Agent

2026 September Thought Notes 220 notes this month | recorded from 2026-09-01 to 2026-09-10 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 105 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 44 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 34 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 16 · Travel, Places and Cities 8 · Reading, Ideas and History 7 · Business, Investing and Career 3 · Content, Craft and Recording 2 · Body, Health and Daily Life 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2026 August Thought Notes 484 notes this month | recorded from 2026-08-04 to 2026-08-31 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 212 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 118 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 96 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 36 · Business, Investing and Career 9 · Content, Craft and Recording 6 · Reading, Ideas and History 4 · Travel, Places and Cities 3 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 12 sections in the body above. 34 archived notes this month, filed under 7 themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology · 13 Daily Notes and Everything Else · 5 Business, Investing and Career · 5 AI and Agent Systems · 4 Product, Engineering and Open Source · 3 Content, Craft and Recording · 2 Reading, Ideas and History · 2 Prologue: A slack surface, and high density underneath In June I came back from Laos to Shenzhen. ...

2026 April Thought Notes 222 notes this month | recorded from 2026-04-02 to 2026-04-30 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 87 · Travel, Places and Cities 56 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 34 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 29 · Reading, Ideas and History 5 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 4 · Body, Health and Daily Life 3 · Business, Investing and Career 2 · Content, Craft and Recording 2 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2026 March Thought Notes 464 notes this month | recorded from 2026-03-01 to 2026-03-31 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 135 · Travel, Places and Cities 109 · Reading, Ideas and History 57 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 55 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 48 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 30 · Content, Craft and Recording 11 · Business, Investing and Career 11 · Body, Health and Daily Life 8 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2026 February Thought Notes 363 notes this month | recorded from 2026-02-04 to 2026-02-28 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 85 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 63 · AI and Agent Systems 63 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 61 · Travel, Places and Cities 41 · Business, Investing and Career 19 · Content, Craft and Recording 14 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 13 · Body, Health and Daily Life 4 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2026 January Thought Notes 386 notes this month | recorded from 2026-01-01 to 2026-01-31 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 89 · Reading, Ideas and History 79 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 70 · Business, Investing and Career 46 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 44 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 23 · Travel, Places and Cities 14 · Body, Health and Daily Life 12 · Content, Craft and Recording 9 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 August Thought Notes 332 notes this month | recorded from 2025-08-01 to 2025-08-30 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 94 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 74 · AI and Agent Systems 47 · Reading, Ideas and History 43 · Travel, Places and Cities 25 · Business, Investing and Career 17 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 16 · Content, Craft and Recording 9 · Body, Health and Daily Life 7 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 April Thought Notes 113 notes this month | recorded from 2025-04-05 to 2025-04-17 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 30 · AI and Agent Systems 30 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 26 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 12 · Reading, Ideas and History 5 · Travel, Places and Cities 4 · Business, Investing and Career 4 · Body, Health and Daily Life 2 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 March Thought Notes 52 notes this month | recorded from 2025-03-01 to 2025-03-22 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 21 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 15 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 8 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 4 · Business, Investing and Career 2 · Travel, Places and Cities 1 · Reading, Ideas and History 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 February Thought Notes 40 notes this month | recorded from 2025-02-18 to 2025-02-27 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 11 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 9 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 8 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 4 · Business, Investing and Career 3 · Reading, Ideas and History 2 · Travel, Places and Cities 2 · Body, Health and Daily Life 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

A model needs a tool to check project status. A user asks, “What’s blocking the demo project?” The model understands the question, but has no way to read the project’s state. The experience we want is straightforward: the user adds their project service, authorizes access once, then returns to the same conversation and gets an answer grounded in data. What this article verifies Sources were checked as of October 3, 2026, using Nango source and client version 0.71.12. The local examples use Node.js 22+ and have been tested for tool discovery, input validation, and request/response handling, including a local replacement for the proxy adapter. Project data is synthetic; the experiment does not call a model or execute real OAuth and proxy requests through Nango Cloud. The public-server sections provide integration steps to test in your own account. Rolling documentation, pinned source, and cloud deployments may differ; a dependency version does not prove protocol support, and customer stories establish only their stated use cases. The available evidence also does not establish that external MCP tools are automatically imported into Nango’s Action catalog. ...

