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“Why now?” is a great question! Maybe with overall review load increasing, people are looking for short-term efficiencies, or maybe it’s some comfort in agentic reviewers. I’d love to see studies of the tradeoffs regardless.

Aww thank you! I'm particularly curious about the interviewing and managing portion for "Review plans & code you didn't write." Models are getting better at working with loose task definitions, but speedrunning "the engineer is thinking more critically about AI-generated code" is a tough one

A timeline of the professional experiences a junior engineer used to develop over several years. Skills that used to take years to hone are now required in your first moments with a coding agent.

Late last year, I gave a talk at Northeastern to students in a few software engineering classes about what's changing and what's staying the same for junior engineers in industry with the introduction of coding agents. Slides and notes here: blog.marcua.net/2026/04/08/a....

It took me way too long to understand what was going on there.

I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server.

🔗 ziptbl.com

It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved.

Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data:
ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...

Have a slice of Tercel

Project Document Study Interest Form Hi! 👋 We are researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) exploring AI-powered tools to support researchers as they work on their research projects. We are looking for partici...

Are you a researcher in CS or a CS-adjacent field curious about how an AI agent can help you with your research project? Want to try a new tool for your research support in a paid user study ($100, 2 hr)? Limited spot numbers. See details and sign up here: forms.gle/JzLtkAhe7Ttv...

Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma YouTube video by Scott Parsons

Not an endorsement of its death, but this feels obligatory www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9os...

B12 3.0 A decade of helping customers build their home online

I've never built anything for a decade professionally, but here we are! blog.marcua.net/2026/03/12/b...

Clawrd

"...managers who treat AI as a productivity multiplier for their junior engineers are optimizing for output. The managers who use AI to push their juniors into harder problems are optimizing for growth. These look similar on a quarterly roadmap. They produce very different engineers over two years."

I want to talk about why AI-based mass surveillance is so dangerous, and why I would oppose it no matter which party or president is in office.

AI And The Ship of Theseus Slopforks: what happens when a library gets rewritten with AI?

chardet was vipeforked to MIT and I have thoughts about it. Spoiler: I like it. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/the...

A photo outside a black building labeled "The Punk Rock Museum" in neon green, with a hat that says "SKA" at the bottom of the photo

If you find yourself in Las Vegas, The Punk Rock Museum is a pretty good place to go!

It's like 50% nostalgia for whatever 1-2 decades of punk you liked, 50% stuff Fat Mike / NOFX liked or collected.

A snippet from the introduction to the blog post: Four questions agents can't answer Software engineering after agents write the code Feb 25, 2026 You’ve likely read countless words about how coding agents have massively changed software engineering. At the extreme, December 2025 was the turning point and we’re unlikely to write a line of code again. But amidst all this talk of change, it helps to understand what likely won’t. I’m particularly interested in the questions agents can’t answer, doubly so if they are unlikely to answer them well in the coming years. Here are four such questions that blur the line between product management and software engineering. The questions reflect the fact that as coding agents cover more of the nitty-gritty of code generation, humans will be responsible for higher-level concerns. I think these questions will remain in the human domain for years to come: What should we work on? How much of it are we doing? How do we do it well? What’s getting in our way? These questions are durable: we’ve encountered them since software engineering became a profession, and we’ll be responsible for them as long as we’re responsible for the products and systems we share with the world. The answers to these questions require judgment based on goals and constraints that are organization-specific, dynamic, and don’t live in some task management or issue tracking system you can integrate with. It’s hard to imagine an agent successfully synthesizing these disparate and context-specific inputs into answers. What should we work on? Companies tend to work at the intersection of what their users find valuable, what the business finds

Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code"

We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come.

blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...

Only a few more days (full consideration deadline: March 1) to apply to our lecturer position at @cornelltech.bsky.social!

‘The bathrooms were rank, but we didn’t care’: how the grimy-but-great CBGB changed rock for ever Half a century ago, the famed New York venue run by a former marine and folk singer was ground zero for the punk and new wave scenes. Now the bands who played there are being celebrated on a 101-track...

CBGB&OMFUG. Iconic and mourned.

www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...

A snippet from the introduction to the blog post: Four questions agents can't answer Software engineering after agents write the code Feb 25, 2026 You’ve likely read countless words about how coding agents have massively changed software engineering. At the extreme, December 2025 was the turning point and we’re unlikely to write a line of code again. But amidst all this talk of change, it helps to understand what likely won’t. I’m particularly interested in the questions agents can’t answer, doubly so if they are unlikely to answer them well in the coming years. Here are four such questions that blur the line between product management and software engineering. The questions reflect the fact that as coding agents cover more of the nitty-gritty of code generation, humans will be responsible for higher-level concerns. I think these questions will remain in the human domain for years to come: What should we work on? How much of it are we doing? How do we do it well? What’s getting in our way? These questions are durable: we’ve encountered them since software engineering became a profession, and we’ll be responsible for them as long as we’re responsible for the products and systems we share with the world. The answers to these questions require judgment based on goals and constraints that are organization-specific, dynamic, and don’t live in some task management or issue tracking system you can integrate with. It’s hard to imagine an agent successfully synthesizing these disparate and context-specific inputs into answers. What should we work on? Companies tend to work at the intersection of what their users find valuable, what the business finds

Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code"

We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come.

blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...

[new blog post]

End of Productivity Theater

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/end-...

Move fast and break things?:)

Rust Engineer DuckDB Labs provides services around the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system directly from its main developers.

🦆 ↔️ 🦀 DuckDB Labs is looking for a Rust engineer to join our team in Amsterdam.

📝 See the details and application page at duckdblabs.com/jobs/rust_en...

GitHub - tobilg/polyglot: Rust/Wasm-powered SQL transpiler Rust/Wasm-powered SQL transpiler. Contribute to tobilg/polyglot development by creating an account on GitHub.

Introducing polyglot - A Rust/Wasm SQL transpiler for more than 30 SQL dialects.

It has 100% coverage for sqlglot‘s test fixtures.

github.com/tobilg/polyg...

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

I'm scheduling speakers for NYC Systems 2026. Please DM or email me if you've got a staff/principal engineer or phd student who can come tell us something interesting about compiler / database / systems / infrastructure work!

Schedule is on the site. nycsystems.xyz

So much great advice in this thread!

Oh this is so much better than what was in my head.

It's hard for me to read this and think about anything other than "AND YOU KEEP PULLING ME DOWN!" though I'm not sure if that was the desired effect.

I am recruiting a postdoc in HCI & AI!


Interested in augmenting human thinking and learning, futures of work & education, participatory AI, collective intelligence, or related topics? Please get in touch! This 2-year position will be based at a top university in Europe (email or DM for more info)