Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IWednesday, September 30, 2026 · 64° & smoky haze on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog

Simon Willison

Willison live-blogged the keynote from the creator seats, and the shape of the day is clearer in his minute-by-minute than in any of the launch posts: the headline product is dots, an always-on personal agent with a name and an avatar you choose, powered by Astra, collaborating in a new ChatGPT Space, and — the detail worth sitting with — already carrying its own identity in OpenAI's own Slack. Underneath it: GPT-6.1 Sol at near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price, an Ultrafast tier at up to 300 tokens a second for six times the money, and a Decisions API that hands a model a fixed menu of options and answers in a fraction of a second, which is transparently an answer to Jev. The developer-platform half is the part to actually plan around — an open-sourced Codex harness, sign in with ChatGPT so visitors spend their own token budget in your app, and Sites now shipping a SQLite database and scheduled tasks, which is a static-site host quietly becoming a place to run things.

AI & Agents

Sharon Goldberg and Tiago Silva, Cloudflare

Using AI to chart a course for our post-quantum migration

The useful part is the problem statement, which is a small masterclass in why inventory work resists automation: grepping for RSA or X25519 overcounts because it finds dead and test-only code, undercounts because the real decision is a default in a TLS listener or an algorithm pinned in a YAML file two repositories away, and in any case cannot tell you the one thing that matters — a classical ECDSA signature inside a JWT, IPsec, TLS or SSH has four completely different migration paths. So they built CryptoLabe, named for the mariner's astrolabe, to discover cryptography, classify how it is used, and surface the cases where no post-quantum plan exists yet, against a 2029 deadline. They are not shipping it, because it is welded to their own repos and ticketing, but the write-up is the honest kind: here is the discovery problem, here is why the obvious tool fails at it.

Engineering & Leadership

Sujith Jay Nair

A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work

Nair's premise is that a platform team has no product manager handing over a roadmap and no revenue line to chase, so the work does not exist until an engineer invents it — and he maps the four directions the signals arrive from, with the failure mode of each named honestly (crash-led discovery is a maximally lagging indicator; your own toil is not your users' toil, and fixing it improves unit economics rather than their experience). The heuristic worth stealing is overloaded use-cases: when users press your platform into service for something it was never designed to do, treat that as a prototype they built for you, and the test for whether to absorb it is simply who else has the same problem. He is also right that every real pain already has a hack behind it, and that no hack means the pain is not acute enough to build for.

Web & Product Craft

Mathias Schäfer (molily) · made the Sunday

The death of web development education

Schäfer gathers the receipts from the people whose work most working web developers learned from, and read together they are bleak in a specific, checkable way: Axel Rauschmayer's book income went from enough to live on in 2024 to zero in 2026, and he is pulling 2ality and his free online books offline because essentially all the traffic is now AI crawlers and none of it pays; Josh Comeau and his fellow course creators report revenue down more than half; Web Dev Simplified's tutorial views and income halved in a year. The second-order point is the one to sit with — Comeau's observation that there is now no incentive to make high-quality free content at all, which is the supply the models were trained on. Worth the archive trip at two weeks old, and worth reading alongside whatever you paid for the last thing you learned properly.

New York & the Table

Yana Krasnitskaya, West Side Rag

Here's the UWS Dish: Panineria's Chicken Parm

Panineria on Amsterdam is the not-quite-year-old UWS outpost of a small family chain Mario Pesce started in the Village in 2014, built on his father's shop in Naples and some of his grandmother's recipes. What makes this worth the walk rather than the roundup is that Krasnitskaya writes down the order of operations: bread toasted first, then brushed with garlic and Italian seasoning and a little oil, cutlet, sauce spooned to coat rather than drown, fresh mozzarella rounds under the broiler, and shaved Parmesan last for the salty finish. The baguette is $2.25 more than the ciabatta and, per her, the correct choice.

Diversions

Gita Jackson, Aftermath

I Love The Frustratingly Realistic Sewing In Dressmaker

Jackson traces the pleasure back to watching early-era Project Runway for the pattern-making rather than the drama, and Dressmaker delivers that same vicarious craft by refusing to abstract the annoying part away: you take a client's measurements, build a pattern from pieces you have actually earned, and then nest those pieces onto fabric you bought by the yard, which turns out to be a genuinely good packing puzzle. Some steps are streamlined and others are detailed to the point of what she calls very realistic frustration, which is the honest trade every craft game makes and most get wrong in one direction.

