This week, I learned:

  • IITM has launched a 4 year degree in management & data science.
  • “Use AI to replace early-career mentorship: use AI-driven synthetic practice when traditional apprenticeship pathways collapse. AI can generate personalized coaching, replacing the missing junior loop with training environments.” Jack Clark
  • Observability is more than logging. It’s agents watching feeds and signalling insights!
  • The GPT 5.4 prompt guidance is a bit complex, but here’s what it’s broadly saying: (Gemini)
    • It’ll over-complicate answers and front-end design unless you tell it exactly how you want it
    • It’ll keep checking with you or give up (e.g. on errors) unless you tell it otherwise, e.g. with checklists or rules
  • Claude Code supports 32K output tokens by default. Since I generate large data stories, I usually hit this limit and lose an entire session. Setting the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS=64000 (which is the maximum) reduces this problem.
  • Google Workspace CLI lets you run npx -y @googleworkspace/cli as a single unified service for all Google Workspace APIs. It follows agent-friendly CLI practices which I turned into a SKILL.md.
  • I’ve been using mise use -g ubi:owner/repo to install GitHub packages. The ubi backend is now deprecated in favor of the new github backend. This works fine for most repos, with edge cases like jtroo/kanata which still require ubi:jtroo/kanata as of now.
  • On the margin, I’ll likely switch to just as my task runner. Claude
  • With AI now writing almost all of my code, I don’t see much need to format it. Code formatters like ruff, dprint, biome, etc. are not relevant when AI will be reading and writing the code, not humans. I just format the prompts in Markdown.
  • Salt is the duct tape of food ingredients. Lemon juice, vinegar, butter/oil, onion/garlic, etc. are runners-up. Claude
  • Claude’s prompt to import memory from other AI providers doesn’t seem to work with Claude’s free account: “No memories or stored context found.”