simonw/claude-skills One of the tips I picked up from Jesse Vincent's Claude Code Superpowers post (previously) was this: Skills are what give your agents Superpowers. The first time they really popped up on my radar was a few weeks ago when Anthropic rolled out improved Office document creation. When the feature rolled out, I went poking around a bit -- I asked Claude to tell me all about its...

Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025 A follow-up to Jesse Vincent's post about September, but this is a really significant piece in its own right. Jesse is one of the most creative users of coding agents (Claude Code in particular) that I know. He's put a great amount of work into evolving an effective process for working with them, encourage red/green TDD (watch the te...

A Retrospective Survey of 2024/2025 Open Source Supply Chain Compromises Filippo Valsorda surveyed 18 incidents from the past year of open source supply chain attacks, where package updates were infected with malware thanks to a compromise of the project itself. These are important lessons: I have the growing impression that software supply chain compromises have a few predominant causes which...

Video of GPT-OSS 20B running on a phone GPT-OSS 20B is a very good model. At launch OpenAI claimed: The gpt-oss-20b model delivers similar results to OpenAI o3‑mini on common benchmarks and can run on edge devices with just 16 GB of memory Nexa AI just posted a video on Twitter demonstrating exactly that: the full GPT-OSS 20B running on a Snapdragon Gen 5 phone in their Nexa Studio Android ap...

I couldn't find any good Mac keycaps for my mechanical keyboard that matched the aesthetics of the Apple Magic keyboard so, I decided to design my own. I go over the keyboard details and my process for creating the custom keycaps. I also share the template I used so that you can customize and design your own keycaps for Mac.

Log Events + Report is a Shortcut aimed to help people automatically log to Timery the time they spend daily on daily meetings, phone calls, and other activities + it gives you a sweet report/summary. In the article, I go over step by step how the Shortcut works, and also I share a more advanced version I'm using daily.

An update to my /now page about what I've been up to lately, what i've been watching, playing, building and more.

Apple announced this week that they would be making obsolete the Thunderbolt display. I have used the display for the past decade, making it one of my all-time favorite and longest-lasting Apple products. In honor of that, I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and share how my desk setup has evolved over the past ten years, with the Thunderbolt Display always at the heart of it all.

I'll communicate with another writer I met online by responding to emails every week. I'll then publish our conversation, referencing the previous message, and we'll keep up this exchange for a whole month. Let me know if you are interested in participating!

The first week of the Letters Project with Jarrod Blundy, where I correspond with another blogger for a month. This week's topics include general intros, vacations, music and more.

My personal wishlist of things I want Apple to add or improve on this year's WWDC updates to iOS, iPadOS, MacOS and WatchOS.

I made a few visual tweaks to my Blogs archive pages so it is easier to skim and an insight into my process for making updates to my website.

Like I did with this year's WWDC, I wanted to write down my wishlist for the event. This is not a rumor or expected post; it's more of my wishlist. If Apple delivers on most of my items, it will be a costly event, haha. Check it out!

I recently upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro, and I love it! It feels much smaller and lighter, and I'm having tons of fun playing with the Action Button. I've been upgrading my iPhone annually and every year, I buy and test multiple cases looking for the perfect one. This year, I wanted to share my insights and maybe help others decide.

A list of the apps I chose as defaults for mutiple categories.

There is finally a good battery powered option for Homekit Doorbell and it’s made by one of the most reliable smart home product makers.

I've been using StandBy mode on my desk for over two months and it has become a staple in my setup. It provides glanceable information and auxiliary controls without adding visual noise. My favorite Magsafe dock for StandBy is the Elgato MS1 Charging Stand. Expand on your RSS app to read more.

I've been using Reeder as my RSS reading app for years, but I started facing issues with their iCloud Feeds service. After trying different RSS services, I switched to Feedbin and have been using it for a week without any complaints. It stays in perfect sync between my devices, syncs quickly, and fetches images better. - - - Expand on your RSS app to read more - - - >

Looking back at my favorite TV Shows, Movies, Video Games, Music, Lego and Gadgets of 2023. Expand on your RSS app to read more.

I took a closer look at all of my digital subscriptions and realized that I'm spending a lot, but most of them are essential and bring value to my daily life. I also go over my setup for tracking them in Notion. (Due to limitations of my blogging platform I can't show the full post on RSS readers. You can turn on automatic reader mode if your RSS reader supports it or if not you can expand in t...

I recently returned to work after a few weeks of very-needed vacations. We did not travel this year, so we spent them mostly at home. Apart from spending time with my wife and our dog, Max, my favorite part of the holidays is getting more time to do home projects. The folks at App Stories call it Nerding out for the holidays. They have a yearly episode in which they go over the energy projects ...

During my

Curated and automated links to posts and websites that I have found enjoyable this past month.

We have app defaults, so why not accessories and clothing defaults? Lists and links of my staple items/clothes for everyday use, lounge at home and work out.

Last month, I posted pictures of my setup on Reddit, and it got decent upvotes and comments. After that, the folks at Maker Stations asked if they could showcase my setup on their site, and I agreed! You can read the article at Maker Stations. Still, I thought it would be a good idea to include it on my site for posterity and documentation purposes.

