Software engineering in 2026: I miss writing code

Spotify is once again putting AI slop in my Release Radar. It got there because the uploader somehow was able to attribute this to a bunch of legitimate artists who I'm sure had nothing to do with this.

Nano banana unfortunately fails the upside down bike test

The two worst people you know...

So does Imagen 4

Veo 3 fails the upside-down bicycle test

Suno v4.5 sucked into a bagel suno.com/s/u46wTy3ali...

Cool stuff happening with Copilot in VS Code Insiders right now...

You can add a chat participant that users can talk to directly with "@" in the chat panel, or your extension can just make requests to the language model to drive whatever other features you want. And with the free tier, this is accessible to all of your users.

Now everyone can just use Copilot in VS Code for free 😊

Extension authors should check out our chat API which lets you add cool AI features to your extension! code.visualstudio.com/api/extensio...

Prepare to take flight 👀

Hello, World!

Use the builtin Shortcuts app, and you can have this menubar shortcut

LanguageModelTool API A guide to creating a language model tool and how to implement tool calling in a chat extension

We published a new extension guide for using VS Code's new LanguageModelTool API! code.visualstudio.com/api/extensio... s/o @ntrogh.bsky.social

It's pretty fresh, but using this library lets you turn a couple hundred lines of code into just a handful, and all the chat participant features just light up "for free"! WIP

GitHub - microsoft/vscode-chat-extension-utils: A library for building VS Code chat participant extensions A library for building VS Code chat participant extensions - microsoft/vscode-chat-extension-utils

But, it turns out that building a really good chat extension is kind of hard, because working with LLMs is hard, and because our API has a lot of features 😇

So I just published this library to help you build chat extensions: github.com/microsoft/vs...

Chat extensions A guide to creating an AI extension in Visual Studio Code

So we have this VS Code extension API for building Copilot Chat extensions: code.visualstudio.com/api/extensio... and a bunch of chat extensions have been published over the past 6 months. Sweet! 💯

Trying out this interaction for changing the target of a Copilot Chat message in VS Code

oh wait no animated gifs?

That's one worth the effort!

I guess James S.A. Corey is on that list as well (which is actually two people)

When the final twist of a novel leaves you more excited about pages yet to be written than the ones you’ve just read, the immediate temptation is to downgrade the pleasures you’ve experienced along the way. That’s the conundrum of assessing Neal Stephenson’s “Polostan,” an enjoyable book in its own right, but a trifle disappointing for the way it abruptly ends just as your interest is peaking in its intriguing main character.

Neal Stephenson is the only author who I've read pretty much to completion. But I don't really know why, because all of his latest books have disappointed me one way or another. Now the nytimes review of his latest starts with this paragraph, which describes exactly how I've felt about others. 😩

Bluesky Social as the #1 free app in the App Store rankings

Bluesky stuns in new App Store ranking

Wear a mask! 6 ft!

Now posting nothing twice as efficiently with Buffer

I broke the chat progress spinner. Enough ❤️ and I'll keep it this way 😅

👋