2026-04-14 04:59:00
I was chatting with my buddy at Google, who's been a tech director there for about 20 years, about their AI adoption. Craziest convo I've had all year.
The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too. [...]
There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.
On behalf of @Google, this post doesn't match the state of agentic coding at our company. Over 40K SWEs use agentic coding weekly here. Googlers have access to our own versions of @antigravity, @geminicli, custom models, skills, CLIs and MCPs for our daily work. Orchestrators, agent loops, virtual SWE teams and many other systems are actively available to folks. [...]
Maybe tell your buddy to do some actual work and to stop spreading absolute nonsense. This post is completely false and just pure clickbait.
Tags: addy-osmani, steve-yegge, google, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms
2026-04-13 23:04:00
Research: Exploring the new `servo` crate
In Servo is now available on crates.io the Servo team announced the initial release of the servo crate, which packages their browser engine as an embeddable library.
I set Claude Code for web the task of figuring out what it can do, building a CLI tool for taking screenshots using it and working out if it could be compiled to WebAssembly.
The servo-shot Rust tool it built works pretty well:
git clone https://github.com/simonw/research
cd research/servo-crate-exploration/servo-shot
cargo build
./target/debug/servo-shot https://news.ycombinator.com/
Here's the result:
Compiling Servo itself to WebAssembly is not feasible due to its heavy use of threads and dependencies like SpiderMonkey, but Claude did build me this playground page for trying out a WebAssembly build of the html5ever and markup5ever_rcdom crates, providing a tool for turning fragments of HTML into a parse tree.
Tags: research, browsers, rust, webassembly, claude-code, servo
2026-04-13 10:44:24
The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.
As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.
— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost
Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai
2026-04-13 07:57:53
Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm:
uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with gradio \
mlx_vlm.generate \
--model google/gemma-4-e2b-it \
--audio file.wav \
--prompt "Transcribe this audio" \
--max-tokens 500 \
--temperature 1.0
I tried it on this 14 second .wav file and it output the following:
This front here is a quick voice memo. I want to try it out with MLX VLM. Just going to see if it can be transcribed by Gemma and how that works.
(That was supposed to be "This right here..." and "... how well that works" but I can hear why it misinterpreted that as "front" and "how that works".)
Tags: uv, mlx, ai, gemma, llms, speech-to-text, python, generative-ai
2026-04-12 03:56:53
SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me:
ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK constraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this.jsonb equivalent.The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the Query Results Formatter. I had Claude Code (on my phone) compile that to WebAssembly and build this playground interface for trying that out.
Via Lobste.rs
2026-04-12 03:35:31
Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo
See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly.
