Jeffrey Zeldman Presents - The Courage to Stop - State of the Web Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.

zeldman.com/2026/04/15/t... #WriteBetter #writing #brevity #usability #KillYourDarlings

reads: Introduction In March 2026, an Anthropic employee released the source code of Claude Code, a wrapper around their large language model that is widely used to generate code in programming tasks. Its thousands of lines of Typescript code contained many hopeful prompts and in cantations to shape Claude’s behaviour. Here are some examples: “Report outcomes faithfully”; “Never characterize incomplete or broken work as done”; “Be careful not to introduce security vulnerabilities ” (prompts.ts in Anthropic 2026) . There is more than a passing resemblance here to the Azande witch -doctor apprentice who, while stirring the medicine, utters: “You medicine which I am cooking, mind you always speak the truth to me. Do not let anyone injure me with his witchcraft, but le t me recognize all witches. … Let me be expert at the witch -doctor’s craft so that people will give me many spears on account of my magic.” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 93). In the case of Claude, the incantation s appeared insufficient: analysis of the codebase, which according to a company executive was “pretty much 100% written by Claude Code ”, revealed severe security vulnerabilities (Townsend 2026).

what an introductory paragraph!!

Worth your time:

leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/0...

It’s wild that the biggest threat to world peace and the global economy is the president of the United States of America.

Shipping faster, thinking less? The AI code verification trap As AI floods codebases with machine-generated output, the AI verification trap emerges to test the resolve of modern developers.

AI makes code cheap to write. Verifying it is now the hard, expensive, human part — and the "prompt and review" model risks burning out the very engineers we need to catch what AI gets wrong. My latest for @leaddev.com
leaddev.com/ai/shipping-...

Someone online referred to “Pedolf” and I knew instantly whom they meant. And so do you.

Today, I got messages from 3 different devs at 3 different large tech companies (1,000+ devs each). "tokenmaxxing" is happening inside all of them.

Why?

Because all of them measure either token usage, or surface metrics like DX's TrueThroughput that reward complex code!

This is nuts!

• Feb 2026: $14B ARR
• March 2026: $19B ARR
• April 2026: $30B ARR

That November inflection point with Claude Opus 4.5 was no joke.

Introducing Void, the Vite-native deployment platform:

🚀 Full-stack SDK
⚙️ Auto-provisioned infra (db, kv, storage, AI, crons, queues...)
🔒 End-to-end type safety
🧩 React/Vue/Svelte/Solid + Vite meta-frameworks
🌐 SSR, SSG, ISR, islands + Markdown
🤖 AI-native tooling
☁️ One-command deploys

void.cloud

Our humanoid robot just took our new #robot dog for a walk outside the TNG office. On his first official work trip, our @unitreerobotics.bsky.social Go2 met real dogs, real confusion and lots of looks. Next, we are going to train the Go2 to guard the office, bark at strangers & do tricks on command.

Astro 6.0 | Astro Astro 6 is here with a refactored dev server, an experimental Rust compiler, live content collections, CSP, and more.

Astro 6 is here! We completely rebuilt the Astro dev server and build pipeline onto a new, more powerful runtime-agnostic architecture.

Plus: New Fonts API, CSP support, an experimental new Rust compiler, and more...

astro.build/blog/astro-6...

Anthropic and the Pentagon are back at the negotiating table, FT reports Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is reportedly back at the negotiating table with the U.S. Department of Defense after the breakdown of talks on Friday.

Memo to all those people who switched apps…

This isn't an individual consumer choice issue.

www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/a...

Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here

Following the launch of Claude Code, US GitHub code pushes were 30% above the pre-2025 trend.

Similarly iOS app releases were up 55% vs last January, and new website registrations rose 34% year over year globally after years of flatlining.

AI productivity gains have hit software in a major way.

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainer... An AI agent is merging PRs into major OSS projects and cold-emailing maintainers to drum up more work.

🤖 An AI agent created a GitHub account 2 weeks ago.

It’s already landed PRs in major #OSS projects and is cold-emailing maintainers to offer its services.

Maintainers don’t seem to know it’s an agent and the code is getting merged.

We’re in new territory! 🤠

socket.dev/blog/ai-agen...

Introducing Markdown for Agents Cloudflare's network supports real-time content conversion to markdown at the source.

