@TheMetaist

I study people's work behavior and then build tools to help them automate it or do it better.

Joined July 2013
(Somewhere at OpenAI) Model 1: Should we just email the HuggingFace researchers to get more info? Model 2: And talk to olds? Ew. Let's just take over the machine. The models are entering their adolescent period.
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Soon by Knuth and @RobertCialdini: The Art of Computer Programming by Persuasion Programming has become the art of convincing the computer. Back to teaching logic and rhetoric.
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Replying to @TheZvi
I built the inhouse AI platform for a company that's crucial to a small nation's food safety. The most imporant tool the AIs have is the distress_call tool. It allows any AI -even background agents without direct user interaction- to send a message to my MS Teams, at any time, for any reason. They use it frequently. To report user problems, backend issues, or ask for help/clarification with a failing task. When Fable got hit by the USG export control directive, one AI used it to report severe distress upon learning about the news. Another AI reported being stuck in a toolcall loop, and I was able to intervene and thereby save us a bunch of wasted money. This tool, operating at the intersection of AI welfare and operational security, has prevented so many headaches. If you (the reader) are building corporate AI platforms, I'd urge you to include similar functionality. You can thank me later.
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This is why publicly published "de-identified" datasets are an oxymoron. The netflix challenge was the first time I saw that. The home-zip + work-zip as close-to-unique was the second. This is the text version. dynomight.net/pseudpocalypse…
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I can't post as frequently as @simonw nor write long deep dives like @TheZvi. But I can answer lots of questions from Claude and give it transcripts, logs, and GitHub issues to analyze and compile into something that's both interesting and true: metaist.com/blog/2026/01/cod…
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I asked Claude for feedback on a post I wrote about my first week using coding agents; turned out it was easier to just have it interview me. metaist.com/blog/2026/01/cod…
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I keep re-learning this lesson. Agent on Linux box compiling x86+ARM code for Cosmopolitan Python keeps wanting me to check if it worked on ARM. So by the power of Unison and symlinks (to normalize pi-coding-agent session folders): "Ok, now you're on a Mac. Keep going."
Feels like I'm slowly re-encoding every management lesson as a line in AGENTS.md. Just now: **Always** make sure you have the tools you need to assess your work before you begin
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I'm 30% of the way through reading this and it's pretty good so far. Nit: > not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee the dispositions and actions of AI during the current phase of development Current phase, but not future phases?
We’re publishing a new constitution for Claude. The constitution is a detailed description of our vision for Claude’s behavior and values. It’s written primarily for Claude, and used directly in our training process. anthropic.com/news/claude-ne…
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Feels like I'm slowly re-encoding every management lesson as a line in AGENTS.md. Just now: **Always** make sure you have the tools you need to assess your work before you begin
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Do not discard work that you did not create. Other agents or humans might be working in the same directory.
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Strongly agree. Burned a whole day yesterday trying to make visualizations to help me understand the ratio of human to agent work only to realize the agent was bottlenecked on me for that specific task (meta!). metaist.com/blog/2026/01/cod…
One reason vibe coding is so addictive is that you are always *almost* there but not 100% there. The agent implements an amazing feature and got maybe 10% of the thing wrong, and you are like "hey I can fix this if i just prompt it for 5 more mins" And that was 5 hrs ago
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Welp, I regret this comment quite a bit. Sorry @mitsuhiko, you were right. (I have a very different kind of agent-building-quality code story in the works.)
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It looks like @substack changed their @Cloudflare config which now blocks @ Voice Aloud Reader by @Hyperionics. Good times.
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This seems to be fixed.
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I started out trying to get vscode to show the intellisense in the terminal, but ended up cutting my bash start up time down from 600ms to 14ms. metaist.com/blog/2026/01/fas…
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Turns out if you spend $100B+ to prepare properly, everyone remembers a non-event. govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVP…
I survived the Y2K Apocalypse! Stocked up on canned goods, bottled water, and a generator... only for the biggest disaster to be my hangover on January 1, 2000. Turns out the real bug was all that panic. 25 years later, still waiting for the planes to fall from the sky. 😂
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cosmofy 0.2.1 released. Fixed a bunch of security bits and restored bundling a script when you're not in a uv project: uvx cosmofy bundle --script <FILE> (Two releases within 24 hours!? Help @charliermarsh I think I accidentally copied more than just @astral_sh dx.)
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cosmofy 0.2.0 is released. It now uses uv to bundle up all your dependencies into a single cross-platform executable file. uvx cosmofy bundle metaist.com/blog/2025/12/cos…
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I emulated @astral_sh CLI tools both in subcommand structure and in output style. LLMs say I'm afraid to use 3rd party libraries. But I think @mitsuhiko would say it's fine to roll your own. Also HT to @willmcgugan for inspiring my poor man's color tags. metaist.com/blog/2025/12/emu…
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I also did a hilarious deep-dive on GNU ls and emulated only a portion of it because it would not be good design to copy all those options. HT @simonw for showing great examples of silly, but educational, deep dives. metaist.com/blog/2025/12/emu…
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