Things I Learned - 18 Oct 2026
This week, I learned: I tested a few tools that help agents work with mobile devices. On Android, apart from adb, mobile-mcp seems better than Android-MCP or mobilerun (which has a different purpose, though) #ForNow. More importantly, agents controlling mobiles with USB debugging seems quite seamless. HeyPuter is cloning every software #ForNow into open-source apps. I expect more people will do this. Consumer software moats will probably erode faster than enterprise software (which has regulatory and other moats). My colleague built his own mobile music player yesterday using Claude Code and rea to reverse engineer the YMusic APK. Another example of technically capable users building their own (disposable) software. Fingerprints are the new cookies. I was surprised to see that the server could identify me correctly even in Incognito mode. Cover your tracks lets you test your browser privacy and mine was unique among ~369K users. My user agent, system fonts, Canvas fingerprint, WebGL fingerprint, audio compression float differences, WebGL Vendor & Renderer, and HTTP Accept Headers were the biggest unique-ness identifiers.. Thinking will become a hobby. Interesting point. After all, with the mechanical revolution, exercise became a hobby. (Interestingly, schools teach very little exercise - or most other hobbies.) Claude Code just told me that “Version 1.0.10 was published only 2 days ago, so to be supply-chain cautious I’ll pick a release that’s at least 2 weeks old.” That’s pretty circumspect of it - and I learnt a new term: “supply-chain caution”. Paraphrasing Andrej Karpathy: LLM capability is widening - something I’m seeing in my interactions, too #ForNow. 75% of the population has barely seen LLMs. 20% are free-tier users (searching, writing, maybe booking a flight) who see occasional use. 0.2% see large, complex projects one-shotted: apps, math proofs, … ~5,000 people see swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Human review and comprehension are falling behind: “archeology” of the OpenAI-HF incident, studying the 722 OpenAI proofs… That’s because we don’t have a reservoir of big, difficult problems we really care about; and the jagged edge: digital, verifiable and economically valuable domains grow faster; and access is uneven: free-tier, paid-tier, internal. Cloudflare acquired Deno. “After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime.” Good for Cloudflare, pity about Deno. It was a good kick in the rear for NodeJS. Ryan’ll be porting celld into workerd. What I learnt is: workerd might be a realistic alternative to write web servers - instead of NodeJS, Express, etc. Durable Objects (worker + storage) seem to be a more powerful infrastructure component than I thought. They’re powering Queues, Workers, Git storage (artifacts), and more. Wallhop lets you skip paywalls #ForNow. Built by Josh as a 12ft.io replacement forking everywall/ladder. From How Anthropic Builds And How Engineering Will Change Soon | Thariq Shihipar: Examples - especially personal examples - are still an excellent way to prompt models. Agents do what the typical user wants pretty well. Focus your personalizations on how you want things done differently from the typical user. Learn vocabulary and intuition in areas where AI needs help. Visual design, mathematical ideation, economic theory, … Things move so fast (at least in code) #ForNow, so plan to deliver value within a month or two. For longer projects, wait for the next generation of agents to change the economics. Mistakes I made Week ending 18 Oct 2026 ...
