Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Kitesurf is significantly more efficient in CPU and memory consumption than Chromium for common agentic tasks like screenshots and HTML extraction. What follows is the story of how we built it. Buckle up, it’s going to get technical — but we promise to keep it interesting.

The headless browser for AI agents and web scraping

The findings also cast doubt on one of the main arguments for bringing employees back to the office: that people need to be together in person to feel connected.

A GitHub Action for issue triage

Symphony turns project work into isolated, autonomous implementation runs, allowing teams to manage work instead of supervising coding agents.

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English rules, repurposed as a Claude Code skill for rewriting ambiguous agent-facing English.

A deep-research agent with an enforced budget, verified quotes, and a privacy boundary for local data.

Ordinary SQLite files, one sharded database—parallel writes, PostgreSQL, HTTP, Rust, Python, and shard-safe IDs.

A human mathematician can hold only a small number of unfamiliar elements in mind simultaneously. An AI model can keep the entire problem statement, hundreds of intermediate equations, several abandoned approaches, definitions, constraints and earlier conclusions inside its context window. We normally interpret the resulting performance as evidence of superior reasoning. But some of it may instead reflect the removal of one of the most important biological limits on human reasoning: our extremely restricted working-memory capacity.

Future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark. This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text, and we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act.

This post grew far beyond my original idea, but I wanted to set out my thoughts on building a custom engine before delving into the technology itself. Building an engine takes time, but it gives us control over how the game loads and updates, removes engine-licence fees, and teaches us about asset compilation, rendering, and optimisation. We can even expose parts of the engine to players, allowing them to improve the game or create mods (and potentially entirely new games) with our technology. After Unity’s runtime-fee announcement, technological independence became an even more important concern for game developers.