For a Personal Agent to do things reliably on someone’s behalf, it has to connect a single model run to a recoverable task and confirm the result against external state. The model saying “I’ve cancelled it” still does not prove that the merchant stopped the renewal. Consider a design example: the user asks the agent to cancel a monthly subscription, keep the benefits already paid for in the current period, accept no new offers, and not delete the account. The agent finds the subscription and reviews the terms, then clicks confirm; the merchant has already processed the request, but the browser disconnects before the result comes back. Clicking again at that point might do one step too many, and reporting success outright has no basis. Whether this can safely continue depends on what was saved beyond the button. ...

For a Personal Agent to earn repeated use, the user has to genuinely carry less of the mental load. If handing over an operation still means chasing progress, rereading results, and nagging it to fix mistakes, the delegation is not complete. One Instinct user documented his own stress test on Reddit: buying snacks across apps and monitoring flight prices, and also researching startups. He was satisfied with part of the results, but he also hit long waits between steps and website verification that required a human to step in. He was willing to let the agent find things and compare prices, and willing to let it prepare an order, but not yet ready to hand over his credit card and let it pay freely. Original stress-test post ...

An animated character moves through several shots without changing color or proportions. Captions appear on cue, and the final movement lands on a musical beat. Watching a piece like this, it is tempting to conclude that the model has suddenly learned to understand video. Yet in the public Shipvideo project, the central artifact Opus delivers is an HTML document. A browser turns it into frames, and an encoder turns those frames into a video. Project overview ...

I build products on my own, and I want a design system that helps me maintain their UI and frontend over time. Finishing a page is only the beginning: features get added, styles change, and another platform may need support. When I return to a project, I want to build on the design already there and understand what a change will affect. That calls for a method I can maintain myself. When I want to change a color, I need to know where to edit it. When I want a different layout, I need somewhere to compare options. When I hand implementation to AI, it needs to find the existing components. I also want the interface to feel more thoughtfully designed, while starting with free tools wherever possible. File organization, tool choices, and visual judgment are connected problems. ...

The same support demo needs a WeChat version, a WhatsApp version, and different people and photos. The dialogue barely changes, but the image has to be rebuilt. IMStage keeps those changes inside an editable scene for product demos, teaching materials and fictional stories. Describe a moment in IMStage . AI opens the workspace and generates the dialogue and imagery. You can then edit messages, people, photos and layout directly, or ask for another change in plain language. ...

Suppose one company runs two Telegram bots: one serves European customers, one serves American customers. Both bots hand messages to the same support agent, and the session isolation policy is set to per-channel-peer. One platform user ID happens to appear in both accounts. The system generates the same key: agent:support:telegram:direct:tg:12345 A conversation from the European inbox can then surface in the American inbox’s context. No model jailbreak, no database corruption, no random routing. The system worked exactly as configured — the session key simply lacked the accountId dimension. ...

The previous article, the n8n primer , already started from Manual Trigger → Edit Fields → IF and covered Growth OS, constrained Agents, human approval, the operation ledger, result feedback and alternatives. This article does not build another three-node workflow. We start from a less photogenic failure window: worker → external API write succeeds worker → execution success not yet written back worker → crashes At this moment Redis may hold no active job and Postgres still holds a running execution, yet a third-party system has already received an email, created a record or charged a payment. Re-running the execution can turn n8n green again, and it can also repeat an external write. ...

By default Pi hands the model only four tools: read, bash, edit, write. It has no built-in Plan Mode, Todo, MCP, subagent, permission popup or background bash. Reading this far, it would be easy to write Pi as a hymn to minimalism: four tools are enough, and every complex framework can be deleted. The more useful question is tougher. After you delete a capability, where does the duty it used to carry go? ...

