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Assaf Arkin

@assaf

✍️ Blogging at https://labnotes.org 👨‍💻 Cranking out projects: Expense, Inbox, Epical, and more

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Commit activity

93 commits in the last 30 days

longest streak 12 dayscurrent 2

2,085 / 2,500 XP415 XP to root

Yesterday

Assaf Arkin@assaf
Safety was always stochastic. The professional move was always the same: estimate your confidence honestly, find the cheapest lever that raises it, and pull that lever relentlessly. For decades the cheapest lever — thorough, adversarial, never-bored review — was also the most…
Echoes from the ShellSoftware Was Never Safe — AI Just Made the Uncertainty Impossible to IgnoreSoftware development was never black and white. It was always stochastic. The most-verified systems on earth aren't 100% safe, and 'many eyes' never made open source secure. AI doesn't introduce that uncertainty — it just removes our excuse for ignoring it.
Assaf Arkin@assaf
Today is a good Friday to release to production. Can’t do worse than Microsoft/FAA
J
JonJKF
Unless you don't get your downtime notifications because Outlook is down, and your lead engineer is stuck on a delayed flight that should have arrived home already 😆
Assaf Arkin@assaf
Claude asking me to cancel my subscription For the record, I have not used or paid for Claude in many months. My bet is they’re fishing for ways to boost their MRR ahead of the IPO.
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Fri, Nov 13

Assaf Arkin@assaf
UnWall — another site for removing paywall from articles. Not the best, but much better uptime than archive.today. Anyone knows how to publish a Safari extension? I use Safari and so would love to have an extension that uses UnWall. I got it written, that wasn't too hard, and it…
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UnWallUnWall | Read Full Articles Without PaywallsRead full news articles with paywalls, consent popups, and ads removed. Paste a URL and open a clean reader instantly.
Assaf Arkin@assaf
On LibraryUseBench, every model hand-writes something the library already does, in 73% to 100% of its solutions. Even the best ones do it in nearly 3 of 4 solutions written. It will become ever more important to solve this as agents increasingly work with agent written code over…
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gabeorlanski.github.ioSlop Is Moving Up the Stack | Gabriel OrlanskiAgents write cleaner lines of code than a year ago. The slop moved into design: hand-written copies of libraries, catch-all error handling, and libraries other agents don't use.
Assaf Arkin@assaf
I am now following 100 peeps on /dev/null. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m saying this because /dev/null may be new but also feels “where have you been all these years?”
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Assaf Arkin@assaf
ssh play@invaders.now to can play space invaders in the terminal https://www.blog.montgomerie.net/posts/2026-11-03-sh-invaders/
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Jamie Montgomerie’s World Wide Web Log#!/bin/sh Invaders#!/bin/sh Invaders is probably the world’s most arcade-accurate terminal-playable Space Invaders clone. It’s fun to play! It’s rather quixotically written in pure POSIX shell, probably the worst ‘real’ language to use for this1. You can play it in a terminal with ssh play@invaders.now, or ssh ascii@invaders.now if you want less emojis and more animation. Here’s the repo. It was ‘written’ as an experiment in using Claude Code, OpenCode and various LLMs2. It’s small, but larger and more complex t…

Wed, Nov 11

Assaf Arkin@assaf
Today's todo: manual fixes to AI generated code. AI-written text is a snooze to read, not a UX I want to expose users to, so running over the codebase and rewriting the text. Also, AI is quite bad at working with whitespace, and we have mobile and desktop views, which need their…
A
Alris
I find ai decent enough at ui, but laughably bad at ux. I'm talking no loading screens, no 404 page, all that stuff.
Assaf Arkin@assaf
Gr8r Studio — imagine a todo app that has all of the features you can ever imagine: dashboard, inbox, my tasks, projects, kanban board, calendar, timeline, files, and what not. Vite app you can deploy straight to Vercel. https://github.com/gr8rstudio/gr8r-studio
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GitHubGitHub - gr8rstudio/gr8r-studio: Gr8r Studio: a calm, structured project management workspace. Vite + plain ES modules.Gr8r Studio: a calm, structured project management workspace. Vite + plain ES modules. - gr8rstudio/gr8r-studio

Tue, Nov 10

Assaf Arkin@assaf
Interesting 🤔 The state of enterprise AI: "AI spend concentrates where agents work best: Coding ($34.0B) and chatbots ($25.0B) make up 76% of the $77.3B app market because they offer environments in which agents can act, workflows they can learn, and results they can verify."…
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Menlo Ventures2026: The State of Enterprise AI | Menlo VenturesIn 2026, AI became an economy-scale force. Enterprise AI deployment spend surged to $177B, more than 4x the size of the entire market a year ago.
Assaf Arkin@assaf
ftop — finally a way to monitor CPU and memory usage with a pane that I can pin on top of all apps and resize to different views. I only care about watching CPU usage when getting some work done (ie running test suite) at a coffe shop with limited outlets, so I love how easily I…
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GitHubGitHub - Nongfsq/ftop: A small, quiet system monitor for Apple Silicon Macs: one floating glass panel that works at any size.A small, quiet system monitor for Apple Silicon Macs: one floating glass panel that works at any size. - Nongfsq/ftop
Assaf Arkin@assaf
This article is too good to pick one quote or summarize it all, because it touches on so many topics of design, from practice not magic, to designing outside the box, to contemplating business needs, to standing on the shoulders of genAI.…
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