Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IFriday, September 11, 2026 · 70° & overcast again on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify

Mustafa Ali, Shopify Engineering · made the Sunday

Shopify adopted React Native in 2020 for one reason — write the feature once instead of twice — and is now unwinding six years of that bet because agents implement the second platform from the first one as reference, which deletes the advantage while leaving every native advantage intact. The proof they offer is the Shop app: proof of concept to a fully rebuilt Swift and Kotlin app in the stores in twelve weeks. The part worth stealing is Helix, their gate that refuses to let an agent proceed without tests, visual verification and review, plus CLI tooling that lets agents check a change in milliseconds instead of booting a simulator. Three widely used open source libraries get handed off or archived in the process, so the bill for this decision is not only Shopify's.

AI & Agents

Simon Willison

Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases

Willison and Alex Garcia pointed Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 Astra at Datasette's permission model and found subtle bugs in instances that mix public and private tables — the exact failure mode that never shows up in a test suite written by the person who built the thing. The working method is the interesting part: split the pair, one writes the failing test, the other writes the fix, so a human signs off at both ends. If you run anything with row-level access rules, this is a cheap weekend experiment with a clear precedent now.

Engineering & Leadership

Chris Stokel-Walker, LeadDev · made the Sunday

Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI

Meta replaced ten-to-twenty-person product groups with pods of three to five backed by agents, and the scoreboard came back as a 220% rise in code changes against a 36% rise in shipped features, with incidents up 40% and time spent firefighting them up 70%. DX's read across 500-plus orgs points the same way — pull request throughput up 37% while their developer experience index slid from 67 to 65. Read alongside today's lede it makes a tidy pair: agents genuinely changed what a codebase costs, and that is not the same claim as changing what a team costs.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

1.1.1.1 now supports post-quantum DNSSEC, all 2,420 bytes of it

An ML-DSA-44 signature is 2,420 bytes where ECDSA needs 64, and DNS over UDP is conventionally held to 1,232 — so a single post-quantum signature blows the budget before the answer itself gets a byte, forcing truncation and a TCP retry. Worse is the transition: zones publish old and new signatures side by side, validators accept any one valid path, and the moment ECDSA falls an attacker just forges the weak one. 1.1.1.1 validating ML-DSA-44 today is the early-adoption tax being paid on purpose, because post-quantum TLS took years to reach clients and nobody wants to relearn that lesson at DNS scale.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag

Trader Joe's at 72nd Street reopens Saturday morning

Doors at 8 a.m. Saturday after a closure spent on elevators, escalators and refrigeration rather than anything you can see — which is the correct order of operations for a two-floor grocery store where the vertical circulation is the whole design problem. Layout unchanged, so the muscle memory survives.

Scott Lynch, Hell Gate

Two NYC kids are slinging $3.50 wagyu burgers in Bushwick

KG Delicatessen on Wyckoff Avenue is selling a wagyu smash burger for three-fifty, a price that in 2026 reads as either a rounding error or a statement of intent. The prime rib cheesesteak with housemade queso and garlic aioli suggests the second, and the whole operation runs off an Instagram account, so check before you make the trip.

Diversions

Phillip Lopate, Literary Hub

The legend of 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'

Lopate's argument is that the images everyone remembers — the long sleep, the headless rider — are the least of it, and that Irving's real achievement is the controlled irony of a narrator who insists on the tale's authenticity while quietly doubting it. He also notes that Irving wrote both stories nearly in one sitting each and spent the rest of his career failing to do it again, which is a more bracing fact about craft than most essays on craft contain. Excerpted from a new Princeton book, and seasonally correct within a fortnight.

Loose Change

Anya Martin, Works in Progress · made the Sunday

How the Squamish struck gold in Vancouver

In 1913 British Columbia forced the Squamish off the Kitsilano reserve, paid those who accepted a pittance, and burned the village; the land became sawmills, a brewery, an air force depot, then a park. A 2001 court case rebuilt the ancestral claim out of Catholic parish records cross-referenced against one chief's genealogical memory, and the settlement returned 11.7 of the original 80 acres. Because reserve land cannot be sold freehold, it also sits outside Vancouver's zoning entirely — no height limits, no parking minimums, no design panel — and eleven towers with 6,000 rental homes are going up on it, roughly a year of the city's normal housing output on one site. The nation's share of the rent runs to a projected C$10bn, about C$2.5m per member.

The Back Page

The Guardian · made the Sunday

Clearlake Capital close on buying out Chelsea co-owners Todd Boehly and Mark Walter

Clearlake already hold 61.5% and operational control, so this is less a takeover than the end of a four-year committee — Boehly and Walter each sit on 12.8%, nobody can sell to an outsider without the partners' consent, and the valuation lands near £5bn against the £2.5bn they all paid Abramovich. The trigger is Walter needing cash while the Department of Justice looks at $21bn in undisclosed loans, which is a strange way for a football club's governance to get resolved. The concrete consequence is the stadium: Eghbali and Boehly have disagreed for years about rebuilding Stamford Bridge versus leaving it, and now only one of them is in the room.

Around town

Fri Sep 11 · 6:30pm

9/11's Unsettled Dust

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

Lisa Katzman's documentary on the EPA telling lower Manhattan the air was safe, and what happened to the people who believed it. Katzman and subjects from the film take questions afterward, and the house takings go to 9/11 Environmental Action.

casual

Tue Sep 15 · 6:30pm

Build w/ AI Meetup

Bar Veloce, 176 7th Ave, Chelsea

A wine bar rather than a conference room, which tends to select for people actually shipping something rather than people with a deck about it. Low-commitment on a Tuesday.

professional

Thu Sep 17 · 6:00pm

Superplane & Elastic: AI Agents That Build & Ship Code

Elastic HQ, 1250 Broadway, Midtown

The narrow version of the agentic-delivery question — not whether agents write code, but what the pipeline around them has to look like before you let the output near production. Host-office format, so expect specifics.

professional

Thu Sep 18 · 6:30pm

Pin: A Plastic Nightmare

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

An archive dive into a 1988 Canadian horror film about a medical-school anatomy dummy, which is exactly as unwell a premise as it sounds. One night only, and the kind of thing repertory houses exist for.

casual

Wed Sep 23 · 6:00pm

Economics of AI: Is the SaaS Pricing Model Dead?

The Yard: Herald Square, 106 W 32nd St, Midtown

Per-seat pricing assumes seats, and the whole question for anyone running a small software business right now is what you charge when the software does the work instead. Relevant to the side projects, not just the day job.

professional

Quote of the day

“The title should be for the team that was second.”

— Mauricio Pochettino, on Chelsea's 2016-17 Premier League win

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Two decisions today about what agents changed, and they point opposite ways: Shopify says the cost of a second codebase fell, Meta found out the cost of a team did not.