Jeremy Ettlinger

Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IMonday, September 21, 2026 · 63° & cloudy on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger
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The lede

Trying the software factory pattern

Will Larson, Irrational Exuberance · made the Sunday

Larson pointed the pattern at his own job rather than at a codebase: a skill called `/linear-project-loop` that audits whether a project has a written goal and a real metric, reads the dashboards, works the unblocked tasks, and moves on — looping on the goal and letting the harness find the next step. The finding worth having is a side effect. Automating the way he manages projects forced him to write down the goals and success criteria he had been carrying implicitly, and the loop now checks on things he personally stopped checking, including a passkeys implementation he shipped months ago and had not looked at since. His caveat is the honest part: the Linear source of truth, the Datadog and Snowflake connections, the orchestrated harness — the pieces only compound to the extent you already have the other pieces.

AI & Agents

Google

AX: an open agentic orchestrator

The premise is a scheduling observation rather than a model one: agents are stateful, bursty and long-running, computing hard for a minute and then sitting idle waiting on a model, a tool or a human, which is a shape conventional orchestrators price very badly. AX answers with four primitives — task, workspace, gateway, model — over a substrate built for sub-second suspend and resume, so an idle agent costs close to nothing. Apache 2.0, and the framing of idleness as the real line item is worth carrying even if the runtime never touches his stack.

Maharshi Patel

Why MCP was always a bad idea?

The argument is that MCP is scaffolding built for weaker models and kept past its usefulness: every server ships its own tool schemas into the context window, and around that grows an infrastructure layer for credentials, filtering and discovery that exists only because the model could not be trusted to find its own way. A model with terminal access and `--help` gets there without any of it, so the proposal is to stop wrapping APIs and start serving them — `Accept: text/markdown`, documentation the agent can read, responses that are not verbose JSON. Worth reading against your own MCP surface even if you finish it unconvinced.

Engineering & Leadership

Boris Cherny

I am often wrong

The six steps — gather information, find the gaps, define the problem, design a solution, set goals, execute with urgency — are not the point; the instruction to go back and revise any of them the moment new data arrives is. His two named failure modes are a problem that was never clearly defined and a solution that got too complicated, both of which survive any amount of seniority, and his case is that the churn of correcting them is health rather than chaos as long as everyone knows that is what it is.

Web & Product Craft

Marcin Wichary, Unsung

Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: the Mac side

Canadian Macs carried a set of genuinely ugly glyphs for Control, Escape and the arrow keys that appeared nowhere else; Japanese keyboards put a pencil on the Control key to stand for the Kotoeri input system until 2014; German PowerBooks came in a specific beige to satisfy a contrast regulation for terminal operators. Wichary's interest is in the constraint rather than the icon — what it looks like when a standards body or a government gets a vote on your typography, and what an in-house design team does with that vote.

Cloudflare

When scanners miss the attack: four live campaigns on customer storefronts

Seven of the eight payloads were unknown to VirusTotal and none drew a malicious verdict from URLScan, one having sat there unclassified for two and a half years — not because the scripts were clever but because they refused to run for anyone who looked like an analyst. The gates are the mechanism: a mobile viewport under 477px, a campaign UTM tag, a US IP outside a 325-entry denylist, a three-day cooldown in localStorage, and dead branches for whoever reads the source anyway. Detection here is a graph neural network over the syntax tree with an ensemble of models voting on what it flags, which is a more interesting architecture than the usual signature list.

New York & the Table

Gary Martin, West Side Rag

The Upper West Side version of a data center

Gary Martin's Sunday illustration nominates the public library as the neighborhood's own data center, which is a two-panel joke that lands harder than it should in a month when every other story is about where the compute goes and who pays for the power. The comments are the good part: a stack of people explaining what it meant to be able to trust the answer you got at the desk.

Hell Gate

New Yorkers have paid nearly $1 billion since 2018 to clean up the NYPD's mess

Legal Aid's numbers: roughly $930 million in misconduct settlements since 2018, $53 million in the first seven months of this year across about 500 cases, a median payout of $25,000. The story is not the total but the flatness of the line — the rate is holding steady into a new administration with no change in policing to explain it, which makes the settlements less a series of incidents than a standing municipal expense.

Diversions

Danny Bate, Literary Hub · made the Sunday

A necessary history of the oddest letter: W

W exists because sixth-century scribes in Francia had the Latin alphabet, a pile of Germanic names, and no letter for the sound in the middle of Clovis, so they wrote two U's and waited five hundred years for the pair to fuse. The payoff is in modern spelling: scribes would not write three U's in a row, which is why it is wolf and wood and wonder, and why Shakespeare could still rhyme was with glass.

Loose Change

Alison Bashford, Aeon

Our eloquent hands

Newton bought a book on geometric palmistry at Cambridge in 1663. In the 1820s anatomists were comparing palm patterns across species; by the 1930s the geneticist Lionel Penrose was running statistics on the single transverse crease and its correlation with trisomy 21, and midwives check newborns for that crease today. Bashford's argument is that the line from palm reading to diagnosis is continuous rather than embarrassing, because both are the same craft — a trained person reading the surface of a body for the thing underneath it — and that medicine is a little too quick to disown the half of its own genealogy that looks like magic.

The Back Page

The Guardian

Premier League: 10 talking points from the weekend's action

Brighton beat the champions with a nineteen-year-old Greek striker scoring from twenty-five yards, his third in eight days; Liverpool's £400m front four were shapeless while a £60m centre-back finished a third straight clean sheet; Manchester United took twenty-nine shots at Fulham, put six on target and needed a deflection for the one that counted. Chelsea's Friday night at Brentford is three days cold by now, which this week counts as mercy.

The Guardian

Maresca dismisses title talk as too early after City take over at the top

Fifteen points from five, three clear of Arsenal, and a manager going out of his way to say he would rather have won 1-0 than 5-3 — City conceded three after four straight clean sheets, and Enzo Fernández was among the scorers, which will land a particular way in SW6. The line for the pub: Brian Brobbey's hat-trick made him the first man to score three and lose a Premier League match since Roque Santa Cruz in 2007.

Around town

Wed Sep 23 · 5:00pm

Everesteer Hedge Fund Hackathon

19 W 24th St, Flatiron

Five hours, free, a thousand-dollar pot, and the actual exercise is building quant models with frontier AI and then deciding which ones to deploy as live rounds resolve against you. That second half — choosing what to trust once results start landing — is the part most AI evenings leave out.

professional

Tue Sep 22 · 9:00am

Food Solns Summit: Stories From the Frontlines of Climate & Farming

Civic Hall, 124 E 14th St, Union Square

A free half-day that puts farmers, fishers and frontline organizers in the same room as the people writing the checks, with a locally sourced breakfast to make the point. It ends at 12:30, so it costs a morning rather than a day.

casual

Fri Sep 25 · 8:00pm

UNZIPPED, with Isaac Mizrahi, Douglas Keeve and Lena Dunham

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, Hudson Square

The documentary that followed Isaac Mizrahi through the making of a collection, back in 4K, with the designer, the director who shot him and Lena Dunham on stage afterward. It took the audience award at Sundance and it remains the sharpest film anyone has made about the distance between a sketch and a finished thing. The run is sold out; the standby line forms half an hour before, which is the whole cost of trying.

say yes

Quote of the day

“I love being wrong. It is my favorite.”

— Boris Cherny

On this day

September 21, 1970 — ABC airs the first Monday Night Football, the Jets losing 31-21 at Cleveland in front of 85,000 people, and American television discovers that a weeknight is a thing you can sell.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Three weeks of international break now, which means three weeks of talking points with no football underneath them. The paper will find other things.