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Meta Is Tracking Its Own Employees to Train AI Agents

TL;DR Meta’s Model Capability Initiative installs software on US employee laptops that captures keystrokes, mouse movements, and screenshots to train AI agents - there is no opt-out The program is US-only because EU and UK employees are protected by GDPR; the scope of the tracking maps directly onto the absence of legal protection Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth openly framed the end state: agents do the work, humans direct and review - the surveillance and the automation plan are the same story The irony is deliberate: Meta’s defence of the program - narrow purpose, safeguards, not used against the person - echoes its long-standing defences of consumer data collection This is a signal about where the agent-training bottleneck actually sits: not reasoning or context windows, but the long tail of real software interactions that only real employees can provide Meta has started installing tracking software on the work laptops of its US-based employees. It captures keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and occasional screenshots. The captured activity is fed back into training data for AI agents. There is no opt-out. The program was disclosed to staff in an internal memo in April 2026, and the response from inside the company has been about what you would expect. ...

April 1, 2026 · 8 min · James M
A year of AI agents

A Year of Agents, and What is Coming Next

TL;DR The defining shift from April 2025 to April 2026 is the move from “ask” to “delegate” - agents now run for minutes, open files, execute shells, and return results rather than waiting for each prompt Key developments that drove this: coding agents becoming operators (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex), MCP standardising tool access, spec-driven development going mainstream, and context windows expanding to millions of tokens In the next two years, longer-horizon agents, multi-agent coordination, persistent personal AI memory, and computer-use automation will move from early features to default expectations The working day is reshaping around less typing and more reviewing - the skill that matters is judgement over diffs, not typing speed or boilerplate generation To adapt now: pick a stack and use it daily, write specs before code, build the habit of reviewing diffs fast, and move procedural knowledge into reusable agent skills A year ago, in April 2025, “AI in your workflow” mostly meant a chat window in a browser tab and an autocomplete plugin in your editor. You typed, it suggested, you accepted or rejected. The interaction model was small. The blast radius was small. The verb was “ask”. ...

March 13, 2026 · 12 min · James M
Where Should Documentation Live Banner

Where Should Documentation Actually Live? Thinking Out Loud in the AI Era

TL;DR Documentation sprawl across Confluence, Jira, SharePoint, Google Docs, GitHub, and Miro is not a tool problem - it is a joints problem: the same decision exists in four places, drifting out of sync immediately Three forces constantly pull against each other: source of truth (one canonical home), discoverability (right surface for every audience), and governance (real access control) - optimising for any one breaks the others The proposed shape: docs-as-code for engineering artefacts in Git, collaborative tools for business content, a read-only render layer between them, and an AI-assisted discovery layer across all of it AI tooling weakens the old boundary - a business user can get a summary generated from a markdown master without ever seeing the file, and an engineer can draft an ADR pulling context from Confluence and Jira automatically Several genuine open questions remain unsolved: versioning across boundaries, who owns the render pipeline, and whether Jira tickets as documents should be formalised or fought against This post is me thinking out loud. It is not a proposal, not a recommended pattern, and possibly not even a useful framing. I am writing it because I am actively stuck on the question, and writing in public tends to be the fastest way I find out what I have got wrong. Feel free to disagree with any of it. ...

March 12, 2026 · 11 min · James M
Junior Developer Pipeline Problem Banner

The Junior Developer Pipeline Problem: Where Do Tomorrow's Seniors Come From?

TL;DR The work AI now automates - boring tickets, bug hunts, boilerplate - was the unspoken apprenticeship that turned juniors into seniors The skills that work built (pattern recognition, systems intuition, taste, calibration) are built by doing, not by reading - and that doing is now cheapest to delegate The new apprenticeship shifts toward reading over writing, debugging agent output, earlier architectural decisions, and deliberate practice of things agents do badly There is a coordination problem: individual organisations rationally skip junior investment in the short term, but the senior pipeline thins industry-wide a few years later If you are starting out today, optimise for proximity to a great senior engineer above salary, title, or any other variable The views in this post are my own personal reflections on the industry as a whole, written in my own time. They are not about any specific employer, team, or colleague, past or present. ...

March 12, 2026 · 11 min · James M
Learning to buy intelligence as infrastructure

We Are Learning to Buy Intelligence

TL;DR For most of history, usable intelligence - the kind that solves complex problems - required hiring expensive specialists or spending years acquiring expertise yourself Research shows the cost of running AI capability has been falling roughly an order of magnitude every one to two years, making intelligence increasingly affordable Intelligence is becoming infrastructure - like electricity or compute, available on demand through APIs rather than locked inside individuals or institutions When intelligence is cheap and abundant, creativity becomes the limiting factor, not knowledge, credentials, or access to experts This democratisation is extraordinary, but the question of how we deploy these tools wisely matters as much as the capability itself For most of human history, intelligence has been scarce. Not intelligence in the biological sense - people have always been clever - but usable intelligence. The kind that helps you design a system, debug a problem, write code, plan a strategy, analyse data, or turn a vague idea into something real. ...

