c’mon, try doing a breakthrough

The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments. Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks. After a little while, you’ll start recognizing familiar Tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings, and everyday objects. You might even see them appear before your eyes when you start falling asleep. Tom Tang Attention hijacking There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts. This can be a good thing since it’s how we learn new skills and discover new ideas. Sadly, less and less of our attention is focused intentionally. Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us. Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran. Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists. Do you want to know how your colleagues are doing? Too bad, LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment. Do you want the opinion of strangers on a product? Well those Redditors you wanted to ask are probably just a bunch of LLMs talking to a bunch of Russian trolls now. I hope you didn’t value their opinion too much. If, like me and most people, you spend the major part of your day focused on your device, there’s no doubt it’s affecting you. And when you let someone else dictate what appears on your screen, it’s the same as giving them the key to your brain. New York Said Back to an intentional internet The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer. You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s… Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video. The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but it’s not very hard to find. After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it. The main difference between this time and now is you. When you want to get back to reading blogs, RSS feeds, and finish that tutorial instead of doomscrolling shorts, you have to get used to a slower internet. One where content is not infinite and doesn’t get updated every click. But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain.

One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I’ll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I’d missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has been something like: January: get every engineer onto Claude Code every single day March: ok, let’s also get everyone else onto Claude Code or Claude Cowork every single day April: local development is bottlenecked on checkout and worktree model, instead create ~10 local workspaces which each have an independent checkout of every repository, and operate at the workspace level, not at the repository level, so it can generate cross-repository pull requests across frontend, backend, infrastructure and data monorepos June: oh boy, agent-driven development is heavily constrained by lack of a common task management system with higher visibility and less permission complexity than Jira, so let’s migrate the entire company over to Linear and hard stop on Jira July: yikes, now we have visibility into all these tickets, many of them are trivial but managing them through local development isn’t scaling, let’s roll out an orchestrated harness which internally we call “Agent Fleet”, along the lines of Stripe’s Minions The most recent question for me has been figuring out how to adopt the software factory pattern. (After some light research, the specific AI-context origin of this term is slightly messy to attribute, but I think it might be Justin McCarthy in February 2026’s Software Factories And The Agentic Moment.) The software factory pattern is looping on a broad goal, and then relying on the harness to drive progress towards that goal. Our first pass at implementation is fairly basic: An agent skill /linear-project-loop which reads in a Linear project and starts by auditing that project’s goal definition on these dimensions: An RFC in Notion that describes the project’s goals, how those goals are measured, and the general approach A Datadog dashboard or Snowflake queries that measure progress against those goals If those are missing, or the Linear project is missing in its entirety, it iterates with you on creating those missing tools. Then it reviews the state of the metrics and issues for the project. If new work is identified, it adds those issues to the project. It updates the state of issues that have moved. It works on the non-blocked tasks based on the project’s current state. This is often writing a pull request, updating a pull request, pinging for review, asking a clarifying question, etc. When a task completes, if the project description is fresh, it takes on the next task. If the description hasn’t been updated in a while, it reruns the loop starting with the first step. Right now I am running this locally in a local harness, but it’s working well enough that I anticipate moving the behavior to be driven by the same orchestrated harness that we assign one-off tasks to. What I particularly like about the factory pattern is that it parallels very closely how I’ve been working locally, while forcing me to recognize the places where I was accidentally hording parts of the state for myself regarding the goals of the project. I was already asking agents to iterate on specific Linear projects, but they didn’t have the ability to evaluate if they were going in the right direction, or if it was missing necessary tasks. Now it does. The other place this has been extremely helpful for me is checking in on projects post release. For example, I shipped our passkeys implementation earlier this year, but some months go by without my checking in on how it’s going. If we saw adoption spike, or error rates start to turn, I might miss it, but running the factory in a less frequent post-release mode would catch it immediately. The final thought that’s been interesting to me is how much all of the pieces here compound only to the extent that you have the other pieces. For example, this factory pattern depends on having Datadog MCP and Snowflake access available to manage goal-tracking, but it also depends on Linear being the single source of state for the company’s work, and an orchestrated harness that can perform work independently from your laptop. Keeping up with this many migrations is a fascinating industry moment.

