If the part of programming you enjoy most is the physical act of writing code, then agents will feel beside the point. You’re already where you want to be, even just with some Copilot or Cursor…

How to use a skill (progressive disclosure): After deciding to use a skill, open its SKILL.md. Read only enough to follow the workflow. If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, l…

One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file…

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost. “How modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of small, satisfying tasks and moments…

How does lake ice do this? Incredible! (Mirror Lake, New Hampshire) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“Eating the right foods in the proper quantities, 16th-century Britons believed, balanced mind and soul. So in Shakespeare’s plays, roasts, ales, and pies are not props, but clues to char…

I guess this is as good an explanation of contemporary culture as anything. Hungover from a world that told us we could be anything, we decided to be DJs. We don’t create our own music.…

LLM 0.28 I released a new version of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models. Highlights from the release notes: New OpenAI models: gpt-5.1, gpt-5.1-chat-…

The Flow State podcast recently celebrated their 300th episode with a 2h41m mix of instrumental music sourced from a group of “musicians, curators, label heads, music fans”. They even let…

I first posted about Nick Veasey’s work back in 2005 and thought it was worth another look. Veasey uses x-ray photography to get inside views of familiar objects, sometimes on a large scale…

Oilwell is a (fake) wellness app “to help you embrace climate chaos” that includes features like “Drowning Mindfully”, “Lo-Fi Beats to Frack To”, and “12 Hour Wildfire Relaxatio…

Season's Greetings, Friends. Here's issue #62 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🍝 I don't make fresh pasta—but I certainly eat it.…

I just updated the 2025 Kottke Gift Guide with some new suggestions, including inflatable tube men (for your front yard; your neighbors will love!), some of the year’s best cookbooks, ramen…

Size of Life by Neal Agarwal is absolutely beautiful, incredible, and informative. Web design inspiration at its finest.…

Civicus monitors the health of civic societies and their freedoms around the world. In their annual assessment on civic freedoms for 2025, they downgraded the United States from “narrowed…

Post-Japan Depression. “People feel it after coming home from a trip that feels magical, safe, clean, punctual, aesthetic, peaceful… and suddenly — boom — back to reality.” (Not sur…

What is happening? Orcas started wearing dead salmon as hats again and chimps are once again putting grass in their ears. “We were even more shocked that they were doing their own spin on…

OpenAI reportedly declared a "code red" on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google's Gemini 3. It's less than two weeks later and they just a…

A big part of our chat circled around authenticity and self-worth. A few questions we touched were: How easy is it to overlook your own achievements? How strange does it feel to work alone so much? Ho…

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are probably my favorite big brand candy (perhaps only bested by Reese’s Pieces), so it was a real treat (groan) to see how the company makes them cups. But…

MacKenzie Scott announces that she’s donated almost $7.2 billion of her personal fortune to organizations worldwide this year. That brings her total giving up to more than $26 billion.…

A streaming services savings tip from the Nomadico newsletter that I was not aware of: I’m going to add Apple TV at home after watching only part of Severance on a United flight, but I’l…

Eight Million Ways to Happiness: Wisdom for Inspiration and Healing from the Heart of Japan. “Hiroko awakens readers to the idea of a traditional spiritual flexibility that seamlessly coexi…

On the latest episode of Wake Up Excited! , I talk with my good friend Marc Thiele. Marc is the organizer of the Fantastic Beyond Tellerrand conference that happens every year in Germany. I really f…

Liam Neeson Narrates Anti-Vax, Pro-RFK Documentary. In the narration, he calls the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines “dangerous experiments”.…

This video by Ian Lauer is an excellent accessible explanation of the basics of astrophotography as he runs through the process of how he captures a long-exposure image of the Andromeda gal…

Funniest McSweeney’s piece I’ve read in awhile: The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking? “Warmth is for Sorry! This is not a hug. This is a chess clock in a stranger�…

From the V&A Museum, here’s a 90-minute video of someone knitting a pair of gloves using a knitting pattern from the 1940s from the museum’s archive. Featuring soft-spoken moments, nat…

Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore. “…that point in midlife when your capacity to pretend, perform, and please others starts shorting out lik…

Thread: What was typography like in the Soviet Union? “They did not just have 1 font everyone had to use. As a matter of fact, there were 39.” 💬 Join the…

New evidence suggests that Neanderthals were making fire in the UK 400,000 years ago. The previous earliest date of human fire-making was a mere 50,000 years ago.…

From the archives of London’s V&A Museum, a selection of items that were used by Victorian-era mourners to remember and pay tribute to loved ones who had died, including jewelry with huma…