Curated and automated links to posts and websites that I have found enjoyable this past month.

The Meta Ray-Bans feel like a genuine upgrade to everyday glasses, offering a surprising "magic" with their integrated camera and audio capabilities. From effortlessly taking pictures of my dog to listening to podcasts while doing chores, the use cases are surprisingly versatile. I'll delve into my favorite features and the moments these smart glasses have truly shined. Read on to see if this i...

Mastodon introduces paid hosting and support services for institutions, building sustainability without sacrificing decentralisation.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Linda Ma, whose blog can be found at midnightpond.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Manton Reece and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a mon...

When I was at uni I went with some friends into a cellar with a druid to experience his home-made 6 foot tall light-strobing monolith, what I now know was a type of Dreammachine, which was a pair of stacked out-of-sync strobing lights so bright that it makes the receptors in your eyes produce concentric circles of moving colour even with your eyelids tight shut. His performance of changing and...

One fairly common concept you’ll inevitably stumble upon if you spend any modicum of time reading discussions on the web is the idea of “two sides”. Some will tell you that the two sides are not the same and one is clearly better than the other, others will argue that not taking one side means that you’re tacitly supporting the other, while someone else will tell you that trying to argue that m...

I started a new job as a UX Developer for Revive Our Hearts ministry six months ago today. I had planned to write a post when I celebrated my two month mark in June. But life got in the way and now the calendar is on September October. I wanted to share a little bit […] The post Six months appeared first on Jeff Bridgforth.

Have you ever wondered why new CSS features and other web technologies very often seem to just work across browsers these days? The reason is probably: Interop. The Interop Project is a collaborative effort between major browser makers — Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla — to improve the Web by making it more consistent and reliable across all browsers. The idea is that in...

A smart (and slightly bleak) take from Luke on why contact forms attract more spam than email addresses.

Die zeitgenössischen Kunstzerstörer:innen operieren im Modus der Simulation. Es geht darum, den Symbolwert einer Vernichtung einzuwerben, die nicht stattfindet. So Johannes Franzen in seinem Artikel “Kunst zerstören: Die beharrliche Ungezogenheit des Publikums” über PR-lastige Protestaktionen der Klimaschutzbewegung, die in letzter Zeit deutlich nachgelassen haben. Franzen stellt in...

I get a feeling that working with multiple AI agents is something that comes VERY natural to most senior+ engineers or tech lead who worked at a large company You already got used to overseeing parallel work (the goto code reviewer!) + making progress with small chunks of work... because your day has been a series of nonstop interactions, so you had to figure out how to do deep work in small c...

Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don’t know.

This post on AI art from The Oatmeal made me think more about AI than I expected, so wanted to jot some of them down.

Check out the post I wrote for developer.chrome.com to learn what changed for View Transitions in 2025.

TIL: Testing different Python versions with uv with-editable and uv-test While tinkering with upgrading various projects to handle Python 3.14 I finally figured out a universal uv recipe for running the tests for the current project in any specified version of Python: uv run --python 3.14 --isolated --with-editable '.[test]' pytest This should work in any directory with a pyproject.toml (or ev...

This isn't necessarily surprising, but it's worth noting anyway. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is capable of building a full Datasette plugin now. I've seen models complete aspects of this in the past, but today is the first time I've shipped a new plugin where every line of code and test was written by Claude, with minimal prompting from myself. The plugin is called datasette-os-info. It's a simple debugg...

Studioworks is live! I can honestly say Studioworks is the best invoicing platform out there, with the lowest fees, best design (and most design customizations), and simplest UI. But that’s not all we’re about. We’re building a company that hon……

Gregory Scott, founder of Kush Audio, shared an interesting insight about mixing music the other day: Sometimes, to bring something forward in the mix, instead of turning it up, it can be more effective to actually turn all the other things down. Let’s say you realise that the track you are working on needs more bass. So you pull up the fader for the bass by a few dB. But now you notice that t...

Whenever I'm writing a rhyme, I can't do the third and fourth line. Dah-de-da-dah-duh, Dah-de-de-dah-duh. But somehow it still works out fine.

Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It? Miguel Grinberg uses some basic benchmarks (like fib(40)) to test the new Python 3.14 on Linux and macOS and finds some substantial speedups over Python 3.13 - around 27% faster. The optional JIT didn't make a meaningful difference to his benchmarks. On a threaded benchmark he got 3.09x speedup with 4 threads using the free threading build - for Python 3.13 ...

The cognitive debt of LLM-laden coding extends beyond disengagement of our craft. We’ve all heard the stories. Hyped up, vibed up, slop-jockeys with attention spans shorter than the framework-hopping JavaScript devs of the early 2010s, sling their sludge in pull requests and design docs, discouraging collaboration and disrupting teams. Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as ...

Why NetNewsWire Is Not a Web App In the wake of Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store, Brent Simmons talks about why he still thinks his veteran (and actively maintained) NetNewsWire feed reader app should remain a native application. Part of the reason is cost - NetNewsWire is free these days (MIT licensed in fact) and the cost to Brent is an annual Apple developer subscription: If it we...

