Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison

People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders. Your coders need to have solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and churn out the code. That's changed completely. My programming work, I need two minutes every now and then to prompt my agent about what to do next. And then I can do the other stuff and I can go back. I'm much more interruptible than I used to be.

Kind of goes against the whole deep work principle. Times sure are changing.

The open web isn't dying. We're killing it by

The open web’s values were always expensive. Someone has to run the servers. Someone has to maintain the software. Someone has to define the standards. Someone has to pay for storage, bandwidth, security, spam mitigation, abuse handling, moderation, and UX work. The fantasy was never that these costs did not exist. The fantasy was that advertising would cover them without eventually reshaping the system around the needs of advertisers and intermediaries. […]

Most importantly, an open web cannot survive if most of its participants think of themselves only as consumers. Open systems require maintainers, contributors, donors, paying members, standards participants, hosts, and institutions willing to absorb some friction in exchange for resilience.

Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex by Maxwell Zeff

While Cursor’s core product lets developers code in an integrated development environment (IDE) and tap an AI model for help, new products like Claude Code and Codex center around allowing developers to off-load entire tasks to an AI agent—sometimes spinning up multiple agents at the same time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s version of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the product is optimized for a world where developers spend their days “conversing with different agents, checking in on them, and seeing the work that they did,” rather than writing code themselves.

I used Cursor exclusively when this whole revolution started. But it was coding only, I could not use it for general stuff. And I wanted that too, hence I loved to Claude.

But their business model is entirely dependent on the agents, and so are at a risk from price changes from them.

I don’t get their business model.

This even smaller credit card-sized e-reader has one tragic flaw by Andrew Liszewski

I was thrilled to find the X3 fits perfectly on the back of my iPhone 16 Pro, and then once again disappointed to discover its magnets aren’t strong enough to keep it securely in place. Magnetic accessories like PopSockets or the OhSnap Snap Grip have a satisfying “thunk” when attaching them to your phone. Attaching the X3 to my 16 Pro feels more like the devices are exchanging a weak hug. They don’t remain aligned when holding the two together, and on several occasions the X3 fell off my phone while being inserted or removed from a pocket.

I want to buy a phone sized device which can help me read. The problem is what I read. Not just books. I Use RSS to read from the web. That, is the missing component in this and all the other devices like this.

But damn is it tempting.

What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? by Kelsey Rexroat

Super-readers read on lunch breaks and before bed, on buses and in grocery lines, and sometimes—confessed sheepishly—during meetings with the camera off. [..]

Phones and e-readers make this possible, turning idle moments into opportunities to microdose literature. Reading is not scheduled so much as threaded throughout the day.

I find doing this myself.

For this article, the writer did not include people who read audiobooks. I use audiobooks extensively though.

Whatever works.