The trailer for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary film about the late singer/songwriter. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality.…

The Normalization of Deviance in AI This thought-provoking essay from Johann Rehberger directly addresses something that I’ve been worrying about for quite a while: in the absence of any headl…

Timothy Snyder: “What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the pogrom of autumn 1938 were steps towards creating a centralised national police agency. In the US, something similar…

Size of Life, a visual comparison of living things from DNA to a quaking aspen clone. Lovely illustrations. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I hate how good this is: Radiohead sings Santa Claus Is Coming to Town (There I Ruined It). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

From artist Miya Ando, Water of the Sky, A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words. Through a collection of 2,000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando des…

The loose flap of skin around the elbow is called the what now?? 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I've never been particularly invested dark v.s. light mode but I get enough people complaining that this site is "blinding" that I decided to see if Claude Code for web could produce a useful dar…

10 Years of Let's Encrypt Internet Security Research Group co-founder and Executive Director Josh Aas: On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. [...] Today,…

Devstral 2 Two new models from Mistral today: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 - both focused on powering coding agents such as Mistral's newly released Mistral Vibe which I wrote about earlier t…

I talked to Brendan Samek about Canada Spends, a project from Build Canada that makes Canadian government financial data accessible and explorable using a combination of Datasette, a neat custom…

Agentic AI Foundation Announced today as a new foundation under the parent umbrella of the Linux Foundation (see also the OpenJS Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenSSF and many m…

Listen to jazz trio The Commercialists play Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas live in a small club called The Estate in Milwaukee. That’s this afternoon’s chill work music so…

mistralai/mistral-vibe Here's the Apache 2.0 licensed source code for Mistral's new "Vibe" CLI coding agent, released today alongside Devstral 2. It's a neat implementation of the now standard t…

We Asked Critics From Authoritarian Regimes What They Wish They’d Known Sooner. “You cannot make authoritarian leaders the center of your narrative. You have to make the people the center…

A “particularly inventive” Rube Goldberg marble run maze. Lots of elements doing double duty. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

A blog alarm clock lives inside me. As time passes, an uncomfortable pressure builds up until the alarm finally goes off, rattling my bones and my soul. Snoozing isn’t an option; the only way to…

Since 2013, I’ve done a holiday gift guide that’s basically a curated roundup of stuff from the best gift guides I can find. I always do it a little bit differently from year to year, and…

Colin Furze built a full-suspension bike using powerful magnets instead of shocks or springs. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

CSS Wrapped 2025 is a super fun website that shows off the latest and greatest CSS features. The website’s got some fun light/dark mode action going on too!…

Looks Like the Supreme Court Will Continue to Overturn the 20th Century. But: “It’s amazing how many of our problems today could be solved by a Congress that was willing and able to legis…

I found the problem and it's really bad. Looking at your log, here's the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the end? That's your entire home direct…

I’m super excited to talk about the potent combination of AI and design systems with my pal Dominic Nguyen and the folks at Storybook this Thursday. I got to huddle with Dom today, and this is somet…

Prediction: AI will make formal verification go mainstream Martin Kleppmann makes the case for formal verification languages (things like Dafny, Nagini, and Verus) to finally start achieving mor…

Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries Seth Larson reports that urllib3 2.6.0 released on the 5th of December and finally removed the HTTPResponse.getheaders() and HTTPRespo…

This is a pretty good optical illusion. If you’re not on your phone, it also works if you shake your head a little. (thx, caroline) Tags: optical illusions �…

A guide on how (and why) to quit Spotify. “I am extremely glad I [switched away from Spotify]; it’s been a minute since I’ve felt something approaching genuine delight in discovering a…

Stickertop.art is a massive collection of the tops of laptop computers adorned with stickers. Laptop stickers are more than decoration, they’re a form of self-expression. Eac…

Why We Have Two Nostrils Instead of One Big Hole. (Great title!) “The nostrils alternate airflow from one side to the other. This may allow one side of the nose to rest.”…

I’m working on the 2025 gift guide right now, but I wanted to separately shout-out my favorite gift recommendation of the year: Kelli Anderson’s incredible popup book about typography & t…

A video featuring Magnus Carlsen trying to beat a very novice player at chess with increasingly unfair rules (opponent gets two moves per turn, opponent starts with 23 queens, Magnus starts w…

From Nature, a list of 10 people who helped shape science in 2025. “A fired public-health official, a mosquito breeder and a baby with a smile seen around the world. These are just a few of…