For the past year the techfluencers and executives and tokenmaxxers have been telling us that code is cheap. Lately harness engineers have upgraded the claim: code is free.[^1] Soon enough, the marginal cost of acquiring another thousand lines really will round to zero, totally untethered from the old bottlenecks of human time and human expertise.
I think this misses the point. Sometimes free isn't cheap enough.
The discourse on coding agents has been obsessing for the past year over the wrong question. The main focus has been what models can do: lines written, autonomous minutes, benchmark scores, model cards, percent of lines shipped by AI. These are all generalized measures of implementation throughput. Useful for a bird's-eye view of model progress, but they say almost nothing about where the actual bottlenecks now live. The operative question for practitioners in 2026 is not what tools can do, it's what you should ask them to do.
Why does Anthropic — the frontier AI lab valued at billions of dollars, owner of the most sophisticated AI coding tools, and the undisputed king of agents for 2025 — struggle so much with rendering monospace text?
From paper teletypewriters to modern digital emulators, terminal interfaces have always printed out a simple monospace text grid. This avoids some of the toughest problems in text rendering: the styling is heavily constrained, you often have a single font, one or two colors per grid cell, and the layout and shaping is relatively trivial.[^1] In the words of Casey Muratori:
Drawing a monospace terminal display is straightforward....
[8 sentence pseudocode for the full rendering pipeline...]
...That's it, right? I mean that is the entire renderer.
Given these expectations for terminals, there was consternation from devs when details surfaced on X about the Claude Code rendering architecture:
While there's still a chance to throw more terminology at the wall, I think we could do better.
I think that there are more specific names we have yet to hit on, for this year's applications of generative AI. Not only are more specific names possible, they are very useful when communicating between engineers, or coming up with useful specifications for projects. Imagine that every time you wanted to deploy software in 2015, another engineer on your team asked if it was going to "the cloud." Not asking if it's going into a Docker container, or running on bare metal on EC2, or using that new tool "kubernetes," but literally asked "hey have you gone to the cloud yet." It would be pretty difficult to have a meaningful engineering conversation about what you've implemented.
I haven't worked on a lower-level systems project in a while, I haven't worked on reversing or binaries since a brief stint in college, I've never worked on anything in the Android software ecosystem, and I haven't yet written or modified Linux device drivers myself.
Directly in line with those goals is an unmet hardware need: my growing desire for an E Ink tablet that will run an open source Android build. I've heard that some users have gotten LineageOS running on a Hisense, which is in the neighborhood of what I would be interested in. However, my note taking preferences require the screen real estate of a tablet. For several months, I've used a Boox Go 10.3 as an untrusted device solely for epub reading. As time has gone on, this tablet's full Play Store access on an Android build hints at tantalizing possibilities: the congruous feeling of a paper-like calendar or planner, an E Ink optimized RSS reader, note taking and email on the go, all further enabled by my obsession with small form factor wireless keyboards. With that dream in mind, this is the perfect fit to learn a bit about AOSP and device drivers.
With my lay understanding of the hardware/software boundary in the mobile ecosystem, long term I would be curious how far I can get towards deploying an Android custom ROM to the Boox Go 10.3. This unfortunately entails the very tough challenge of a full device bringup. Boox has made this even tougher by not open sourcing either their kernel or the device tree. For this to be minimally usable, it would require support for:
I've noticed that with big topics about societal issues or values, there are often three types of conversations:
How generators can be used in four ways (from simple to complex):
The first two use cases are covered this previous article, and serve as a primer to the topic. If you don't have a solid understanding of generators in Python, I would recommend starting there.
The second two use cases are covered in this article.
Well that's a big gap in time between these two articles!
A peak behind the screen -- I speed wrote the first article and outlined the second, immediately after doing some small projects and consuming some related tech talks. This past month I was able to clean up this section, and finally click publish on both!
Both the previous use cases are common ones, made more concise through generators. This use case and the next are less common use cases that are less about convenience, and more becoming possible with generators. (Okay okay, that's not a challenge... There are definitely other ways to construct this logic! But I think these particular formations make me thankful for the tool.)
How generators can be used in four ways (from simple to complex):
The first two use cases are covered in this article, and serve as a primer to the topic.
The second two use cases are covered in the second part here, and might provide a new applied usage for those already familiar with generators and coroutines.
Users usually first experience lazy-like behavior in Python when iterating through sequences, like so:
16 waking hours ÷ 10 minutes = 96
10 minutes is ~1% of your day.
When the phone scrolling lasts for 10 minutes, or low-priority yak shaving adds up to 10 minutes, that's one percent of your day spent. That's not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but make sure it's a thing you want to have spent one percent of your day on.
You only have this many 10 minute moments.
🥱 📱 🪥 🍳 🥐 📱 ☕ 🧥 💻 💻 💻 🚽 💬 📧 🎧 💻 📞 💻 💻 💻 💻 💻 ☕ 💻 📞 💻 📱 🎧 💻 💻 💬 💻 📱 🍱 🍱 📱 ☕ 💻 📞 💻 💻 🎧 🚽 📱 💻 💻 📧 💻 💻 💻 💻 💻 💻 💻 💻 💬 🥪 📱 💻 🚗 🛒 🛒 🚗 🥏 🥏 🏃 🏃 🥏 🥏 🥏 🏋️ 🏋️ 🏋️ 🏋️ 🧘 🧘 🚗 🚗 🛁 🍲 🍲 📺 📺 📱 📺 💻 🚽 💻 💻 💻 🪥 📖 📖 📖 📖 🛌
Many minutes, but few moments.
Hash extension allows us to enter whatever cookies we choose, without knowledge of the secret, and still pass the website’s checks. Since the cookie is unserialized, we can inject arbitrary php objects into the server. By injecting a Post object, we know it’s destroy method will be called. This method has been redefined to output the Post’s fields in HTML comments after parsing them with the class Filter. The Filter operates by running the given text through preg_replace calls with stored params for match and substitution. As we have injected the object, we have complete control over these stored params, and can thus call the preg_replace with the ‘e’ flag, allowing us to do arbitrary command execution. By catting the necessary file at /home/daedalus/flag.txt, and substituting all of the Post’s text with the file’s contents, we can print the file’s contents in an HTML comment, and thus get the flag.