matt Webb, Galactic Compass 2: now with new augmented reality mode
Stop Making TUIs. Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing.
I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March, and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.
I'm not habitually knocking out real UIs for my other projects yet, but I'm running out of excuses!
Thomas:
If you haven’t tried your hand at turning one of your 500 throwaway CLIs into a native app, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Go build a native UI. It’ll probably change the way you think.
Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.32 it can display the reasoning traces for LLMs available through OpenRouter.
- Updated for compatibility with LLM 0.32.
- Models now use OpenRouter's implementation of the Responses API.
- Three new server-side tools: Shell, WebFetch, and WebSearch. Enable these with options like
-T WebSearch.
Fresh installs of LLM stopped working the other day because the OpenAI Python library dropped its usage of httpx, and it turned out LLM depended on that library but only installed it via a transitive openai dependency.
This dot-release fixes that for the moment by pinning to openai<3, and a soon-to-drop 0.33 release will switch from httpx to httpx2.