Nat Torkington

OpenClaw reaching out?

Or, as it is becoming known, “agentic development” :)

If code is free, why shouldn’t I? Said Bilbo Baggins in front of Claude.

Have the Instagrammers moved on?

Brilliant! Not improv, but a way to get some of that lightning. Love it!

Coming soon to a PM near you ...

Also, sorry to hear it was a hard week for you. There's a lot of different flavours of that going around. I hope next week is easier and you can find some joy in it. 💖 to you from NZ.

Bent Creek, by Julian Pinelli 8 track album

Bluegrass: "if you want to be happy, listen to the music. If you want to be sad, listen to the words." Instrumental modern bluegrass makes me VERY happy! Check out julianpinelli.bandcamp.com/album/bent-c...

For words, the harmonies in "I'm With Her" always 💖🤲: imwithher.bandcamp.com/music

At times like these it always helps to read some William Butler Yeats

A nation of people who place at least one big order each from the menu of government services in infrastructure, healthcare, education, emergency services, business ... and then stamp their foot and say "the bill is too high" and "we won't come to this restaurant again". @davidslack.bsky.social

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Threads thread: thriller_instinct 3d Is it okay to bully 40 and 50 year olds who are on social media just for being on it, cuz like why are you here - 254 Q 3.1K G 28 746 corporateash 18h ••• My ICQ UIN is 7231680. That number is burned into my consciousness. I inadvertently learned that you could see private conversations in public chat rooms when using Telnet instead of a browser on GeoCities. I can tell you the difference in audible dial-up handshakes between 1200, 2400, 14.4 kbps modems. I needed a edu email address to join Facebook after my university was admitted. We were here at the beginning. We made social media. You wouldn't be in my Top 8. I have usernames older than you. 852 Q62 G6 72

“I have usernames older than you.”.
Holy shit

Screenshot of a Tweet. "Awesome bit of data that makes intuitive sense. Finland cut VAT on haircuts in 2007 to see if cheaper prices would boost demand and jobs. But when the tax fell by 4 euro, many salons lowered prices by only 2 euro and kept the rest as profit. When VAT rose again, prices jumped by the" [full amount]. There's a graph showing this.

Remember this when you hear "we shouldn't charge GST on food."

Whipping Post YouTube video by Della Mae - Topic

So good! Bluegrass bands have been kicking ass with it lately, too. E.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKqr...

Hallmark of a great song is that it can pays off in other genres too.

“humanity hanging from a cross of iron”

Black and white photo of Marjane Satrapi with the quote: "The world is not divided between East and West. You are American. I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same."

Once again.

I called it "pretirement" when I did it. It's like retirement but you have to keep working. A change is as good as a ... no, it isn't, I take that back. My bad, I was wrong.

Ooof, that's a hard place to be in. I see your moral position, and it's sound. I have a book in the Anthropic settlement, and I'm puzzled by how the settlement isn't "don't train on pirated stuff" but rather "this modest one-off sum makes it all okay."

America. 🤷

Nice! I would love to compare notes (nathan@torkington.com). I did something similar for my own experiments: internal network Ubuntu VM, everything runs in a container, Caddy doing port mapping. If I could easily DNS up *.experiment.company.com then I would use that instead of Caddy.

Yeah, it's wild to see what a motivated goal-directed agent will do in pursuit of that goal. Also, terrifying when you think who wants to connect it to autonomous killing machines.

As my wife's step-dad said: "you've got to be smarter than what you're working with". That carries weight in 2026.

I hope you find intellectual satisfaction wherever programming ends up. Are you early in your career, or a seasoned veteran with decades spent in the code mines?

I definitely get that puzzle-lovers who thrive on the word-level detail are going to suffer. I find I get the same delight figuring out how to solve problems with Claude. Different programming language, different tools, same outputs, and (for me) the same intellectual challenge.

Some thrive on being part of a team: we had one dev who nearly went nuts in lockdown because he thrived on the face-to-face pleasure of work. Being a part of something bigger, relying on others and being relied on, is a part of the job.

... and the flipside of "why is it not doing what I want?". There's a dopamine game in that puzzle-solving too, which is super addictive. Every bug feels like the last ...

For some it's just a day job, they code to get paid, climb the career ladder, maybe some day get promoted to management.

Totally. There's huge diversity in programmers, diversity of what makes you happy. For some people it's a happy customer -- debugging and feature builds are because of the smiles & gratitude at the ends. For others it's the puzzle-solving "how do I line up the pieces so it does what I want?" ...

Maybe the process of writing software gets some acceleration, but it won't take many fuckups before your boss will want the company to run on more than Claude's self-marked homework.

I see AI making a lot of shitty unfinished software possible now. In the short- to maybe medium-term, the work of securing, deploying, guaranteeing, and maintaining reliable useful software isn't going away.

Or maybe it does completely automate away programming. Ok, I liked the money but the job kinda sucks really. If you're paid to solve sudoku 8 hours/day, the fun goes out of it.

Give me a week or two to catch my breath, and I'll be ready to rise up against the capital class.

The future isn't predetermined, though. Will everyone who wants software have the patience and insight to iterate until it's perfect, or will they throw PoCs over the fence to people who understand how software works and runs? Maybe this creates MORE software jobs?

I think there's a genetic predisposition to curiosity and invention and making it happen because we can. We know it's not leading somewhere good but there's a compulsion, a delight in the invention, which obscures the future.

US carrier launch

The only high-speed rail Americans support