2026

I am a somewhat odd duck in all this, being a “humanities person” who also learned to code and hack around on a computer at a young age. Therefore I feel it is especially incumbent upon me to demonstrate how coding agents can be useful to non-coders of all backgrounds, ages, and interests. Today, I’d like to do just that. I hope it is useful to as broad a range of people as possible, and in service of that goal, I am going to write assuming no prior experience with coding agents, command-line interfaces, or coding.

Dean Ball on using coding AI agents.

We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like?

A call for new aesthetic perspectives and creative approaches.

The magic of this mysterious technology is starting to lose its luster. What looked like magic is turning into work.

The current state of personal AI infrastructure. via ondiscourse.substack.com

Corporate profit margins have risen to nearly 20%, which is double the historical 10% levels seen in previous decades. via Eric Basmajian x.com

You don't need to do all three. You might not need to do any of them. But if Reddit matters to your audience—and increasingly, AI is making that decision for you—pick one approach and commit to it properly.

Wild Signal provides AI search optimization services that help brands earn citations in the digital landscape. They pair communications experts with geospatial tools to deliver strategic intelligence. via wildsignal.agency

Comprehensive Coverage 139 Skills - Extensive coverage across all major scientific domains 28+ Databases - Direct access to OpenAlex, PubMed, bioRxiv, ChEMBL, UniProt, COSMIC, and more 55+ Python Packages - RDKit, Scanpy, PyTorch Lightning, scikit-learn, BioServices, PennyLane, Qiskit, and others

GitHub repository with 139 scientific skills for Claude, enabling complex multi-step research workflows across biology, chemistry, medicine, and other scientific domains

Star Trek's unproduced 'Phase II' series from the 1970s included 19 episode scripts that were never filmed via kottke.org

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. ... It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Dan Wang's 2025 annual review letter.

I started my tools.simonwillison.net site last year as a single location for my growing collection of vibe-coded / AI-assisted HTML+JavaScript tools ... The new browse all by month page shows I built 110 of these in 2025!

Simon Willison's Annual review blog post examining major trends and developments in large language models (LLMs) during 2025.

WikiFlix is a free streaming platform for public domain classic films with no ads or account required. via swiss-miss.com

You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of.

A truly beautiful essay proposing a return to independent publishing.

For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are: works by people who died in 1955, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America); works by people who died in 1975, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia); films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1929 (relevant solely to the United States).

Public Domain Review article highlights works entering the public domain in 2026, including books by William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Hermann Hesse.