The new iOS is bad in so many ways that writing a post highlighting them all is quite pointless. By the time I’d be done typing, they’d have likely released iOS 27 (and hopefully fixed most of this nonsense). So I’m not gonna waste time doing that and simply focus on one single thing that was so bad when I first upgraded that I was genuinely considering changing career: the new iOS UI. This thi...

Python 3.14 This year's major Python version, Python 3.14, just made its first stable release! As usual the what's new in Python 3.14 document is the best place to get familiar with the new release: The biggest changes include template string literals, deferred evaluation of annotations, and support for subinterpreters in the standard library. The library changes include significantly improved...

Adding SuperHTML support to BBEdit only requires tweaking the existing settings for HTML language support. Existing support uses the vscode-html-languageserver, which is a NodeJS project. You can easily change that to SuperHTML by doing the following: Accessing the HTML language settings Open the BBEdit preferences by accessing the “BBEdit” menu and then choose “Settings&rdqu...

Google released a new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model today, specially designed to help operate a GUI interface by interacting with visible elements using a virtual mouse and keyboard. I tried the demo hosted by Browserbase at gemini.browserbase.com and was delighted and slightly horrified when it appeared to kick things off by first navigating to Google.com and solving their CAPTCHA in order to ...

For Blogtober, I dug up a draft about the two CSS pseudo-class functions :is() and :where() that I’d had lying around in my drafts folder for quite some time. Actually, when I originally started writing this post, :is() and :where() had just landed in CSS, and — just like with so many other new CSS features — I was expecting them to “change the way we write CSS.” Both are now widely available b...

Ich habe das bestimmt schon einmal irgendwo geschrieben, also auch auf die Gefahr hin, mich zu wiederholen: Wenige E-Mails nerven mich mehr als die von “Kundenservice”-Abteilungen mehrerer Onlineshops – ja, das ist mir gerade in der Tat zum mindestens dritten Mal passiert – mit der Bitte, die Bestellung doch bitte zu bewerten. Bevor ich die […]

I’ve done something few on the internet do. I’ve changed my mind. A few posts on my blog have started to unfurl social share imagery. You might be wondering, “Wait Jim I thought you hated those things?” It’s not that I hate social share imagery. I just think…well, I’ve shared my thoughts before (even made a game) so I won’t get on my soapbox. But I think these “previews” have their place an...

I flew a plane for the very first time! It’s one of the most exhilarating and frightening things I’ve ever done. The highlight was flying over my neighborhood at 7,500 feet. I’m still taking it all in. I thought I’d be a passenger for the most part, but turns out I handled everything but the […]

For quite some I wanted to write a small static image gallery so I can share my pictures with friends and family. Of course there are a gazillion tools like this, but, well, sometimes I just want to roll my own. [...] I used the old, well tested technique I call brain coding, where you start with an empty vim buffer and type some code (Perl, HTML, CSS) until you're happy with the result. It hel...

Started working on a new company yesterday. Happy and excited about all the things I’m going to learn. 🤓

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI - entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and c...

Adam Stoddard recently found common cause with the enthusiastic craftsmanship of lowrider culture, and I found myself nodding along vigorously: The thing is, this particular brand of “functional absolutism” that’s widely held in tech circles is a bankrupt philosophy. It leaves no room for beauty, no room for expression, no room for investing time and care in something for no other reason than ...

Damien Leone, 2022, ★½ In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist. In an adjacent hemisphere of the late...

Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report Ouch: Deloitte will provide a partial refund to the federal government over a $440,000 report that contained several errors, after admitting it used generative artificial intelligence to help produce it. (I was initially confused by the "Albanese government" reference in the headline since this is a story abou...

I've settled on agents as meaning "LLMs calling tools in a loop to achieve a goal" but OpenAI continue to muddy the waters with much more vague definitions. Swyx spotted this one in the press pack OpenAI sent out for their DevDay announcements today: How does OpenAl define an "agent"? An Al agent is a system that can do work independently on behalf of the user. Adding this one to my collectio...

gpt-image-1-mini OpenAI released a new image model today: gpt-image-1-mini, which they describe as "A smaller image generation model that’s 80% less expensive than the large model." They released it very quietly - I didn't hear about this in the DevDay keynote but I later spotted it on the DevDay 2025 announcements page. It wasn't instantly obvious to me how to use this via their API. I ended u...

We’ve all been there: You write a bit of CSS, check whether everything looks right. You deploy. Then someone sends you a screenshot: the mobile navigation is broken. And why is the size of those headings just a bit off? And where has that button gone? Especially when you are working on a larger codebase together or you are refactoring your CSS or consolidating redundant styles, seemingly small ...

🔗 On public online behavior. Worth a read, often.

GPT-5 pro Here's OpenAI's model documentation for their GPT-5 pro model, released to their API today at their DevDay event. It has similar base characteristics to GPT-5: both share a September 30, 2024 knowledge cutoff and 400,000 context limit. GPT-5 pro has maximum output tokens 272,000 max, an increase from 128,000 for GPT-5. As our most advanced reasoning model, GPT-5 pro defaults to (and ...