Retrospectiva #13

Darkness is upon us. It's that time of year when the Danish weather starts taking a toll on everyone’s mood. There are only two solutions: keep running and stay active, and a whole lot of vitamin D.

Legra started walking which is a bit nuts. Vitto’s back at work and going full steam ahead. It’s hard to juggle everything all the time. But we are slowly (VERY SLOWLY) getting the hang of it.

Using

Executor: I like experimenting with different coding agents, harnesses and products. But I hate reconnecting all my skills and integrations every single time: Gmail, TickTick, Telegram, Website Analytics, etc. Executor solves exactly that. A one-stop shop for all your integrations over a single MCP. You can use their cloud offering or host it yourself (which I do).

Rex by Superlogical: For the past couple of weeks I have been taking Mitchell Hashimoto's Rex for a spin. It's a nice alternative to Herdr but I would be lying if I told you that it does something magical that Herdr or Tmux can't do. If there is one such thing it's the mobile app! The space of “agentic development environments” is moving fast. Herdr App, T3 code, Paseo, Tern, etc. A new one pops up every week.

Grok Bot: Speaking of agentic tools. I realized that the annual Cursor subscription I bought a little over a year ago gave me access to Grok Bot. The three features I like the most are the simplicity of the interface, the fact you can have a "master" agent managing all bots, and that every bot has its own Linux VM it can operate. I also recommend watching this talk from Lee Robinson on how Grok Bot is built.

Reading

On Confidence by The School of Life: Saw someone recommend this book online. It's a short but punchy read on what confidence is - and what defines a non-confident person. Great read especially in the age of the “end of work” whatever that might mean. I will be reading more from The School of Life.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows: Started this one last week. I had never read anything about systems thinking. So far, it's a banger. Recommend.

The Ultimate MoE Training Handbook (Hugging Face): Everything this team produces I read.

Resisting Cognitive Surrender by Kunal: When working with LLMs it's hard to understand when you're actually learning anything at all. This article articulates that very well and gives advice on how to fight the so-called "cognitive decline".

The State of Context Engineering by Drew Breunig: A great write-up from Drew on different tools you can apply to address the challenges of Context engineering. Also liked how he showcases DSPy as a powerful agent harness you can easily tweak and extend. I have used DSPy for prompt optimization - but never for live harnesses.

Listening

The revised rules of engineering management with Will Larson (The Pragmatic Engineer): Another recommendation from the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, an interview with Will Larson about the future of Software and Engineering Management. I also recommend his blog.

On the music side I have been weirdly gravitating towards British rap. There's something about the UK style that just feels more “garage”. Some recommendations below (if you are into this type of thing). And also the new sondaeblu album that has been on rotation.

Watching

I'm not a Clojure-head by any means. But this talk from Stuart Halloway was uncomfortably funny. In an almost-scary way:

How to Make Things, and Why by Stuart Halloway (Clojure/Conj 2026)

Anthropic is getting ready to file for its IPO. Here's a breakdown from my favourite finance YouTuber of what is wrong (and right) with it: