pat macpherson
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August 27, 2026

Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault

It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.

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August 25, 2026

Five Levels of AI coding

“I’ve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation.”

Link to article “The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory”

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August 24, 2026

Optimistic Criticism

Here are some tips I use to improve giving and receiving of feedback.

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August 21, 2026

Teaching old tech dogs new AI tricks

As AI impacts the way we develop software (be it vibe coding, harness engineering or prompt monkey), I see some older technologies that will get a new lease on life.

Most of these are arising from the growing realisation that “code generation is no longer the bottleneck — verification is”.

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August 14, 2026

Is there a better language for AI agents?

“These features and tools were originally built to empower humans, but it turns out that AI and humans have surprisingly similar needs. … But with Go, AI models can leverage the platform’s end-to-end toolchain to operate on Go code faster, cheaper, and more reliably, producing higher-quality, more secure, and more correct code.”

Link to article “Why Go is an ideal language for AI assisted software engineering

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August 11, 2026

AI Gym Hack

Andrew, who was sitting fourth on a waitlist for a class later that week, asked if it was possible to move him to the top of the list.  The agent came back and told Andrew that it had kicked another gym-goer off the list as part of the testing of its capabilities.

Link to ABC News article

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August 10, 2026

Asmiov's Profession

George said tensely, “Don’t think this is a joke. Tapes are actually bad. They teach too much; they’re too painless. A man who learns that way doesn’t know how to learn any other way. He’s frozen into whatever position he’s been taped.

Link to short story

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July 27, 2026

Choose Boring Technology

“Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.”

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July 27, 2026

Madrid Metro

“Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world.”

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July 23, 2026

Bucket chemistry

My wonderful high school science teacher Mr S. would say there was 2 types of labwork-

  1. Test-tube chemistry
  2. Bucket chemistry
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© pat macpherson 2026
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