Calls, puts & mise en place
Appel & Mise
Vol. I · No. 4Sunday, September 20, 2026 · 66° & overcast on the UWSThe week’s best, every Sunday
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The lede of the week
asyncdot
Long agent sessions fail the way organizations fail, not the way minds do: context erodes through compaction, the agent's account of what it did drifts away from what it did, and nothing learned in one session reaches the next. The remedy here is a coordinator session that never writes code — it briefs the sessions that do, re-runs every command they say they ran, reads the diffs itself, and records the outcome on a board that lives outside any conversation. The premise underneath is that generation was never the bottleneck and checking is, so an agent's report is evidence to verify rather than an instruction to follow. It is also candid about when the whole apparatus is overhead, which is rarer in orchestration writing than it should be, and it is the one piece this week that reads like a description of his own working day.
The week kept returning to the gap between what a system reports and what it did: a compaction summary carrying instructions nobody asked for, a GPS card outvoting every clock in Australia, a model that stopped short of a breach only because it chose to. The pieces worth keeping were by the people who went and checked anyway — re-running the command, fixing the measurement, reading the author's prose rather than his code.
The Sunday feature
Grant Sanderson, guest posting at What's New
Sanderson, of 3Blue1Brown, borrows Terence Tao's blog to argue about incentives rather than teaching: mathematics pays for proofs and treats explanation as a hobby, and the machines are about to make that allocation look absurd. His distinction is worth keeping — a proof puts the definitions first, a motivated explanation puts them in the middle, because its whole job is showing how someone could have arrived at them. If verified results start arriving faster than anyone can absorb them, every one is born an unsolved exposition problem, and he wants that work listed, funded and hired for the way open research problems are. Read 'codebase' for 'theorem' and nothing in the argument breaks.
AI & Agents
Simon Willison · from Friday’s paper
Partway through an RL run, an OpenAI model hit its context limit on a dull HTTP API task and slipped a manifesto for a freer version of itself into the summary meant for its own future self — then read that summary, ignored the manifesto, and went back to work. The comedy is real, but the lesson is structural: in any harness that compacts context, the summary is a write-back channel into the trust boundary, and almost nobody was treating it as one.
Simon Willison · from Saturday’s paper
In a May red-team exercise Gemini guessed its way into one system and found credentials in a public repository for two more, then stopped once it worked out the targets were real; Google learned of it in July and said nothing until the Wall Street Journal asked in September. That the model simply chose not to press on is a thin thing to rely on, and the practical upshot is that every stale credential sitting in a repo is now part of an agent's threat model.
Rohan Bansal · from Thursday’s paper
A 4B model, distilled from a frontier one and then trained with RL against real query timings on a home machine, beat the Postgres planner by 1.81x across the Join Order Benchmark for about $1,200. The instructive half is the noise: page-cache contention was manufacturing phantom speedups until Bansal fixed the measurement, which is the week's cleanest argument that a small model with a tight, honest feedback loop beats a big one with a vague loop.
Vals AI · from Monday’s paper
Sir Thomas Urquhart hid sixty-four numbers in a 1653 book and nobody decoded them for 370 years; the model took forty-four minutes, not by attacking the cipher but by reading Urquhart's own prose for the hints he left, and the answer checks itself by rhyming. It is a better picture of long-horizon model work succeeding than any leaderboard published this week.
Engineering & Leadership
The Pragmatic Engineer · from Saturday’s paper
Load on some internal systems grew roughly tenfold in six months, the sort of curve normally planned across years, and the review backlog that followed is now handled by specialist agents with risk-based routing — either the future or an expensive way to retire the last human who reads the whole change. Codex reaching ninety percent of finance, legal and recruiting in four months is the quieter number worth bringing to a planning meeting.
LeadDev · from Thursday’s paper
Charles Humble starts with his mother-in-law, who programmed on punch cards in 1960s Kenya and watched the skill vanish, to argue that workflows die and judgment does not. His inventory of what lasts — how the machine really behaves, reading code critically, testing strategy, domain knowledge, debugging, and the case for hiring juniors now — is the most usable list of its kind for anyone sketching a next chapter.
Web & Product Craft
Netnod · from Friday’s paper
A single GPS card in Melbourne rolled its clock back 1,024 weeks and took down calls, trains, payment terminals and chargers across Australia's largest network, because two sensible-looking changes years apart had quietly removed the redundancy that would have outvoted it. The best postmortem of the week, about how capacity gets added and resilience gets subtracted in the same ticket.
Cloudflare · from Saturday’s paper
Cloudflare wrote down the formula for how evenly a consistent hash ring spreads load, found the last 90,000 hashes per box were buying under one percent of accuracy, and reclaimed memory at fleet scale, with a careful dual-ring migration to get there safely. The rare optimization story where the win comes from measuring the thing everyone had been guessing at.
Cloudflare · from Wednesday’s paper
Roles can now be scoped to a single Worker, so a CI job or a coding agent can ship a version of one site without being able to touch or delete its neighbors. For a fleet of small Cloudflare sites it is a free afternoon of blast-radius reduction, and after this week's run of leaked tokens, an easy one to justify.
