Weeknote on Mutable Comment

weeknote-2026-20

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

How Claude Code Works in Large Codebases: Best Practices and Where to Start

Some maybe surprising things here about how to use Claude Code with larger codebases that I hadn’t known before.

Hooks make the setup self-improving. Most teams think of hooks as scripts that prevent Claude from doing something wrong, but their more valuable use is continuous improvement. A stop hook can reflect on what happened during a session and propose CLAUDE.md updates while the context is fresh. A start hook can load team-specific context dynamically so every developer gets the right setup for their module without manual configuration. For automated checks like linting and formatting, hooks enforce the rules deterministically and produce more consistent results than relying on Claude to remember

weeknote-2026-16

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-not-actually-trying

One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying? I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased. I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

weeknote-2026-15

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

The Middle Loop

http://annievella.com/posts/the-middle-loop/

It occurred to me that we often refer to “loops” in software development - the inner loop and the outer loop: • The inner loop is where the craft lives: write code, build, run, test, debug. Tight, fast, local. This is what TDD and better IDEs optimised. • The outer loop is the broader cycle: commit, code review, CI, deploy, monitor, feedback. This is what DevOps and CI/CD optimised. What if supervisory engineering work lives in a new loop between these two loops? AI is increasingly automating the inner loop - the code generation, the build-test cycle, the debugging. But someone still has to direct that work, evaluate the output, and correct what’s wrong. That feels like a new loop, the middle loop, a layer where engineers supervise AI doing what they used to do by hand.

weeknote-2026-15

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

AI 101: What Is a Token (And Why It Runs AI)?

https://www.turingpost.com/p/token

English is often tokenized into words and subword pieces, because spaces clearly separate words and longer terms can be broken into reusable chunks. Chinese works differently: words are not separated by spaces, and single characters often already carry meaning, so tokenization tends to stay closer to the character level. That is one reason the same sentence can produce a very different token count in English and Chinese.

weeknote-2026-14

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

Hackernews Thread

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

weeknote-2026-13

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-2f5

Moreover, the code was leaking cached entries and even entire caches due to misunderstood memory ownership rules, and suffered from a large number of crashes, in the order of 300,000 to 500,000 crashes per month for the WireServer web server alone across the fleet. New code was throwing C++ exceptions in a codebase that was originally exception-free. The team had coding guidelines in direct contradiction of those of the larger organization, and their testing practices didn’t include long-running tests, so they missed memory leaks and other defects. The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something. This further illustrates the pervasive gap in technical leadership throughout the organization.

weeknote-2026-12

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

You Will Know Nothing and Be Happy

https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/you-will-know-nothing-and-be-happy

But there’s a difference between using AI to accelerate your thinking and using AI to replace your thinking!

Previously we built up our mental maps of how things work by writing code. However now that has changed and we need to figure out what the new thing is.

Production Is Where the Rigor Goes

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/production-is-where-the-rigor-goes

The notes describe five destinations where rigor is already moving to: • Upstream to specification review • Into test suites as first-class artifacts • Into type systems and constraints • Into risk mapping • Into continuous comprehension All of these are great and exciting. Beefing up your pre-production test quality, capturing intent in specification docs, separating specs from constraints, revisiting the jobs to be done by code review, yes yes yes, all of that. Yes please. But where is production on that list? If control is supposed to be moving “closer to reality,” what is closer to reality than your production systems? Production is reality! Reality is production!

weeknote-2026-11

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Highlights of the Week

AI Should Help Us Produce Better Code - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison’s Weblog

https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/better-code/

I like to think about shipping better code in terms of technical debt. We take on technical debt as the result of trade-offs: doing things “the right way” would take too long, so we work within the time constraints we are under and cross our fingers that our project will survive long enough to pay down the debt later on.

weeknote-2026-11

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

Highlights of the Week

Zen of AI Coding

https://nonstructured.com/zen-of-ai-coding/

The cost of changing your mind is lower than it has ever been. Architectural decisions that once felt permanent are now provisional. You chose React. Two months later, you regret it. Ask an agent to rewrite the project. Making imperfect decisions is no longer fatal. In fact, it can be productive. A flawed reference implementation provides better context than a pristine specification. Agents reason more effectively from concrete artifacts than from abstract intent. Rapid iteration is now the default mode.

weeknote-2026-10

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

Another week of AI things. Not as much here this time but there’s still a lot happening.

