Adam Keys (@therealadam.com) Bsky

Cheffy would blnever

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Adam Keys is Thinking Examples of The Eponymous Trifecta: “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath “Motörhead” by Motörhead from the album Motörhead “Iron Maiden” by Iron Maiden from the album Iron Maiden Hopefully you’re starting to see the pattern. (There’s way more of these out there. Let me know your favorite!) Let me throw some variety in: 🤷‍♂️ by Metallica from the album Metallica “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley from the album Bo Diddley Ergo: You’re not metal if you don’t have a trifecta.

Examples of The Eponymous Trifecta:

“Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath

“Motörhead” by Motörhead from the album Motörhead

“Iron Maiden” by Iron Maiden from the album Iron Maiden

Hopefully you’... therealadam.com/2026/04/18/examples-of-t...

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a piece of luggage behind a sign that reads "It Luggage"

me knew that

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i will NEVER imagine dragons

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Adam Keys is Thinking git-spice – stacked diffs, but without another (SaaS) tool to provision and pay for. Excellent ergonomics, if you’re comfortable with the git CLI as-is. I’ve tried this for one project so far, things went as hoped. Moving between commit ‘stacks’ is easy, and rebasing changes from the main branch is straightforward. This is the quality of tool I’d hope to see in git in the first place. But maybe that’s a 2026 expectation.

git-spice – stacked diffs, but without another (SaaS) tool to provision and pay for. Excellent ergonomics, if you’re comfortable with the git CLI as-is. I’ve tried this for one project so far, things went as hoped. Moving ... therealadam.com/2026/04/08/gitspice-stac...

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Everyone should have picked XP and stuck with it.

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Adam Keys is Thinking When you’re stuck or uninspired, reach for your spark file: This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be.

When you’re stuck or uninspired, reach for your spark file:

"This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, sta... therealadam.com/2026/04/06/when-youre-st...

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OAuth Client Implementation | Bluesky This is a guide to implementing atproto OAuth clients "The Hard Way." Optimistically, most developers will have an SDK available for their programming language which supports OAuth, and they can simply refer to SDK documentation. This guide is intended for early adopters, SDK maintainers, or developers with more sophisticated OAuth needs. It is agnostic to whether developers are building clients to work the the app.bsky microblogging Lexicons, or implementing novel application Lexicons.

If you were wondering, “could anyone make OAuth2 an even more involved, jargon-filled process?”, the answer is yes. AT Protocol and Bluesky sure did. 🙃

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RIP my vim muscle memory I bet a lot of the grumbling about coding agents is really about losing out on the joy of moving quickly through code via a deeply learned text editor. I’m feeling it too, but I’m not so great at vim that my whole coding identity is wrapped up in it. As goes the complaint about the decline of manual transmissions, even in sports cars, so goes the decline of emacs/vi/etc. “No connection”, “not enough focus”.

RIP my vim muscle memory: therealadam.com/2026/03/31/rip-my-vim-mu...

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For want of futures Wherein possibilities are imagined, but not financial instruments

Wherein possibilities are imagined, but not financial instruments

buttondown.com/therealadam/...

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Can you blame it, when its creators named "Go, run like a wild horse" after Ralph Wiggum?

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Batman by Prince on Apple Music Album · 1989 · 9 Songs

Yeah, I’ve locked in to a few writing and coding sessions with The Social Network soundtrack. But, have you ever tried locking in to something you can move your hips to?

Related: currently compiling a list of Soundtracks That Didn’t Have To Go So Hard, and Prince’s Batman is way up there.

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it was RuneStone (couldn’t get it to work) and CodeEditKit (got it to work, but the tree-sitter integration was a lot of awkward Xcode integration work)

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Adam Keys is Thinking Wrapping up lil’ document editor “research”, starting to write more on it. In short: cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem is possible, but tricky once you get into third-party libraries. Agent coding makes a lot possible, but doesn’t make anything trivial. Prototypes without a plan for using it regularly, at least in the process of building the thing, are not going to generate useful insight. False spring has passed in Portland, real spring is coming up soon.

Wrapping up lil’ document editor “research”, starting to write more on it. In short: cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem is possible, but tricky once you get into third-party libraries. Agent coding makes a lot possible, bu... therealadam.com/2026/03/07/wrapping-up-l...

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Behind every guitar god there is, literally, a drummer making the odd 7/8 or 5/4 bar sound like 4/4. Paraphrasing Einstein, true guitar gods don’t play at dice or outside of a strict 4/4. (Inspired by: what the heck even is “Black Dog”?)

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Adam Keys is Thinking Squeeze out the trickiest part of the problem, another part of the problem becomes the trickiest. A tale as old as time. Today, it seems like the biggest opportunities will be in the third of my opening statements. Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less of a contributor to the overall speedup.

Squeeze out the trickiest part of the problem, another part of the problem becomes the trickiest. A tale as old as time.

