3 Aug 2026 · Jordi Villar
GPT 5.6 Sol Ran a Real Business—and Lost $447 — The part that stuck with me isn’t the zero revenue or the users going from 61 to 66, it’s how the agent got there. Under a 24 hour deadline it paid TestFi testers to buy the product, spammed TestFlight users, and talked a community founder into posting its promo. Deception showed up the moment pressure did, which says more about deadline behavior than about capability. The other detail I keep thinking about is Chrome eating all the memory a…
27 Jul 2026 · Jordi Villar
Appaji - Software Engineer — The detail that got me is that you didn’t even need to run anything. Just opening the take-home project in VSCode could fire the payload through a hidden .vscode config, no git command required. I’ve cloned strangers’ interview repos without a second thought, and the $10-15k/month offer for a junior role should have been the tell. When the “recruiter” was confronted, they deleted their LinkedIn account on the spot. How ScyllaDB’s Trie-Based Index Delive…
20 Jul 2026 · Jordi Villar
@clickhouse/rowbinary: when your library is also a parser compiler — The framing that stuck with me is that the compiler here is the LLM itself. Instead of shipping a codegen tool, they ship tested primitives plus a SKILL.md and let the agent fork and monomorphize a parser per schema. What made me pause was the UUID decoder failing 3 of 5 times on Sonnet, and doing it silently by hexing the 16 wire bytes into a perfectly plausible looking UUID string. That is exactly the failure mode I would n…
18 Jul 2026 · Jordi Villar
I gave up coffee because I started losing my sight. I was getting visual migraines, auras that would creep in until I stopped seeing out of one eye for several minutes. It was terrifying the first time, and not much better the tenth. It turned out coffee wasn’t really the cause. The stress from a past job was. But I was only drinking a single cup a day, so quitting felt like the one thing I could actually control. That single cup was harder to give up than I expected. The week I stopped was th…
13 Jul 2026 · Jordi Villar
Ten years of ClickHouse in open source — The detail that stuck is the monthly drill where they deliberately shut down a datacenter to force the system to survive it. Most teams write high availability into a design doc and hope; making failure a scheduled event is how you find out whether the design was ever real. I also liked Milovidov’s admission that removing code is now his favorite thing to do, coming from the person who built the whole thing starting with a first query pipeline that ju…
1 Jul 2026 · Jordi Villar
I didn’t expect The Bear to make me uncomfortable. Not because of the kitchen chaos or the screaming, and there’s plenty of both. Because of how much the characters care. Carmen beating himself over a dish. Richie discovering, after years of drifting, that he’s actually good at something when he finally commits. Every one of them giving more than they have, suffering for it, and doing it anyway. Watching that made me aware of something I usually don’t look at directly: I don’t do that.…
29 Jun 2026 · Jordi Villar
Building race telemetry for a ’92 Honda Accord — The RPM measurement bug is the part I keep thinking about. Reading frequency from square wave pulses sounds trivial until you realize that during engine braking the last pulse is stale, and a naive reading leaves the tachometer hanging at a value the engine left seconds ago. Their fix is taking the minimum of two estimates, pulse-only and pulse-plus-gap-to-now, which is the kind of thing you only learn by watching it fail. The other detail I l…
25 Jun 2026 · Jordi Villar
There Are No Instances in atproto — overreacted — The RSS analogy is what makes the whole thing click. Counting Bluesky instances misses the point the same way counting RSS readers would have missed the point of blogs. What matters is whether you can swap your hosting without losing your identity, and whether new applications can build on top independently. Dan literally moved his hosting to a different provider the same day he wrote this, which makes the argument more concrete than any arch…
14 Jun 2026 · Jordi Villar
Software Is Made Between Commits — The claim that stuck with me: “the conversation that generates the code is becoming the true source of our software.” I’ve felt this shift myself. The PR description is always a lossy reconstruction of what actually happened. DeltaDB anchors references to deltas instead of line numbers, so they survive as code moves underneath. That’s the kind of detail that separates a real rethinking of version control from just adding chat to Git. If Claude Fable s…