Alasdair Allan

I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....

In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...

Vera now has a language (LSP) server, so it gets the same editor support as any other language. A normal one checks whether your code parses. Vera's also checks whether it still proves, every contract re-verified by Z3 as you type. veralang.dev #AI #LLM

"A Distribution of One," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. App releases are surging but downloads are flat. The industry sees failure. I don't think so. Most of those apps were never looking for an audience. That was the point. #SaaS #AI negroniventurestudios.com/2026/06/09/a...

"It Wasn't Built for This," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. GitHub built Copilot. Copilot drove agent adoption. Agent adoption broke GitHub. The feedback loop nobody wants to talk about. #GitHub #AI #Copilot negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/27/i...

Announcing agentlanguages.dev, a community-edited catalogue of the 21 programming languages designed for AI agents to emerge since late 2025. The most interesting thing to emerge? They fall into three philosophical camps that disagree on the underlying problem. #AI #LLM

"Three camps alike in dignity," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Seventeen languages for AI agents. Three diagnosis camps. One field that didn't exist six months ago. I built one of them and went looking for the others. #AI #ProgrammingLanguages #Vera negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/20/t...

"Documentation-First Programming," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. If AI writes the code, what does the human write? The part of the job most developers hate has now become the whole job. #LLM #AI #Documentation negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/19/d...

Know someone who should come to a future #dotastro event? Use our nomination form here anytime: dotastronomy.com/nominate

Expanded the Vera benchmark to 6 models, 3 providers. Kimi K2.5 got every Vera problem right while only managing 86% in Python and 91% in TypeScript. Flagship average Vera and Python level at 93%. Yet there is no Vera in their training data, no examples on GitHub or Stack Overflow. veralang.dev #AI

That's been a productive morning! github.com/aallan/vera/...

The #Vera v0.0.101 release makes LLM calls first-class algebraic effects. An agent calling another model declares <Inference> in its type signature. Type-checked, contract-verified, every side effect explicit. As far as I know, no other language can do this! veralang.dev #AI #LLM #Programming

First signal for the end of what I’ve always called “the platform problem” for #AI. It’s not about the platform anymore, it’s about actions. It’s about AI acting, not chatting. venturebeat.com/technology/o...

"The web just got a second audience," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Google shipped WebMCP in Chrome. Cloudflare shipped Markdown for Agents. Both quiet. Neither made the front page. But the web just forked its audience. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/18/t...

"The valley and the monomyth," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/t...

"The Ghost in the Statistical Machine," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. We anthropomorphise #AI agents, give them names, identities, "souls." If we anthropomorphise them enough, do they start acting more like us? At what point does it matter? negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/06/t...

Someone watched the Mac vs PC ads back in the day. @anthropic.com have gone on the offensive with adverts against ads, and they just buried OpenAI without even mentioning them. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia... www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...

"The new programmers? ," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. What does a programming language built for #AI look like? No syntax, no variable names, and no text, just components composed under formal contracts. Less like coding, more like hardware design. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/01/12/t...

"Technology does not solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. The best technology becomes invisible precisely because it's fundamental, it dissolves the old interaction model entirely. The worst adds friction while demanding attention. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/12/03/t...

"We need a new Turing Test," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. The real test for artificial general intelligence isn't fooling humans, it's demonstrating flexible real-world competence that our token-prediction architectures fundamentally can't deliver. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/11/30/w...

AI is an assistive technology. It'll be a long time, if ever, before it's anything more than that. Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Resurfacing something I wrote for Hackster.io last year, "Dividing the Stack into Thirds," talking about the ongoing trade wars the splintering of our global approach to technology. www.hackster.io/news/dividin...

"Don’t build platforms, solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. It turns out that #AI will commoditize the mediocre and automated, but amplify the value of the obsessive and hand-crafted. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/10/29/d...

On this day in 1971, the U.K. successful reached orbit using the Black Arrow launch vehicle lifting the Prospero satellite to orbit from Woomera, Australia. The U.K. remains the only country to reach orbit after already cancelling their launch programme. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_A...

Anyone else getting nostalgia for the Nokia 3650? www.theverge.com/news/793136/...

In Amsterdam for this year’s #thethingsconference. It’s fascinating to see how things have evolved in the LPWAN space over the last few years. It’s a very different conference than their first which one I keynoted in 2018. aallan.medium.com/teaching-a-n...

Oh! Now I'm interested, ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-.... I far preferred the design of the Pebble Time to the original #Pebble. Always considered the death of Pebble as a real waste of potential. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcPz...

"Commercial fusion is now just 20 years away…" yes, for about the last 50 years. 🤦‍♂️ hackaday.com/2025/03/05/c...

[Alexa] will know "almost [everything] in your life — your schedule, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you’re using, the people you’re connected [to and] the entertainment you [enjoy]…" they understand that most people don't think that's a *good* thing? techcrunch.com/2025/02/26/a...

The RP2040 has now been certified to run at a system clock of 200Mhz! See github.com/raspberrypi/....

By me for @hacksterio.bsky.social, “The return of Pebble: you can’t keep a good watch down!” Some thoughts on @ericmigi.com’s announcement and the return of #Pebble. www.hackster.io/news/the-ret...

I genuinely sorta scared about what Apple is going to do to my favourite image editor. The precedent of the Dark Sky weather app fiasco looms large. www.macrumors.com/2025/02/11/a...

The problem with asking successful people about how to get to where they are now is that how to get where they are has inevitably changed since they did it. You almost certainly can't do what they did, and end up in the same place. That's just not how the world works any more.

Stumbled across this piece by Wil Schroter. Was absolutely fascinated, because he's right. Doesn't matter whether you're working a job, freelancing, or building a startup. Plenty of people will encourage you to start, nobody will tell you when to stop. fortune.com/2025/02/03/s...

Pretty much what Jenson said during his #CES2025 keynote, although I'm guessing they were expecting a bit more lead time before we saw something like #DeepSeek. Whatever nutty thing the stock market is doing, this doesn't hurt #NVIDIA.

So $NVDA is down 11%. What do people think Deepseek-r1 was trained on? It was trained on GPUs, probably grey market unacknowledged NVIDIA GPU. 🙄

One of my favourite demos from CES Unveiled last night at #CES2025 was the Holobox by Holoconnects, www.holoconnects.com. Using a live video feed that is projected onto a transparent screen and a light box, giving the illusion that the person in the feed is three dimensional.

Fascinating to see evolution for the humble robotic vacuum. I think we're going to see people trying to hack this one pretty soon after it's generally available, there's a lot of use cases for a relatively cheap robot platform with an arm. #CES2025 techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/r...

Platform problem. This is the platform problem all over. 🙄

This👇. The other 50% is telling people not to reuse their passwords between sites.

You have to love the architecture of downtown Chicago.

So. If you’re doing media things at #CES2025. Maybe don’t leave it till Thursday? Most of us fly in early for the weekend media events and then leave early, before the show is over. I’m not going to be there Thursday! 🤷‍♂️ #subtweet