Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IMonday, October 12, 2026 · 57° & overcast on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Fable took my jorb

Cendyne · made the Sunday

The most honest thing written about AI and jobs this week, by the last engineer at a company that decided a frontier model was cheaper than his compensation and that leadership could coast to an acquisition on it. He draws the distinction that most of the discourse elides — "AI took my job" is far more fun to say than "AI contributed to my role being eliminated" — and then does the harder thing, which is to separate what the models actually do well from what the spending decision assumed. His read: agents are excellent at copying things across domains and pushing a measurable, check-pointable rock up a hill, which is why he agrees with Shopify's machine-coded retreat from React Native to native apps; what they lack is taste, and the foresight to price the operating cost and complexity of a decision three years out. If you are a leader approving headcount against an AI capacity assumption, this is the view from the seat your spreadsheet eliminates, including the week of four-hour sleep.

AI & Agents

Ted Haley

Pensieve: local code search and MCP context for coding agents

An open-source Mac app that keeps a local semantic index of your files, repos and past agent sessions, then hands the agent the few passages that matter instead of letting it grep the disk. The pitch is a cost argument rather than a capability one — fewer tool calls per task, less context burned rediscovering what a previous session already worked out — and it connects over MCP, so it sits in front of Claude Code without you changing how you work.

Engineering & Leadership

Chris Stokel-Walker, LeadDev

AI code causes real world production outages

Undo surveyed 300 senior engineering leaders at large US and UK companies and 81% had a production incident or outage in the last six months linked to AI-coding tools, while 79% say release cycles are no faster than before. The number to argue with is the time split: their engineers now spend 16.9 hours a week debugging against 9.8 hours writing code, because 35% of AI-generated code reaches production before anyone has fully understood it. The report's claim is that the bottleneck moved rather than cleared, and that it bites hardest in long-lived mission-critical systems — trading platforms get named — where the undocumented interdependencies live in a few people's heads.

Robert Kimani, LeadDev

Your engineering strategy has a new failure mode

The scenario is specific enough to sting: a leader approves five hires, an internal AI platform and a two-team reorg on the premise that AI-assisted development raises capacity, and six months later the code output is up while delivery is flat, review queues are longer and security has more changes to verify. Kimani's point is that nothing in the plan was wrong — it was built on a model of delivery that moved underneath it — so the useful work is matching each commitment to the strength of the evidence behind it and wiring in signals that fire when the assumption breaks. A good companion to the item above, which supplies the numbers.

Web & Product Craft

royfish.dev

Fingerprints are the new cookies

A demonstration first and an argument second: the page gives you a nickname, and it holds through a refresh, a cookie clear and a VPN, because none of those touch the signals it is actually reading. The history is the sharp part — the third-party cookie was deprecated loudly, Privacy Sandbox went nowhere, and the end state is Google's ad products permitting device fingerprinting outright — which is a useful thing to have straight if your own site's colophon promises no tracking and you would like that promise to keep meaning something.

New York & the Table

Melissa McCart, Eater NY

A viral London chef has opened his buzzy Soho restaurant

Thomas Straker, who built two million followers apiece on Instagram and TikTok largely by being evangelical about butter, opened Straker's at 59 Grand Street on Saturday, in the old Lucky Strike space, a year late and some two million dollars over budget. The interview is candid about the business logic — New Yorkers eat out constantly where Londoners eat at home, and his British butter just landed in Whole Foods nationally — which makes this a restaurant opening and a distribution play arriving on the same weekend.

Diversions

Nanolathe

Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

Nanolathe is an MIT-licensed 2.5D RTS engine that reimplements the 1997 game from clean-room research into its file formats, with a modern GPU renderer, a Classic toggle for people who want the old look, and three original demo missions playable in the browser with no install. The engine is the actual artifact — the formats and the reasoning behind the behaviour are documented for anyone who wants to extend it — which makes this preservation work that happens to also be a good Saturday.

Loose Change

Jake Currie, Nautilus

Did these microbes eat a lot of the fossil record?