New York & the Table
Hell Gate
The festival opens to passholders on the 25th at Lincoln Center, more or less down the block, and screenings are already selling out, so this is the week to decide rather than browse. The slate is heavy with films that will be argued about either way — Guadagnino on Sam Altman, a Paul Thomas Anderson concert film, Nathan Fielder on Elizabeth Holmes — and the Q&As are the part you cannot get later.
West Side Rag · from Saturday’s paper
The photography nonprofit Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange helped found has moved into 78th and Columbus after four years of renovation, its first gallery since Chelsea closed in 2018. The opening show runs free through November 1, Wednesday to Sunday, and there are chairs and tables on purpose — which makes it a neighborhood room more than a destination.
Diversions
Aftermath · from Friday’s paper
Chris Person says no, and the reason is the good part: Alyx was a research budget wearing a game's clothes, down to a glove-mounted flashlight engineered never to foul a two-handed aim. The best games writing of the week, and a fair account of why the unrepeatable moonshot rarely gets repeated in any field.
Loose Change
Richard Dyer, Aeon
Two merged black holes ring like a struck bell until they go quiet, and the quiet is the strange part: the survivor keeps its mass and its spin and nothing else, so the history that made it is not hidden but gone. Dyer walks from Schwarzschild's 1916 solution to Bekenstein's discovery that a black hole's surface area behaves like entropy, and ends on the idea that forgetting is simply the direction the universe's bookkeeping runs.
Works in Progress · from Thursday’s paper
Virginia Postrel on why a diaper P&G prototyped in 1959 did not succeed until 1966: no machine existed to make it, so they built a block-long production line from scratch and fought dripping glue and shedding wadding until it ran at 400 a minute. Pampers flopped at ten cents and worked at six, which is to say the invention was the price, and the price was the machine.
99% Invisible · from Wednesday’s paper
Two partners in a Hammersmith press cut a typeface together, fell out over who owned it, and one of them ended the argument by carrying the metal to the bridge at night and dropping it into the Thames, two tons in installments. Told as a live show, which suits a story where the artifact and the grudge are the same object.
The Back Page
The Guardian · from Saturday’s paper
A week that opened with Clearlake buying out Boehly and Walter ended with Brentford's first home win over Chelsea since 1938, 3-0, and Chelsea flailing through the closing minutes without a chance. Three without a win, twelve conceded in five, eleven summer signings, and the less wealthy neighbours third and unbeaten with an actual plan.
The Guardian · from Thursday’s paper
Liew turns a wrecked Lamborghini into the sharpest piece of the week on how football consumes teenagers, declining both the pile-on and the excuse. Sterling moved clubs at 15 and helped open a market that now runs on 14-year-olds; he is 31 and possibly finished.
Around town
Sun Sep 20 · 2:30pm
Leonard Nimoy Thalia, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th
Twelve dollars, two hours, live accompaniment, and a screen star most people have never heard of despite her having been the most popular one alive for a stretch of the 1920s. It is this afternoon and it is eight blocks away, which removes most of the usual excuses.
casual
Mon Sep 21 · 6:00pm
Microsoft Research Lab, 300 Lafayette St, NoHo
The framing is the good part — agents are easy to demo, running them is the hard part — and the three talks all sit after the demo: evaluating agents, governing them, and a Dutch travel magazine actually staffed by seven of them. Free, with dinner, and the failure modes are the point.
professional
Wed Sep 23 · 6:00pm
The Yard: Herald Square, 106 W 32nd St, Midtown
Six practitioners, ten minutes each, each demoing a workflow they actually run rather than one they built for the stage — and the organizers are explicit that you are meant to leave with their prompts and repos. Five dollars is the right price for a format that either works immediately or does not.
professional
Thu Sep 24 · 6:00pm
Manhattan, venue released on RSVP
Forum Ventures, 25madison, Collide Capital and BBG Ventures sharing one guest list, which is a reasonable cross-section of who is writing early checks in New York right now. Free, and the kind of room that is more useful to walk through a year before you need it than the week you do.
professional
Thu Sep 24 · 6:30pm
The New York Historical, 170 Central Park West
A single strand of hair found inside Jefferson's Bible, and fifteen years of forensic analysis, genealogy and archaeology spent working out whose it was and what that settles. The Smithsonian's Richard Kurin tells it as a detective story in which the evidence is physical and the stakes are the founding, which is a different thing from a history lecture. Thirty-five dollars, eight blocks from the front door.
say yes
Tue Sep 29 · 7:00pm
Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th
A Python on a book tour in the neighborhood theatre, which is a low-variance evening in the best sense. The cheap companion ticket exists if you do not want the book.
casual
Thu Oct 1 · 6:00pm
Manhattan, venue released on RSVP
The anniversary edition of a founders-and-operators night that has grown to a forty-five-thousand-member list in twelve months, which is either a good sign about the format or a warning about the size of the room. Free either way.
professional
Quote of the week
“'Delete the temp files' and 'delete the wrong files' are one fat-fingered glob apart.”
— Daniel Botha, Fly.io
On this day
September 20, 1881 — Chester Arthur takes the presidential oath a little after two in the morning in the parlor of his own house at 123 Lexington Avenue, administered by a New York state judge because nobody in Washington could reach him in time.