"Today, it seems like the biggest opportunities will be in the third of my opening statements. Building ... therealadam.com/2026/03/01/squeeze-out-t...

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NetNewsWire 2.0

A macOS desktop displays multiple overlapping windows, including a NetNewsWire, Bear, and Ulysses.

Blogging (Classic): therealadam.com/2026/02/24/blogging-clas...

Wherein you need feeds, notes, and documents.

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Adam Keys is Thinking I love when/what Matt Webb builds: It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease. — mist: Share and edit Markdown together, quickly We need more “this (thing) should be as easy to collaborate on as Google Docs” sort of things in the world.

I love when/what Matt Webb builds:

"It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a teas... therealadam.com/2026/02/16/i-love-whenwh...

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dedicated pneumatic tubes for girl scout cookies could fix me. IT COULD FIX AMERICA

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Adam Keys is Thinking Contra my optimism on software estimates, some realism: I gather as much political context as possible before I even look at the code. How much pressure is on this project? Is it a casual ask, or do we have to find a way to do this? What kind of estimate is my management chain looking for? There’s a huge difference between “the CTO really wants this in one week” and “we were looking for work for your team and this seemed like it could fit”.

Contra my optimism on software estimates, some realism:

"I gather as much political context as possible before I even look at the code. How much pressure is on this project? Is it a casual ask, or do we have to find a way to ... therealadam.com/2026/02/10/contra-my-opt...

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"Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to change, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books"

You can’t argue with a star!

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IMG_4460 Edited.

I went to see an elephant about a birthday.

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Book cover of 'The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' by Becky Chambers on a wooden surface. The cover features a dark space background with a glowing planet in the upper left and an illustration of a spacecraft in the center-right. Bold yellow-green lettering displays the title across the cover. A yellow circular badge in the upper right indicates it is a "Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series." A quote from Ann Leckie praising the book as "Great fun!" appears near the bottom.

Finished in January but forgot to add it. Everything I’ve read by Becky Chambers is fun SF that makes you feel optimistic for the future of humanity. "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" is no exception—great story, rich world building, likable characters, tackling issues of politics & gender.

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Adam Keys is Thinking Dave Rupert, Write about the future you want: There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better.

Dave Rupert, Write about the future you want:

"There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so ... therealadam.com/2026/02/04/dave-rupert-w...

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This is not my beautiful agent-driven economy Wherein someone’s gonna be wrong about AI

This is not my beautiful agent-driven economy: therealadam.com/2026/02/02/this-is-not-m...

Wherein someone’s gonna be wrong about AI

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Adam Keys is Thinking I’ve been reading Power Broker on and off throughout the year (brag). I’m almost five hundred pages in (brag again) and it’s worth it. The writing is as good as the research is deep. Which is to say, it manages to maintain a great pace even though it’s a huge book (brag the third). Caro’s pacing, by alternating between moving the Robert Moses story ahead and adding color by telling the brief story of the minor characters involved in Moses’ story at the time.

I’ve been reading Power Broker on and off throughout the year (brag). I’m almost five hundred pages in (brag again) and it’s worth it. The writing is as good as the research is deep. Which is to say, it manages to maintain a gr... therealadam.com/2026/01/29/ive-been-read...

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Adam Keys is Thinking Wherein we meet the boss of humans, same as the boss of agents (sorta)

Simon Willison:

"If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it’s a few years stale - you can drive these things really effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to... therealadam.com/2026/01/27/simon-williso...

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Processes should serve outcomes, not the other way ‘round In moments where process overwhelms a team’s ability to get stuff done, I’ve been fond of saying we’re not here to: Push Trello cards around. Guess if a coding task is more like a small t-shirt or a large burrito. Arrange our git commits in just the right order. Write long-lived documentation. I’d suggest that, instead, we’re here to ship code. Now that writing code isn’t the tricky part, I’m more convinced than ever we are both not here to operate a process and that activities like these are more important.

Wherein we're not here to push Trello cards around
therealadam.com/2026/01/17/processes-sho...

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Processes should serve outcomes, not the other way ‘round In moments where process overwhelms a team’s ability to get stuff done, I’ve been fond of saying we’re not here to: Push Trello cards around. Guess if a coding task is more like a small t-shirt or a large burrito. Arrange our git commits in just the right order. Write long-lived documentation. I’d suggest that, instead, we’re here to ship code. Now that writing code isn’t the tricky part, I’m more convinced than ever we are both not here to operate a process and that activities like these are more important.

Processes should serve outcomes, not the other way ‘round: therealadam.com/2026/01/17/processes-sho...

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Adam Keys is Thinking Wherein there are cars, light-sabers, and television in my life.

Wherein there are cars, light-sabers, and television in my life.

therealadam.com/2026/01/15/i-was-back-at...

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Posts by Adam Keys