Ediacaran animals were almost entirely soft-bodied and yet they fossilised beautifully, which has never quite made sense. A team traced collagen-digesting enzymes across 700 bacterial genomes and found the answer was not when they evolved but where: collagenases first appeared in microbes living without oxygen, while the Ediacaran creatures lived in oxygenated seas, and soft-tissue preservation drops off once aerobic ocean microbes acquire the trick. The same gap explains coal — wood's lignin evolved 70 to 110 million years before white rot fungi learned to break it down, so dead trees simply accumulated — and one of the authors notes that plastic is currently sitting in the same waiting room.

The Back Page

Jonathan Wilson, The Guardian

Spectre of ghost football hangs over Manchester City win of unknown significance

The first weekend of football since City were found guilty of breaking financial rules between 2009 and 2018, and Wilson's subject is the strangeness of playing on while the sentence is pending: a win at Anfield that might be the difference between finishing on minus one hundred points and minus ninety-seven. He is good on how little the crowds knew what to do with it — Anfield booed, United's fans restarted their trophy counter, the general mood was bewilderment — and better on the asterisk problem, that an eighteen-year stretch of the league, Chelsea's own offences included, now reads as provisional.

Kento Kato, Posting and Toasting

Three winners and three losers from the Knicks' first two preseason games

The champions are 0-2 in exhibition games nobody is scoring, and the only line that matters is the first one: Jalen Brunson's surgically repaired shooting wrist looks like midseason form, floaters and pull-up threes included. Beyond that it is roster-edge accounting — Landry Shamet shooting 50% from three after turning down contenders to stay, Miles McBride badly cold, and the last spot narrowing to Bruce Brown and James Wiseman. Opening night is inside two weeks; Minnesota comes to the Garden tonight.

Around town

Wed Oct 14 · 7:00pm

Build w/ Stripe Community: Embed Payments Into Your Platform or Marketplace

Online

Ninety minutes on Stripe Connect that promises the part most payments documentation skips — mapping where the money actually goes and who holds it between hops. Free, online, and worth it if you have ever sketched a marketplace and then stalled on the question of who is the merchant of record.

professional

Sat Oct 17 · 12:30pm

Zvenygora, with a live original score by medukha

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Dovzhenko's 1928 film is a Ukrainian folk epic assembled like a fever — buried Scythian treasure, a grandfather who will not stop digging, two grandsons on opposite sides of a revolution — and it was baffling audiences on purpose from the day it opened. On 35mm, ninety-two silent minutes, with a band in the room writing the sound of it live, which is the whole argument for going: nobody has heard this version and nobody will again.

say yes

Sat Oct 17 · 4:40pm

The Insider, Q&A with Lowell Bergman and Pablo Torre

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Michael Mann's two and a half hours on what it costs an institution to tell the truth, screening on 35mm with the producer the film is actually about sitting down afterward to talk about it. The rare Q&A where the guest can correct the movie.

casual

Sun Oct 18 · 1:00pm

All the President's Men, Q&A with Carl Bernstein and Maggie Haberman

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Bernstein himself, with the Times's White House correspondent and moderated by Natalie Kitroeff of The Daily, after a 4K print of the film that taught a generation what shoe-leather reporting looks like. Sunday afternoon, and the panel is the event.

casual

Mon Oct 26 · 6:00pm

Agent Builder Mixer w/ 1Password x Dust

Venue announced at registration

A panel on shipping and securing agents led by 1Password's developer relations director, which means the credentials question gets asked by people whose business is credentials. Free, roughly two hundred builders, and the useful half is everyone in the room who has moved an agent from demo to production and has the scars.

professional

Quote of the day

“The joy of programming is dying. The joy of delivering results lives on.”

— Cendyne

On this day

October 12, 1979 — Pan Books publishes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, six months after the radio series ended, a novelisation Douglas Adams wrote against a deadline he would spend the rest of his career missing. Also the date, in 1810, of the horse race outside Munich held for the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese, which nobody thought to stop holding: Oktoberfest.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

A survey says 81% of engineering leaders have had an AI-linked outage and their teams now debug nearly twice as long as they write; an engineer laid off in favor of a cheaper model says the models lack taste and foresight, not speed. Both are describing the same gap between what the code-generating machine does and what shipping software requires.