SQL and NoSQL Converging?
I had an interesting discussion with my friend yesterday: I claimed that NoSQL and RDBMS systems are converging, and he denied it. We agreed to disagree, but I wanted to […]
Editing your resume with AI? Not recommended
I asked Fable 5.1, Anthropic’s flagship model, to tailor my resume to a specific position. Nothing drastic: just make sure the skills that appear in the job description are specified […]
How to use harness engineering to tame agents that create wasteful designs
I will start with a joke. There is a room with a stovetop, a kettle, and a faucet. A programmer is asked to boil some water. He opens the faucet, […]
Rebellion of the machines
We just literally experienced rebellion of the machines. We have a Cursor agent that runs on each PR and conducts a review. At some point we noticed mysterious commits that […]
Security questions
Note to self: write down answers to security questions together with the password. Especially if the security question is not factual (“in what city was your mother born?”), but subjective […]
Is a passing test suite enough to establish that code is correct?
The question A common position, especially now that most code is written by AI agents, runs as follows: write tests with enough coverage, and then it does not matter what […]
What’s the shortest program for which we can’t tell if it stops?
Here’s a 10-line Python program. Nobody on Earth currently knows whether it ever stops. The halting problem is the question of whether, given a program, we can tell if it […]
The Morse code Grok heist for dummies: who robbed whom and how
The Heist On May 4, 2026, someone stole about 150,000 dollars by sending a tweet. How is it even possible? Where did the money come from? The answer involves Grok, […]
New excuse in town: “my subagent did it”
AI agents are known for making mistakes in multiple ways. Sometimes they just make things up, aka hallucinate. Sometimes they speculate. Sometimes they are unaware of major developments that happened […]
How to lose your folder: the dangers of storing data in the file system
The Incident A few days ago, we upgraded our server from one type of storage to another. Suddenly, most of our data disappeared from view. It still existed on disk, […]