Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Everyone defaults to WebSockets for real-time features. Most shouldn't. The reality: 95% of "real-time" applications only need server → client updates. Chat notifications. Live dashboards. Stock tickers. Log streams. AI responses. WebSockets give you bidirectional communication. But bidirectional comes with a tax: complexity, resource overhead, scaling challenges, debugging nightmares. Server-Sent Events (SSE) do one thing: stream data from server to client. They do it brilliantly. And for most applications, that's all you need.

I think the upshot of all of this is that there is a lot of value to actively managing your agents' vibes and feelings, not just treating them as text-generation robots. The models aren't alive, but thinking of them as having feelings, rather than just next-token-prediction engines can help you nudge their mental states into a better place. I think you'll like the results.

By my very uncharitable math, agentic software engineering methodologies have gotten to somewhere around the 1970s. Like everything in AI, this is, of course, a speed run. We're very quickly relearning why software engineering management and software engineering project management matter. So by next Tuesday, maybe folks will start thinking about what they can steal from XP.

Hyaluronic acid, which is not banned in sport, can be used to increase penis circumference by one or two centimetres. This would increase the surface area of their suits during competition, which, according to FIS, the international ski and snowboard federation, could increase their flight in the air.

Convert Markdown to rich HTML clipboard content

First, they made us learn English. Then we did it so well, that we started to use words that are uncommon to them. Then, they had us do the grunt work of training the AI models. Next, the AI models started sounding like us, and now we are being accused that we are cheating.

Before you point your finger and cry "AI!", I ask you to pause. Consider the possibility that what you're seeing isn't a lack of humanity, but a form of humanity you haven't been trained to recognise. You might be looking at the result of a different education, a different history, a different standard. You might just be looking at a Kenyan, writing. And we’ve been doing it this way for a very long time.

A public model is a model built by the public for the public. It requires political accountability, not just market accountability. This means openness and transparency paired with a responsiveness to public demands. It should also be available for anyone to build on top of. This means universal access. And a foundation for a free market in AI innovations. This would be a counter-balance to corporate-owned AI. We can never make AI into our friends. But we can make them into trustworthy services—agents and not double agents. But only if government mandates it. We can put limits on surveillance capitalism. But only if government mandates it.

Below is a photo of some of the Single Purpose Devices I have been using more so that I can use my smartphone less.

So no, they didn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The “whole self” thing was just the price of admission in a seller’s market. Now that it’s a buyer’s market, they’d prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code. The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they’re building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.

That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology. For a bit more background, I was recently involved in helping a friend’s accounting firm to move away from using an extremely legacy software package that they had locked themselves into using for the last four decades.