Patrick Smith

If you are interested in zero-network, memory-safe, self-contained WebAssembly modules that plug in into your existing stack check out qip.dev

Have developers that are allergic to marketing ever had more of a fantasy fulfilment than build it (with agents) and they (also agents) will come?

If you make HTTPS requests or have other TLS clients and care about MITM attacks, you need to update today. If you run Go: go get go@1.27.3 If you run Homebrew: brew update brew install ca-certificates If you run Linux, maybe stay off the internet for now.

If we aren’t reviewing code we should review the protocols that interface with users and outside systems, and the shape of data that persists in our own system.

Writing code is now easy, but it remains hard to encode people’s needs (product design) and decode people’s minds (marketing).

I mocked up if the Finder _was_ the Siri app and I think it could work pretty great! The name is a natural fit.

Steve Jobs likened computers to a bicycle for the mind. AI is a rocket for the mind. Directed, it can accelerate you to the moon. Undirected, it can noisily consume energy and explode into nothingness.

Much of the appetite for agents exists because the web added so much friction like Subscribe to Our Newsletter, Accept All Cookies, Open in App, Enable Notifications, Share on X, Your Session Has Expired, Sign In With Google, Verify It’s You. We desire that friction gone.

Good software helps people make order from chaos. Unconstrained coding agents create chaos from orders.

help me I’m addicted to social media posts turning 90s games into pastries. It’s got me DOOM scrolling

I hope the iPhone Duo supports Sidecar — the feature that lets you use an iPad as Mac’s external display. I currently carry around a MacBook Air and iPad Pro. Being able to use my iPhone as an external display would be a killer feature.

The fallacy of agentic coding is believing you don’t need to understand the fallacies of distributed computing.

Prototype in one programming language, ship in another. A great way to make state smaller, APIs more obvious, implementations simpler.

Coding agents are infinite state machines. Your job is to make them produce useful finite state machines.

Henry Ford supposedly said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Faster pull requests sounds to me like a faster horse. We need to find the automobiles for the agentic coding age, and master their manufacturing. royalicing.com/2026/faster-...

Markdown specs are a laundering scheme for decision-avoidance.

“Nothing is overdue.” A perfect example of how fewer features can make a better product. marco.org/2026/08/14/u...

Making informed decisions is the bottleneck, and you can use AI either to help make informed decisions, or clog the bottleneck with even more decisions.

Being a systems programmer is a bit like being a crackpot dictator Finally you get to run the state Only to be brought down by resource management

Reading “Steve Jobs in Exile” what’s surprised me most is how he doesn’t sound too different to the post-1997 Jobs from “Apple in China”. There’s still obsessiveness that leads to people endlessly toiling. It’s not until iPod on Windows that his approach seems to succeed!

(Someone looking at my PR) “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Fable-line”

Everyone talks about web scale but not enough people talk about web rotate

Is Google Gemini the Macintosh, Google Search the Apple II, Jeff Dean akin to Woz or Bill Atkinson, and Discovery Loop like General Magic?

QIP lets you write cross-platform components in Zig or C, which are imperative languages. But I love opening a file and seeing how declarative it feels. Here we see clearly what the memory capacity is and what the input/output types are.

Indispensable atoms of the computing universe: - Transistor - Datagram - TCP segment - Transaction - URL - S3 object - Token Each invention carefully draws a boundary around essential complexity, encapsulated as a dependable unit with a stable contract and clear failure modes.

I’m exploring reading SQLite databases via custom WebAssembly vs using the official sqlite3.wasm

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask Claude what you can do for your country when you’ve been replaced by AI

If programming languages are said to be Turing-complete, are coding agents Turing-autocomplete?

Instead of primarily more code what about using coding agents to reduce state? Less state means fewer moving parts, fewer possible failure modes, and fewer bugs. The code will be easier to digest and understand as a reviewer.

Coding agents offer a reset of software orgs. Over years we’ve separated frontend from backend, devops, ux, etc. Zoom out and you’ll see latency, durability, consistency & simplicity are what makes good software. We can bypass silos that lead to these qualities being worse.

Getting excited by coding agents because they’ll let you write way more code is a bit like flooding a lake and getting excited because you’ll be bit by way more mosquitoes.

QIP Components: - Quick for AI to make & quick for users to run. - Isolated sandbox with no file system, network, or environment access. - Portable components that work identically on web, server, and native.

Agree with this. The everything upfront spec approach just doesn’t sense to me. I need to run and use what I’ve made to know to do next. youtu.be/IZRWzXjaXxM

What if the power of AI-generated UIs is not in assembling bespoke UI components on the fly, but in accelerating the user to navigate and knowing which parts to *remove* to help them focus?

AI coding agents can add more entropy to your project. The hard things are: - Adding value for users. - Removing entropy.

Bragging about your AI token spend is like boasting how much fuel you used driving to the gym.

I’ve been over time rethinking opinions of event systems and observable property pubsub as now being overkill. Rather than adding an immediate-mode API over a retained-mode API like React does over the DOM, let’s start with immediate-mode. youtu.be/2Tjh3cr_8d4

All my career I’ve had imposter syndrome. It’s a terrible worry of thinking the wrong thoughts, saying the wrong words, deciding the wrong decisions. But I sought knowledge & peers that led to growth. I am concerned that people will redirect so much to AI they never grow.

The MacBook Neo shows that the iPad Pro would really benefit from a modern multitasking operating system like Mac OS 9 running on it.

HTTP’s If-None-Match and If-Match must be one of the widest-deployed synchronization protocols. If-None-Match (GET): server sends 304 if the requested etag is still current. If-Match (PUT/POST): server sends 412 Precondition Failed if the requested etag is _no_ longer current.