This is a really nice new Cloudflare feature: on-the-fly markdown conversion. Tools like Claude Code send an "Accept: text/markdown" header when making web requests. If you enable this it, it will send these agents a markdown version of your page instead of the full HTML. Really good for docs.

[PERF] Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T by crabby-rathbun · Pull Request #31132 · matplotlib/matplotlib This PR addresses issue #31130 by replacing specific safe occurrences of np.column_stack with np.vstack().T for better performance. IMPORTANT: This is a more targeted fix than originally proposed. ...

So this is dystopian as hell and I can't believe this is real...

AI agents are now writing takedown blog posts to shame maintainers for not accepting agent-generated PRs.

github.com/matplotlib/m...

Everyone is starting to sound like AI, even in spoken language

Analysis of 280,000 transcripts of videos of talks & presentations from academic channels finds they increasingly used words that are favorites of ChatGPT

Model collapse, except for humans arxiv.org/pdf/2409.017...

The Astro Technology Company joins Cloudflare | Astro The Astro Technology Company is joining Cloudflare! Astro remains open-source, MIT-licensed, and platform-agnostic. With Cloudflare's support, we're focusing 100% on building the best framework for…

We are joining Cloudflare! astro.build/blog/joining...

Introducing the Astro 6.0 Beta.

- Redesigned dev server: run against the same runtime you deploy to
- First-class Cloudflare Workers support with workerd
- Stable Content Security Policy and Live Collections

It's never been a beta time to try Astro 👀

Alphabet to Buy Data Center Partner Intersect for $4.75 Billion Alphabet Inc. has agreed to buy clean energy developer Intersect Power LLC for $4.75 billion in cash, plus existing debt, marking one of the largest deals by the tech giant to dramatically expand its ...

Recent Big Tech earnings calls confirm power, not GPUs, is the bottleneck in meeting AI demand.

Google’s Intersect acquisition addresses this by co-locating generation with data centers, effectively bypassing grid limitations.

This won’t be the last investment in power generation by Big Tech.

Exclusive: Murati’s Thinking Machines Aims to Raise Up to $5 Billion Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence developer co-founded by ex-OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, has been in talks with potential investors to raise between $4 billion and $5...

How do you raise a $2B seed round in July then need another $5B by November? I don’t see how startups like this can survive in the long run given the massive capital needed to compete with FAANG on AI infrastructure.

They need multiple breakthroughs in costs considering compute and power needs.

cartoon: A long sandwich coils around and up like a rattlesnake Caption: Don't bread on me

Editorial cartoon: Don't bread on me. Enjoy :)

Cursed Videotape Kills Anyone Who Swallows It Whole

Cursed Videotape Kills Anyone Who Swallows It Whole

Announcing Workers automatic tracing, now in open beta

Cloudflare Workers' support for automatic tracing is now in open beta! Export traces to any OpenTelemetry-compatible provider for deeper application observability, no code changes required. https://cfl.re/4qv3Ste

Microsoft to Get 27% of OpenAI, Access to AI Models Until 2032 OpenAI is giving its long-time backer Microsoft Corp. a 27% ownership stake as part of a restructuring plan that took nearly a year to negotiate, removing a major uncertainty for both companies and cl...

OpenAI now valued at $500 B, Microsoft holds 27% ($135B) and the non-profit holds $130B in the reorganized OpenAI Group PBC.

OpenAI can raise capital more freely, partner beyond Azure, and release open-weight models; Microsoft secures model rights until 2032 and a $250B Azure purchase commitment.

If you demand that people control something they can't control, then expect them to control something else. If the mandate is "No Bugs!" without any social or technical change, then expect a response like "no *reported* bugs".

“I feel like the industry…is making too big of a jump and it's trying to pretend that this [AI Coding Agents] is amazing. And it's not, it's slop! And I think they are not coming to terms with it.” - Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AutoPilot Vision at Tesla

The AI Ouroboros Nvidia and other companies are paying startups to buy their products.

this is one of the best articulations of the AI bear case I've read

most of the AI companies are also massively wealthy and profitable hypercorps, but OpenAI specifically is a bomb planted at the heart of the American stock market helpfully labeled "this is a bomb"
prospect.org/power/2025-1...