June 2025

We used to associate intelligence with accumulation. The smartest people were the ones who knew the most. But that model doesn’t hold anymore. AI knows more than anyone. Wikipedia is free. The internet has flattened information access so thoroughly that hoarding knowledge is no longer impressive. What matters now is what you do with it. How you filter it. How you recognize signal in the noise. Curation is the new IQ test.

Ever wanted to check on your AI agents while you're away? Need to monitor that long-running build from your phone? Want to share a terminal session with a colleague without complex SSH setups? VibeTunnel makes it happen with zero friction.

I've spent a lot of hours this week on this project instead of the usual lucky dip. Here's what I've done so far using my AY tracker terminal-based software ...

Some malware samples are known to do various checks to determine if they are running in a virtual machine. One of the common checks is to look for the presence of certain hardware components that are typically not emulated in virtualized environments. One such component is the CPU fan.

Now, with over five decades of programming experience, Kent is still pushing boundaries—this time with AI coding tools. In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with him to talk about what’s changed, what hasn’t, and why he’s more excited than ever to code.

I don’t have an issue with people being skeptical of new technology. I’m skeptical too, and so should you. We should be asking hard questions about how these systems are built, who they exploit, and who they ultimately serve. But when the critique turns into a litmus test for moral worth—when someone implies that using a tool makes you complicit, compromised, or creatively bankrupt—we’ve crossed out of analysis and into something else entirely. Something detached. Something smug.

Sets of dotifile hacks are now their own “packages” (flakes in nix world) that anyone can use - stylix for example, which tries to do the impossible: make the theming/styling consistent across the whole OS, from NeoVim to GTK to Plymouth, all with the same colors and wallpapers.

For the longest time, I have been frustrated with Python because I couldn’t use it for one-off scripts. I had to first ensure it was running in an environment where it could find the right Python version and the dependencies installed. That is now a thing of the past.

A federal court agreed that using copyrighted works to train AI is fair use - but that pirating them to do so infringes creator rights.

The key trick is to ensure that every project has comprehensive documentation and automated tests. This scales my productivity horizontally, by freeing me up from needing to remember all of the details of all of the different projects I’m working on at the same time.

Midjourney's learning curve is steep, but climbing it unlocks a superpower for developers and entrepreneurs. Learn how to create stunning, cohesive image sets that actually work for your projects. Go from building style reference galleries to using the describe feature for professional marketing visuals that don't scream "AI-generated."

Hydra is live code-able video synth and coding environment that runs directly in the browser. It is free and open-source and made for beginners and experts alike.

Last week marked 12 years since the launch of Ghost on Kickstarter. I was 24 when I first started working on the idea, and back then I had no idea what I was doing. Fast forward to 2025 and I still have no idea what I'm doing, but we've come a long way nevertheless. What started as little more than an idealistic open source pipedream has blossomed into a business with $8M/year in annual recurring revenue and a full-time team of 34.

Save everything you love in the same app

Like any process monitored with Prometheus, Caddy exposes an HTTP endpoint that responds in the Prometheus exposition format. Caddy's Prometheus client is also configured to respond with the OpenMetrics exposition format if negotiated (that is, if the Accept header is set to application/openmetrics-text; version=0.0.1).

The commit is our principle unit of work. It deserves to be treated thoughtfully and with care.

Vibe coding is what happens when you build software without understanding how anything works, relying entirely on tools to fill in the gaps. You feed ChatGPT a vague prompt, drag in some randomly generated code blocks, wire up a few buttons, and hope it works. You ship without testing. You copy code you don’t understand. You build with vibes, not logic. AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, is intentional. You still plan your features. You still understand how your system fits together. You just move faster because you’ve got an AI pair programmer who helps with boilerplate, explains confusing concepts, and suggests things you were going to write anyway.

tl:dr; Brainstorm spec, then plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen. Discrete loops. Then magic. ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

I feel like this is obvious but I’m not hearing it shouted from the rooftops so here it is: adding an untrusted middleman to your information diet and all of your personal communications will eventually become a disaster that will be obvious in hindsight.

As much as I can justify it, this project is probably going to be useless to most people. Not many people are seriously going to play all of celeste or terraria in the browser, and the novel things we did discover along the way are probably too niche to be of any help to anyone else.