Simon Willison arguing that hard budget caps need to be turned on by default.

Here’s a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I’m talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say “after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors”. These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, “after $X/month, send me a warning email”, will not cut it.

Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of spinning up code that can do useful things. Sometimes those things cost money—calls to paid APIs, or hosted web applications, or systems that can bill for additional storage and compute.

Nobody wants to wake up to an email sent at midnight warning about a budget limit and find that, while they slept, their rogue service had consumed several hundred (or several thousand) more dollars of usage.

Martin Fowler arguing that AI needs to have conscience rather than consciousness.

Which all makes me think that when it comes to AI and LLMs: why are we wondering if they have consciousness – when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience?

After all, the AI labs trained them to be super-persistent, why did they not train them to be well-behaved? It’s as if a human trains a dog to bite children, and we blame the dog rather than the trainer.

A decade ago, a dog ran in front of me while I was riding my bike, putting me into the hospital with a broken arm and a broken face. Massachusetts law makes owners strictly liable for what their dogs do. That meant I didn’t have to prove the owners were negligent in how they controlled their dog or fenced their property – they had to pay my hospital expenses (in practice their insurance company paid my insurance company). There should be something along these lines for LLMs. Those that train the LLM should be responsible for what it does, after all if it has such a galaxy brain it should be able to tell if it’s doing something wrong and either stop or get a human’s explicit approval.

Sunil Pai’s suggestion for senior engineers:

I think in moments like this, the thing you need to do is actually a little counterintuitive. but you have to start from a position of assuming that everyone around you is operating in good faith, okay? like, they hired you for you. they didn’t hire you for who you think you’re going to be in six months. they like you for who you are right now, bro.

so the thing to do is actually to drop a level. not to try to be a higher-level engineer, but to almost drop a level and simply become the greatest teammate for a while. you’re still responsible for your work, you’re just trying to get moving again. you know, “I’m just here to help and support my teammates. I’m going to do bugs, the annoying things on somebody else’s plate or that no one has been able to get to. do grunt work, organizational stuff, write-ups. just things to help people out.”

and the reason you want to do this is you want to move away from an outcome-based mindset to momentum-based. like, you want to build a routine, because momentum is everything in this, and relationships are an even bigger thing in this. and by getting momentum going and fixing your relationships with other people, the thing you get is stamina. and that’s when you realize the real lesson, which is that big projects are not done with big efforts. it’s a big marathon, just slow, steady, incremental work. forget about a weekly basis, like a daily basis, an hourly basis, to the point that it’s muscle memory.

you’re in automatic mode. you wake up, you make yourself coffee, you get to work, and you just do the work. and then 30 days later, you look back and you see the immense volume of work that you’ve done just by doing a little bit every day. because the thing you’re going for is reliability, fixing your relationships. you want to take the burden off your teammates and your manager, because then, once you build that trust, they will give you bigger work. that’s the move here.

remember, you are in the reputation-building business, and software is actually downstream of that. godspeed and best of luck.

This will never stop blowing my mind.A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away.And around it, four planets slowly orbiting.Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.com) 2026-10-02T02:14:05.749Z

Mat​hia⁠s S​chäf⁠er highlights the impact of AI on web development. She cites various examples where earnings have fallen off a cliff in a short span of time for anyone to react and adapt. Below is the experience of Axel Rauschmayer.

The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).

The traffic to my blog and my books (which were free to read online) increased beyond what I can currently afford. Virtually all of it comes from AI crawlers, so there is no ad income.

Therefore, I’m taking my blog and my books offline so that I can decide what to do next – especially w.r.t. AI companies stealing my work.

Jeff Atwood sharing the email he received which highlights the loss of belonging, community, connection—or whatever you want to call it—in the world on AI.

Sometimes I would get stuck, and I needed someone to just nudge me in the right direction.

I actually come from a family with a few software engineers. I have friends who were software engineers. I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to “do it myself”.

You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.

That meant so much to me. I felt a connection to people through a community. 

And it meant the world.

An LLM would have done exactly what I wanted back then. But would it have given me what I needed? 