March 11, 2026 · 5 min · James M
OpenClaw - AI agent framework for computer interfaces

OpenClaw Is Absolutely Wild

TL;DR OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework that enables language models to operate software directly through computer interfaces - clicking, typing, and navigating the same way a human does Unlike chatbots that only respond to prompts, OpenClaw acts as an operator - automating any software without requiring custom APIs or integrations This makes legacy enterprise software, complex dashboards, and multi-application workflows instantly automatable using computer vision and reasoning models Because it uses reasoning models rather than fixed scripts, it can adapt to unexpected states and recover from mistakes - closer to digital labor than traditional automation This represents a shift in computing: software that can build, run, and manage other software, driven by open projects improving rapidly every month Every now and then a piece of technology appears that quietly changes the rules. Not in a loud marketing way. Not with a huge product launch. Just a project sitting on GitHub that makes you stop, stare at the screen for a second, and think: ...

March 10, 2026 · 4 min · James M
Claude Code multi-agent code review feature

Claude Code Just Got a Serious Code Review Feature

TL;DR Claude Code’s new Code Review feature dispatches multiple AI agents in parallel to review a PR from different angles, rather than running a single shallow model pass over the diff The motivation is real: Anthropic’s internal code output per engineer increased by around 200%, making human review the bottleneck - and humans consistently miss subtle bugs on large diffs Multi-agent review cross-checks findings, filters false positives, and ranks issues by severity before posting a clean, high-signal review comment plus inline annotations Review depth scales with PR size; typical runs take about 20 minutes and cost $15 - $25, which is cheap compared to the cost of a production bug Humans still approve PRs - the tool’s role is a thorough pre-review pass, not automated sign-off, making it a complement to human judgment rather than a replacement I genuinely think a lot of people still underestimate how fast the AI developer tooling ecosystem is evolving. ...

March 9, 2026 · 5 min · James M
Hybrid AI stack for developers hitting Claude Code limits

Hitting Claude Code Limits? Here’s the Setup I’m Moving Toward

TL;DR Hitting Claude Code Pro usage limits does not mean upgrading to the $200/month plan - a hybrid AI stack is a smarter and cheaper alternative The tiering strategy: local models (free) for quick edits, cheap cloud APIs for general coding, and frontier models only for architecture or complex multi-file reasoning Tools like Ollama or LM Studio with coding models such as DeepSeek Coder or Qwen2.5 handle the majority of everyday tasks locally at no cost Cheap cloud inference providers (Groq, Together AI, DeepInfra) offer capable open models at fractions of a cent per session for heavier work A realistic usage split of 80% local / 15% cheap APIs / 5% frontier models dramatically reduces limit burn while keeping Claude available when it genuinely matters I keep running into the same problem with Claude Code Pro ($20/month): I burn through the usage limits faster than I expect. The obvious solution is upgrading to the $200/month plan, but that feels excessive for how I actually use it. ...

March 9, 2026 · 4 min · James M
Suno Voice Personas - Consistent Vocals for AI Music

Suno Voice Personas

Suno Voice Personas: Consistent Vocals, Creative Freedom Suno has just rolled out a vocal-first update to Personas, and it’s a genuinely important shift for anyone creating music at scale. For the first time, you can build an entire album around the same vocalist, without being locked into a specific instrumental style. What’s New: Voice Personas Voice Personas are designed to focus on what most creators care about first - the singer. ...

December 20, 2025 · 2 min · James M
GitHub Spec Kit - spec-driven development with AI

GitHub Spec Kit and the Rise of Spec-Driven Development (SDD) 🤯

TL;DR GitHub Spec Kit is a structured framework of version-controlled markdown files (spec.md, constitution.md, boundaries.md, etc.) that serve as the single source of truth for a software project Spec-Driven Development (SDD) means writing the specification first, then generating and refactoring code in alignment with it - preventing architectural drift over time Integrating Spec Kit with Cursor AI turns the spec from a static document into an active constraint the AI understands and respects The spec-first loop (define, implement, refine, repeat) creates development that is clearer, faster, and easier to maintain than ad-hoc planning SDD is especially powerful for long-term projects and large teams where shared mental models and consistent architecture matter most Spec-Driven Development is starting to reshape how modern software is planned, built, and maintained. Among the tools pushing this shift forward, GitHub Spec Kit stands out as one of the clearest, cleanest ways to bring structure and intention into your workflow. It turns the usual chaos of planning into something organised, navigable, and repeatable - and when combined with AI-powered editors like Cursor, it becomes even more powerful. ...

December 3, 2025 · 4 min · James M