The Real Lesson of Firstmate: In the Age of Agents, Build the Tools That Fit You

Pixelated photograph of a ship's crew on deck, circa 1904

An L8 principal engineer at Meta quits his job — and instead of launching a startup or raising a fund, he spends a year building wrappers. He wraps the GitHub CLI, Chrome DevTools, Git worktrees and code validation, and writes a tool called gnhf — "goodnight, have fun" — that babysits his coding agents while he sleeps. Stitched together, they became Firstmate, an open-source project that hit 3,000 stars in two months. But in this video, Hal Shin argues that the tool is not the interesting part: the real lesson is what its author understood about building for yourself in the age of AI agents.

Pi Agent's Developer on Why Minimal Beats Maximal in AI Coding

A teal π symbol, a nod to the Pi coding agent

Pi is one of the smallest coding agents around — a minimalist terminal "harness" with a system prompt under 1,000 tokens and just four built-in tools (read, write, edit, bash) — and yet it keeps beating far heavier rivals like Claude Code and Codex in head-to-head comparisons. In this episode of the David Ondrej podcast, Armin Ronacher (the creator of Flask and Jinja2, who now works on Pi at Earendil together with Mario Zechner) explains why less tooling is winning, and walks through his own agentic engineering workflow.

Breda's nachtleven: een avondje uit voor jong en oud

Caféterras bij nacht van Vincent van Gogh

In de meeste Nederlandse steden heeft een avondje uit een heldere leeftijdsopbouw: de uitgaansstraten kleuren jong, de bars zijn trendy en de mensen boven de veertig blijven thuis. Breda is anders. In deze compacte, historische Brabantse stad lijkt het nachtleven werkelijk voor iedereen te zijn: tienerstudenten, dertigers en gepensioneerden belanden vaak in dezelfde bruine kroeg of op hetzelfde terras, en niemand kijkt daarvan op. Dat generatieoverschrijdende karakter is de meest onderscheidende sociale signatuur van Breda.

  • in Sport, Dutch
  • 4 min read

NAC Breda in 2026: de grote favoriet met het grootste budget voor een directe terugkeer

Gepixelde foto van een voetbalstadion

NAC Breda, de Parel van het Zuiden, gesteund door een van de trouwste en meest bevlogen supportersgroepen van het Nederlandse voetbal, het Yellow Army, speelde in 2025-26 weer in de Eredivisie, maar degradeerde meteen. Nu staat de club in het seizoen 2026-27 in de Keuken Kampioen Divisie, en de kansen op een directe terugkeer behoren tot de beste van de divisie. Niet door geluk, maar door het budget, de continuïteit op de bank en de omvang van de club. Een sterke positie, maar niet zonder risico.

Omarchy 4.0: Could This Be the First Truly AI-Embedded Operating System?

Pixelated photograph of code on a computer monitor

Most operating systems treat AI as an afterthought: an assistant app bolted onto the desktop, or a chatbot you open when you remember it's there. Omarchy, the Arch Linux-based distribution created by David Heinemeier Hansson, takes the opposite approach—and its 4.0 release, code-named Quattro, is the clearest attempt yet at making an AI agent a genuine part of the operating system itself. That is why so many are calling it a strong candidate for the first truly AI-embedded OS.

Why Vultures Matter: Nature's Overlooked Sanitation Service

Pixelated illustration of a vulture in flight

Vultures are among the most misunderstood animals on Earth — and among the most important. They are nature's sanitation service: the birds that turn a carcass into clean ground, removing bacteria and pathogens before they get a chance to spread. Their work is worth billions and, as the collapse of vultures in India showed, losing them can cost human lives. Yet across much of the world, these scavengers are quietly vanishing.

8 Evidence-Based Ways to Influence Your Metabolism

Pixelated photograph of fresh vegetables

Your metabolism is the sum of the biochemical processes by which your body turns food into energy. The common belief that slim people automatically have a "faster" burn than people with overweight is a myth: a heavier body needs more energy to function and has an absolutely higher resting calorie expenditure. Weight regulation comes down to total energy balance. So to understand how to influence what you burn, you first need to know what your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is made of.

  • in Society
  • 4 min read

Systems Thinking: Why Patterns Are So Hard to See — and What to Do About It

Abstract pixelated spider web, a metaphor for interwoven patterns

Anyone who has tried to fix a stubborly persistent problem has probably felt it: you push on one part, and the whole thing pushes back. You solve a bottleneck, and a worse one appears elsewhere. The pattern you are looking for stays frustratingly out of reach. This is the terrain of systems thinking — yet even when we know the discipline exists, actually spotting the patterns is remarkably difficult. To understand why, it helps to look at both how systems behave and how our own minds are wired.

Enterprise Design with EDGY: A Common Language for the Whole Organisation

Abstract pixelated architecture, inspired by EDGY's design facets

Most organisations are designed in silos. The user experience team and the process architect speak different languages; the executive can't relate to the strategic product roadmap; the organisation designer can't see the impact of that tangled application architecture. The result is a fragmented enterprise with a fragmented design. EDGY is an open-source response to exactly that problem: a simple, graphical language that lets designers, architects and change-makers co-design the enterprise as a coherent whole.

Singapore's Biological Data Center: 16 Million Living Neurons at Work

Painterly detail of a data center server rack In Singapore, researchers have switched on a data center that runs on a different kind of silicon substitute: living human brain cells. The prototype, built at the NUS Life Sciences Institute by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) together with global data center developer and operator DayOne and Melbourne-based biological computing startup Cortical Labs, packs roughly 16 million living human neurons into a single server rack — the world's first independently operated biologically integrated rack.