At the time, I needed to know somebody cared enough to help me.

You, your colleagues, and random strangers in the Stack Overflow Community, really helped me. It was more than answering my questions. You gave me your time. That made me feel like I mattered. The fact my questions could help other people in my predicament made me feel like I was part of something.

An LLM can’t do that.

Jim Nielsen talking about how modern user experience is designed to exploit human frailties, not be considerate of them.

So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin:

An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics” in user interfaces and experiences: they are designed to exploit human frailties, not be considerate of them.

Stated again: a humane interface — or a humane system, even a humane technology — is considerate of human frailties. It acknowledges they exist and works with them, rather than taking advantage of them.

Humane technology does not rely on impulse, addiction, or imposition to survive.

It survives purely on the free choice of its user.

You choose to use it because you have the freedom not to.

I would highly recommend following Jim’s blog. They are like small, tasty nuggets of knowledge.

Mini Shaji Thomas describing how Delhi cut its power loss from 50 to 5 percent.

This has been one of the most significant achievements for India in the last two decades. We wouldn’t have seen EV on Indian roads without this. India’s bar on the above graph looks incredible.

However, this had an interesting side effect. This comment by groos on Hacker News.

The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as ‘roads’ with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.

Venki Ramakrishnan asking and explaining the question—Can humans live forever?

The diversity of lifespans in nature suggests that aging isn’t fixed. Despite being constructed from the same chemical building blocks, species can have dramatically different lengths of life. Mayflies may live only days, mice about two years, and bowhead whales and Greenland sharks for centuries. Galapagos tortoises live so long that one of them hobbling around today could have encountered Charles Darwin in 1835.

These differences are not random. Lifespan is closely related to metabolism. Smaller animals generally have higher metabolic rates and shorter lives; larger animals tend to metabolize energy more slowly and live longer.

Natural selection doesn’t care how long an organism lives. It favors traits that increase reproductive success. Every species makes trade-offs in how it allocates resources among growth, reproduction and maintenance. A mouse doesn’t improve its ability to produce more offspring by investing in longevity if starvation or predators are likely to kill it first. For a mouse, investing in rapid growth and reproduction is more advantageous. But larger animals, such as whales, mature slowly and reproduce later. Their bigger size also reduces the risk of predation, making long-term maintenance more worthwhile.

The same logic explains some notable exceptions. Birds and bats often live much longer than similarly sized terrestrial mammals because flight reduces the risk of predation and also allows them to forage over a wide area, cutting the chances of starvation. When surviving longer increases reproductive success, evolution favors slower aging.

Evolution can also reward genes that are beneficial early in life even when they become harmful later. For example, the same genes that promote rapid growth or prevent cancer during youth can contribute to aging later on. This evolutionary theory of aging is known as antagonistic pleiotropy. “Pleiotropy” simply means a gene can have more than one effect, and “antagonistic” means some of those effects can be harmful. The theory suggests that aging is not an adaptation in itself but an unintended consequence of evolutionary compromises. The upshot is that each species has a maximum natural lifespan.

This makes sense. If natural selection favored longevity instead of reproductive success then evolution will stop.

This comment on Hacker News by Nevermark on why we should tax the ownership of land.

Land, as apposed to the property on it, is raw nature. If we view raw nature as a common inheritance of mankind, then paying a tax on land is how the exclusionary use of it, balances with the common interest in it.

Economist Henry George in the 1800’s, pointed out that taxing land, but not the property on it, incentivizes efficient use of land, because holding land for its passive (parasitic) return even when underused, becomes unprofitable when the land is taxed in proportion to the value it can enable.

And in turn, only taxing land, not property, incentivizes increased development, as higher property investment amortizes land tax against higher returns.

Greater investment in housing being just one way land tax, without property tax, incentives greater productive use.

So many things align for higher growth in ways that more evenly benefit everyone. But our relationship with land is over-complicated, and that is both the reason for change, but the reason change is so hard.

Small attempts have failed, but then, for the rich who can hold land and reap growth in value that outpaces the taxes they pay on it, that remains another inefficient/negative-externality, that pays off for them.