Calling Claude Tag a Slack bot misses its most consequential product decision. It turns a channel into a place where an agent can be authorized, remember, and keep working: a team shares one executor; each task runs asynchronously in a thread-level sandbox hosted by Anthropic; Agent Proxy injects external credentials at the network boundary; and the result returns to the public thread with a traceable record. The Claude Tag documentation describes these mechanisms in unusually concrete terms. ...

“Is common sense the same as the mechanism underneath?” That was where I got stuck while testing ideas across several industries. I had also reviewed the published work of 22 frontier AI teams and more than 70 people whose work is public. A pattern kept returning: pursue one long-running question, define what good work looks like, connect papers, code, and products, then turn production failures into the next round of tests. But the pattern still did not tell me where industry analysis should begin. ...

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews from the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience and AI memory engineering—representing no actual experts. In March 2026, I wrote in a note: In the AI era, perhaps forgetting is more important than remembering. The image that came to mind was simple: a water layer with hot, warm, and cold strata. Recently used knowledge resides in the hot layer, while content untouched for a while gradually sinks downward—only being retrieved under exceptional circumstances. If a knowledge system absorbs information without releasing it, it will eventually degenerate from wisdom into a mere repository. ...

Open Design is easy to misread. The name also belongs to the older open-design movement around shared product blueprints, but this article is about nexu-io/open-design : an open-source workspace that turns coding agents into a design production system. It is not a model, and it is not simply an image generator. It is a harness. The harness gives an agent a controlled vocabulary, reusable workflows, visual constraints, an artifact loop, and a place to inspect the result. That distinction matters because the quality ceiling still comes from the model and the operator; Open Design improves the path between intention and output. ...

Put the Tip List Down for a Moment I began this article as a collection of Boris Cherny’s Claude Code habits. That version had a problem: social posts age with models and product releases, while fan-maintained collections tend to mix personal advice, previews, and impressive-looking statistics. A sharp opinion can become a historical footnote before the article reaches its readers. So I took the slower route. Product claims in this revision come from Anthropic or the official Claude Code documentation. Untraceable numbers, second-hand quotations, and claims of universal superiority are gone. Boris’s way of working remains an inspiration, but it is not treated as a specification. ...

Why Does Getting Better at This Make Me More Tired? Let me start with a strange thing I banged my head against for a long time before I understood it. When I first started using Claude Code, the productivity gain was visible to the naked eye: an afternoon’s work covered what used to take two days. Once I got fluent, the gains kept coming — but so did the exhaustion at the end of each day. Because I was doing the same thing all day long: watch it finish, judge whether it’s right, think about what to say next, hit enter again. ...

One morning, and three things that shouldn’t exist One morning I got up, made coffee, opened my laptop, and found the agents I’d left running overnight all parked at “done”: one had added full multilingual support to a small tool of mine — Chinese, English, Japanese copy, an i18n layer extracted; one had built reading-progress analytics for my blog; one had refactored a CLI I wrote six months ago into a plugin architecture. The code was clean. The tests were green. ...

This is part two of “The Super Individual’s Gear Stack.” If you haven’t read the overview , start there — every judgment in this piece rests on the yardstick that essay proposed: does an advance in a layer of gear help only you, or does it help all of your competitors at the same time? ...

The fifteenth tool list changed the question Over six months, I read roughly twenty or thirty “AI-era super individual” tool lists. Around the fifteenth, the pattern became hard to ignore: the lists differed far less than the competitive advantage each one promised. I use most of the tools they recommend. The problem was not that the recommendations were bad. It was that ten thousand builders could install the same stack in the same week. Their absolute capacity might rise, while the distance between them barely moved. ...

I am building a developer-machine checkup skill called devbox-doctor. The idea sounds simple: inventory a Mac, identify tools that may no longer earn their keep, find actual toolchain conflicts, and trace data left behind by uninstalled apps. The dangerous word in that sentence is identify. A scanner can prove that two tools are installed. It cannot prove that one is useless. A directory can resemble an app’s name. That does not make the directory safe to delete. Spotlight can return no last-used date. That does not mean the app was never opened. ...