One morning I opened my HP ZBook Ultra G1a and the trackpad was dead. Keyboard fine. Touchscreen fine. External mouse fine. Trackpad: nothing. Twelve hours earlier it had worked. I hadn’t changed anything. Welcome to bleeding-edge silicon on Linux.
Open source is about to get a lot messier. Not because the code is getting worse – because AI agents just changed the economics of “fork it and fix it yourself.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about excellence lately. Not the motivational-poster kind. The real kind – the kind that gets baked into your bones when you’re twenty-two years old and surrounded by people who simply will not accept anything less. For me, that happened on a nuclear submarine.
I have a confession. I have a folder full of tiny bash scripts that make my life with GitHub dramatically easier. They’re not fancy. They’re not trying to be a framework. They are blunt instruments that solve real problems I have every single day.
The AI models are good enough. There, I said it. The bottleneck isn’t the model anymore – it’s how you use it.
Grace Hopper built the first compiler in 1952. They said “you can’t make them understand English-like instructions.” She had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. Sound familiar? Grace had some thoughts about this kind of thinking. She had a lot of thoughts, actually.
From a certain point of view, there are two kinds of people in the world: builders and not-builders. This isn’t judgment—it’s observation. Some people consume. Others create. Builders can’t help it.
AI has made code cheap and abundant. The scarce resource is now knowing what to build, not how. This is creating a rapid split between companies that sell workflows and companies that sell capabilities. Only one of these will survive.
Guest Post by Luca Herlein
The artificial divide between robotics and drone ecosystems made sense once. Today, it’s holding back the entire industry.
A Scottish football manager once said, “Some people think football is more important than life. But they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” When intelligence becomes a utility, the ability to ACT on it becomes everything. In today’s software world, Agency is more important than anything else!