Highlights of the Week

My (Hypothetical) SRECon26 Keynote

https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/my-hypothetical-srecon26-keynote

If I was giving the keynote at SRECon 2026, I would ditch the begrudging stance. I would start by acknowledging that AI is radically changing the way we build software. It’s here, it’s happening, and it is coming for us all.

It is very, very hard to adjust to change that is being forced on you. So please don’t wait for it to be forced on you. Swim out to meet it. Find your way in, find something to get excited about.

weeknote-2026-08

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

The theme of this week is dev tools are agent tools too. So good practices are still just that. AI will change some things but it will mainly just reinforce the good practices of before. If you don’t have those set up, throwing money at AI isn’t going to change things for you a whole lot either.

Highlights of the Week

The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering

https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

weeknote-2026-06

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

I’ve been quite late with this one but at least it is out in some shape or form. It still contains the things I read during the week 6 but a few days late. A lot of AI stuff again this time. I’m not sure if I am or am not that interested in all this still. Some is good but the way absolutely everyone is reading and writing about the same stuff all means there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t that useful or only slight variations of others.

weeknote-2026-05

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

More AI stuff this week again like the last before it. I don’t think anybody really knows how these things will all play out but that hasn’t stopped everyone making lots of predictions.

Highlights of the Week

Raising a Special Little AI

By Not Boring

Having said that, I do subscribe to the Chris Dixon views that The next big thing will start out looking like a toy and What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years, so if this many people are captivated, there’s something going on.

weeknote-2026-04

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

Spend a few days in Madrid this week and spent those days exploring the city rather than reading so a light one this time. I did read a lot of the book “Dead in the Water” and though I haven’t finished it yet it is really interesting. Reads something of a thriller though based on a true tale. I’ve read a few books on shipping and it seems like an awful industry for almost everyone involved. Little to no laws for the workers, margins are cutthroat for those at the top. It really seems to only benefit those of dubious morals who can and will take whatever shortcuts necessary to benefit the bottom line. Or just do the insurance as this book points out which seems to be a great business if once again you’re okay with turning the blind eye to a bit of fraud every now and again as a cost of doing business.

weeknote-2026-04

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

weeknote-2026-03

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

I read a few things this week around AI and code and how things are going. I’ve been trying to think what this all might mean but I’ve not yet been able to put all my thoughts together in a coherent way.

Other than reading this stuff I’ve been generating more code to see where the tools take it. One I’ve been using is amp to help me with this newsletter by pulling together all the articles I’ve read and highlights I’ve made the last week. Not being a frontend developer means something like that would take me ages before, but now I can put it together in a couple of hours no problem.

weeknote-2026-03

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

weeknote-2026-02

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

Lots more AI stuff this week I read and watched. I went to a few talks too around AI and again some of the same themes came up. I’m really not sure what this all means but reading around change is the only real guarantee.

Highlights of the Week

He Was a Supreme Court Lawyer. Then His Double Life Caught Up With Him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/magazine/thomas-goldstein-supreme-court-gambling.html

During this run he won a total of about $50 million, and even though he had sold roughly 75 percent of his stakes to investors, he still personally cleared about $12 million. Flush with his success against Gores, Goldstein sat down to a heads-up match with a real estate magnate named Bob Safai — and this time he didn’t spread the risk by taking on backers. “I just have convinced myself, because I won $50 million in heads-up poker, that I am a savant at heads-up poker,” Goldstein told me. He promptly lost $14 million to Safai, all out of his own pocket.