Loose Change

Grace Ebert, Colossal

Gleaming Water Drops Bead on the Canvas in Kim Tschang-Yeul's Hyperrealistic Paintings

In 1972, newly arrived in France, Kim Tschang-Yeul noticed a water-soaked canvas in his studio and painted a water drop; he then painted water drops for the next forty-nine years, until he died in 2021. Cleo Roberts places him among a generation of Korean artists — Ha Chong-Hyun, Park Seo-Bo — who each bound themselves to a single form and process, and suggests that in a country recently ravaged by war the security of total immersion in one mode was an empowering choice rather than a narrow one. Kim put it as dissolution: to paint the drop is to return anger, anxiety and fear to emptiness, and the ego with them. The paintings themselves look like they would run if you tilted the canvas.

The Back Page

The Guardian

Disguised funding and dishonest witnesses: key findings in Manchester City case

The Premier League has published the independent commission's forty-page core decision, and the mechanism is now on the record with a name: the Disguised Funding Scheme. City signed sponsorship deals with Abu Dhabi partners at fees far above market value, the sponsor paid only a fraction — the base sum — and Sheikh Mansour's ADUG quietly covered the rest, the tagged sum, which let the club book owner money as commercial revenue at a time when owner equity was excluded from financial fair play. The commission's word for the arrangements is shams, the inflation runs to £830m across 2009-10 to 2017-18, and it found witnesses dishonest; sanction is the only question left.

Around town

Fri Oct 2 – Thu Oct 22

Andrzej Wajda 100

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, South Village

Three weeks of Wajda's centenary in 4K restorations newly struck by Di Factory in Warsaw — Ashes and Diamonds, Kanał, A Generation, Lotna, Innocent Sorcerers, The Wedding, Katyń. Opening night has Poland's chargé d'affaires introducing Ashes and Diamonds, and the early films run in the cheap afternoon slots if you would rather go alone.

casual

Tue Oct 6 · 6:00pm

Coding Agents with Elastic Memory + the Evolution to Stateless Serverless

Elastic NYC, 1250 Broadway, 16th floor, NoMad

Two talks and pizza — Pulumi's Engin Diri and Elastic's Ines Potier on giving coding agents memory that survives the session, and on what falls away when the thing underneath is stateless. Free, two hours, and squarely the problem anyone running agents against a real codebase is already having.

professional

Sat Oct 10 · 1:00pm

Decentralized AI Day

Venue given on registration, Manhattan

The Numerai and decentralized-AI crowd in one free Saturday afternoon of talks, a workshop, and an "Out of Sample" panel of three current or former members of Numerai's Council of Elders. Quant tournaments, open model markets and crypto rails are the exact seam his day job sits on, and this is the room where the people building on it argue with each other. In-person only, and they need your full name a day ahead for building security.

professional

Mon Oct 12 · 6:00pm

NY Tech Meetup: International Edition

Civic Hall, 124 E 14th St, Union Square

NYTM has run monthly since 2004 on a format that has aged remarkably well — founders demo live, the audience asks questions, then an open ask-and-offer from the floor. This edition hands the stage to Italian founders brought over by ATLAS in Rome, which is a cheap way to see what is being built somewhere you have no feed for. Twenty dollars, doors at six.

professional

Mon Oct 12 · 8:00pm

The Age of AI: a live recording of The Builders

92NY, 1395 Lexington Ave, Upper East Side

Walter Isaacson launches a new interview podcast by putting Mustafa Suleyman on stage at 92NY, which means the biographer of Jobs and Franklin asking the CEO of Microsoft AI the questions he would normally save for a book. Forty dollars and a crosstown bus, and you hear it before the episode exists.

casual

Quote of the day

“You know what, it's worth it.”

— Sam Altman, on charging 6x for Ultrafast

On this day

September 30, 1927 — Babe Ruth pulls a Tom Zachary fastball into the right-field bleachers at Yankee Stadium for his sixtieth home run of the season, a number that stands for thirty-four years.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Three of today's links describe the same trade from different seats: pay more for speed, pay nothing for the thing someone spent a decade learning to explain.