Mathias Lafeldt

Well, this was fun while it lasted. Gruber put into words what I've been feeling for a while: daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_on... I'm back to posting only at x.com/mlafeldt, keeping this account around for now. See you on the other side - or not. 👋

Asked Claude in @ampcode.bsky.social to "make a shocking new discovery". It went wild and found 43 bugs, 11 of them critical. Told it to fix each one in an orb, and now I'm going through them one by one, hitting the Ship button when I'm happy with the result. Feels good. 🤩

Watching Claude reverse Yahoo Finance's API is mesmerizing 😵‍💫

"We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime." 😳

Spending freely on frontier models is a privilege not everyone has. As a freelancer, it's one of my biggest levers right now. The gap between "good enough" and "best available" compounds fast. youtu.be/3v7dIHh15dk

"Unable to fetch ZLS: ZLS 0.17 has not been released yet" In a way, it's good that language servers will soon be a thing of the past... (This popped up when I opened Visual Studio Code for the first time in months, just to download the latest Zig version)

Thousands of Chinese token resellers are giving AI labs unauthorized access to Anthropic’s Claude, helping them distill U.S. models. Anthropic’s crackdown is pushing those labs toward shell companies and other new workarounds. Read more: https://thein.fo/3VMLhxU

I'm pleased to announce the official release of my book, Refactoring English. I've spent the past two years capturing all the techniques for improving my writing that I've learned over the course of my career as a developer. Grab yours for 30% off during launch week.

"The sensible split is: Amp schedules and reasons; external storage remains the source of truth. Ancient machinery appreciates a ledger." Puck's metaphors aren't too shabby.

It's official: duckdb-rs is moving in-house, so I'm no longer a maintainer. A little sad to let it go after more than a year of work, but proud of what we built. The good news: I'm still maintaining duckdb-go, and we're just getting started. Stay tuned!

Amp's Librarian, a specialized subagent for searching codebases, is the modern (and amazing) version of this very idea.

Published a new version of duckdb-go for DuckDB 1.5.6 🤙 github.com/duckdb/duckd...

How on earth did I draft/negotiate/review freelance contracts before LLMs? 🤔

My monorepo now configures MCP servers in .mcp.json .codex/config.toml .amp/settings.json

Some startups, like Harvey, Abridge, Ramp, and Rogo, are embracing open-weight models or training their own models to reduce expensive reliance on frontier labs (Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Protip: `agent-browser read` happily works around 403s

This can be as simple as "how's $STOCK doing? use yfinance" in Claude or ChatGPT. Both support Python out of the box.

I wonder how many market data providers could be replaced by github.com/ranaroussi/y.... Integrating it as a skill or MCP is a breeze and costs nothing but tokens. Companies might consider it shady, but for a retail investor like me, it's absolutely amazing.

Love this, and long overdue! One more wish: support .agents/skills too and we're all set. Also, small ask: drop the "agents-md: no CLAUDE md found; AGENTS md loaded" warning.

Aided by AI, young people in China launched 7M+ one-person startups in 2025 to escape a bleak job market, up ~42% from 2024, as they face fierce competition (Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

After /grill-me, /retro has become my new wtf-did-i-do-before-this moment. Run it after a session and it tells you what to fix in your agent's environment. github.com/mattpocock/s...

Trump slams Dario Amodei, saying "the only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!" (Ryan Chua/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree https://quesma.com/blog/does-rtk-make-ai-coding-cheaper/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656471)

True, but isn't getting employed the exact opposite of entrepreneurship? tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwin...

Investing in stocks and crypto is a healthy mix of "why do I even bother freelancing" and "fuck, it's all downhill from here". Weekly. Sometimes daily.

How everyday US investors are vibe-coding algorithms to automate trading strategies by connecting their stock portfolios to AI agents built with Claude or Codex (Hannah Erin Lang/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Apple has stumbled into an AI hardware boom as developers turn to high-end Macs to run models locally and cut cloud computing costs. Demand is now so strong that shortages are pushing some customers toward Nvidia alternatives. Full story: https://thein.fo/46DFdKd

"We don’t live through the creative process like before, the connection to the result becomes weaker, so it gets harder to be proud of it." One of many great insights from evilmartians.com/chronicles/a...

Me: Go find shocking new discoveries. Fable: Found 17 real issues, all verified against the built crate. None appear in the upstream issue tracker. 😳

What's better than reviewing massive AI-generated PRs? Reviewing PRs with leaked AI tool-call markup.

I treated myself to a subscription to @theinformation.com today. Outstanding reporting & writing. 👌

"This may be the single dumbest way imaginable to pursue American dominance in AI."

Amazon agrees to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind open-source database DuckDB, for an undisclosed sum; DuckDB will remain open source (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

AI agents' growing capabilities are driving productivity FOMO among some startup founders, who feel compelled to work long hours managing and guiding the agents (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

I had Claude put together github.com/mlafeldt/zig... - a CORS-enabled mirror of ziglang.org/download/ind... for web apps. I'm using it for mathias.blog/tools/whatzi..., but it might be useful for others as well.

Codex has grown on me