• Markdown Is Not a Format, It's an Argument

  I’ve covered PNG and text files, and now it’s time for Markdown, which can be thought of as a philosophy of formatting or a lifestyle of text documents more so than an actually well defined file format. It has structure, and it has …

• There Is No Such Thing as a Text File

  Last time I took apart PNG, which opens with eight bytes whose entire job is to announce “I am a PNG”. A text file opens with nothing. No signature, no header, no length field, no version, no metadata. It is bytes, and then it stops. So …

• How PNG Actually Stores Your Pixels

  I’m starting a series on file formats. Not “here are the ten image formats you should know,” but the actual bytes: what’s in the file, in what order, and why someone decided it should be that way. Starting with PNG, because it’s the format …

• Deploying Hermes Agent With Ansible Without Creating a Snowflake

  I have a home server with Plenty of RAM and no useful GPU, so running a local model was never the interesting part of deploying Hermes Agent. The interesting part was making the agent setup repeatable. I could have pasted a docker run …

• pnpm 11 Made the Safe Thing the Default

  Protecting against supply chain attacks requires vigilance. You have to audit your dependencies. You have to pin your versions. You have to review your install scripts. All of these are great things to do, but they require sustained effort. …

• Onboarding a Second Engineer to an Agent-Heavy Repo

  How do you onboard a new engineer to a project when most of what they need to know is not checked into the code at all? It’s the agent configuration. It’s the rules about commands, the conventions the agent applies automatically because …

• Boring Is a Feature

  What does boring look like in the age of AI? And I’m not talking about uninteresting. I’m talking about highly maintainable. JavaScript? I mean I guess models are good at it. Everybody knows it. It runs everywhere. The biggest problem with …

• The Best Automation Has a Manual Escape Hatch

  Automation earns trust by being easy to override, not by being impossible to question. That sounds backwards. The pitch for automating something is usually that it removes the human, and a system you keep reaching into feels like a system …

• Cost and Latency Belong in the Score

  Congratulations, the best model available passed your eval. That’s not the question you should be answering. What other models could have achieved equivalent results? How much did it cost to run those other models? How long did it take for …

• Your Vibes Are Not an Agent Eval

  Do you really know what you’re doing? You swapped a model, you tuned an agentic workflow, you had the agent rewrite a chunk of a system prompt. You added a skill. Now the output feels sharper. Is that feeling a measurement? No, it’s an …