Workflow

I always find myself getting lost in the Cloudflare dashboard. Every time I need to set up a redirect rule, it seems to have moved. I ask an agent where to find it, and it confidently tells me to click through menus that don’t exist anymore. Then I’m the one clicking around again, and the agent can’t help because it has no idea what I’m looking at. The fix was pretty simple. It’s what you would do with a friend who’s a patient expert. I took a screenshot and sent it over, and the agent saw the menu as it actually was that day and told me it had moved to a different submenu. ...

The best part of pair programming is pretty much just having someone else look at what you wrote. They notice the stuff you stopped seeing an hour ago. I wouldn’t merge my own work without a review, so why would I let the model that wrote the code be the only one to review it? A model reviewing its own work has the same blind spots it had while writing it. It made its choices for reasons that still seem good to it, so asking it again kind of gets you the same thing back. ...

REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, went from nothing in April to about 370,000 GitHub stars this month. It’s an MCP server that hands your coding agent the reverse-engineering tools people have used for years, like Ghidra, IDA, and Hopper, and lets it work out how a program behaves without the source. It should be noted that these tools typically are only used by experts and they take a lot of skill to use. ...

I hate when you sit down to work at 9:30 after clearing emails, send your first prompt, and by 1pm you’re out of usage. The window doesn’t come back until 2:30, so you lose an hour and a half of the afternoon waiting on a timer. To be clear, there are actually two limits here, and they do pretty different jobs. The five-hour window controls when you can use your plan. The weekly cap controls how much you get in total. Most people worry about the five-hour one because it’s the wall they keep hitting, but in my opinion the weekly cap is the real budget. ...

I recently used Tectonic to rerender my résumé and make changes with a coding agent. This made the back-and-forth a lot easier. I could ask for a change, have the agent edit the underlying LaTeX, and get another PDF to check. In my opinion, Tectonic and a coding agent are now a pretty practical alternative to Overleaf if you’re working on a document by yourself. The agent can work directly on local files and run the compiler. This way you don’t need it clicking around a browser through computer-use tools trying to diagnose how your tables are formatted. ...

After I updated my model recommendations, I got some feedback from people still reaching for Sonnet or models like Luna. I get it. If I’m breaking a job down and checking every step, Sonnet can get me pretty much the same result as Opus most of the time. But why am I doing all that planning for it? That defeats the purpose of a fully agentic approach. What I typically try to do with Opus is give it a wider task: give it the goal, let it work through the branches, and come back to review what it did. ...

Astra was the first model that made me stop and go “wow.” With other releases, I could usually predict what they’d try next when a task got hard. Astra spun up multiple Playwright browsers to test and compare things, then recorded videos to show what it had done. I’d seen people talk about doing that online. I hadn’t asked Astra to do it. It also overengineered some open-ended problems I gave it. And I can’t use it every day without upgrading my plan. That matters more to my recommendation than how impressive it was. ...

Is GitHub down if the website loads but GitHub Actions doesn’t work? Technically, no. A lot of GitHub is still available. You can browse, review things, and push a commit. But if your release process depends on Actions, a big piece of GitHub is absolutely down for you. The same thing happens with clusters. The login nodes might be available while storage is having problems. Most of the compute nodes might be healthy while one GPU partition is offline. The owners can truthfully say that the cluster is up, while a researcher can say that they can’t do their work. ...

There is a lot of drama around OpenAI’s claimed solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem. I’m not going to try to evaluate the proof or untangle the dispute around it. One sentence near the bottom of OpenAI’s announcement was very interesting to me: While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. Anyone using an AI tool for research stop and check their plan. ...

Stop adding things to Claude Code or Codex that you use once and then forget about. I like customizing my agents. Skills, plugins, extensions, whatever the particular tool calls them. But I want to combat the slow creep towards the dumb zone, and loading a bunch of unrelated stuff into every session works against that. Matt Pocock has a useful description of the smart zone and the dumb zone. Early in a session, the agent is at its best. The longer the conversation goes, the more mistakes start to pop up. This is where those early-days patterns of hallucinations really came from. The context window isn’t a promise that it’ll work well at all times. ...