I owe a lot of my professional identity and success to CSS-Tricks. CSS-Tricks repeatedly gave me the opportunity to write for them. In doing so, they helped to both socialize and normalize accessibility as a mainstream frontend concern. I’m deeply thankful to them for this. The team was also a joy to work with, notably Geoff Graham. He’s a mensch, and one of the nicest people you can interact with in the frontend web space. If you have not been following the news about the site, Kevin Powell has a good video about the whole situation: Content skipped. I’m not speaking on behalf of Geoff, Chris, or others involved with running the current version of CSS-Tricks. I’ve got skin in the game as an author. This is my personal opinion, born of my feelings and beliefs. I think a lot of the web’s infrastructure should be co-ops, and CSS-Tricks is knowledge infrastructure. To that point, I should also point out that the website covers far more than just CSS. The corporate model of ownership can be a risk. If infrastructure is not part of a corporation’s core strategy, it is not a priority. As Kevin’s video touched on, it seems like promotion via owning the frontend content space isn’t part of Digital Ocean’s strategy anymore. It is not that CSS-Tricks does not have value. It is that Digital Ocean cannot see it. It is deeply, tragically ironic to me that Digital Ocean allowed this to transpire. This is because I know for a fact that the techniques and philosophies shared by CSS-Trick authors helped to shape iterations of their product’s UI. Some may be quick to point out that this knowledge now—illegally—exists inside of LLM training data, so the risk of the website going away is mitigated. To this, know that we should be striving to keep resources like CSS-Tricks going. Human creativity is the force that creates new techniques, strategies, and technologies. The web will calcify without voices sharing what they know, forever locking us into endless permutations of a fixed point in time. Unlike corporations, co-ops don’t have to be motivated by profit. By not needing to prioritize growth at all costs it means co-ops can instead prioritize and incentivise things like preservation and cultivation. It is also a successful model of operation, one that even already exists, and flourishes in the tech space. Collective ownership can also serve as checks and balances for, and protection against hierarchical decision-making. I only need to point to the chaotic and aberrant decisions many CEOs in the technology space have been making as of late to demonstrate the value of this approach. Paddy Srinivasan, if you somehow wind up reading this: Save some face and take a big swing. Give CSS-Tricks back to the people who love it.

How can something that “just works” be so annoying? situation We live in Cambridge off a little road down a drive in shared ownership between us and our neighbouring houses. All the utilities are buried under this drive, including the phone line. anticipation Over the last few years we have been canvassed repeatedly by CityFibre saying that they can deliver fibre all way to our house. I saw them digging trenches and leaving tails of purple fibre cladding along nearby roads, ready to hook up all the houses. I thought they would need to do something similar to deliver fibre to us. So when they turned up and knocked on our door, I talked to their salesbods and walked them up and down the drive and pointed out where the existing BT line goes. Then they gave up trying to sell to us. This happened about three times. disaffection We were not eager enough for an upgrade to deal with these impediments. notification A few months ago we were told that CityFibre would soon come and do the upgrade, since there’s a nationwide deadline for turning off the copper phone network at the end of the year. We expected that this would force them to actually plan some digging works, so we talked to our neighbours about it. We were all ready for some huge faff to follow the next visit by the CityFibre bods. installation CityFibre turned up on the promised morning bright and early. To our enormous surprise, a brown fibre housing was already poking out of the ground next to our copper phone line. It had been fed through 50 metres of 5cm duct without us being aware they were even working on the street. Within a couple of hours, the technicians had drilled through our wall, installed the ONT, blown fibre through the unexpected pipe, plugged in the CPE (superficially identical to the old one), and left telling us to anticipate that it might not work properly until tomorrow. activation Around lunch time, the copper phone line stopped working completely. Some faff ensued, switching all our devices over to the new WiFi network. For a while we thought this was the death of our land line, but in the course of debugging other issues, I realised that the router has a built-in VoIP adapter (I don’t think we were told it has a built-in VoIP adapter) so I plugged the phone in and it Just Worked: they had ported our phone number across and everything. Flawless. I was seriously impressed. rumination It has been a few weeks since the switchover, and apart from a couple of horrible Clown-afflicted IoT devices, it has been fairly smooth. What prompted me to write this up was realising that we delayed this upgrade for years because the sales people were not given enough technical information about how the installation process works: the fact that houses typically have a 5cm duct containing the copper lines (probably standard for the last 40 years) and the fact that fibre can be shoved through a few tens of metres without difficulty. And worse, the sales people didn’t have an esclation path for difficult cases: they just gave up instead. From a technical point of view, the installation was impeccable. (I guess the loose 24 hour window for the cutover time was because OpenReach and CityFibre don’t have tight requirements on ISP reconfiguration schedules.) From the sales point of view, it was crap. Maybe it would have gone faster if we offered to switch early without asking if the drive would be a problem? But I guess the difference between “yes!” and “yes, but will this be a problem?” is too much to expect from a minimum-wage door-to-door salesbod whose employer didn’t give them enough information or any escalation path.