Short posts
Lovely analysis of how Claude Code works. Highlights include:
- Runs on one loop. If task is complex, clones itself, with one loop.
- Uses its small model (Haiku) majority of the time
- System prompt includes a lot of “IMPORTANT” and “VERY IMPORTANT” instructions, which, lol
Devastating story, must read.
… at one critical moment, ChatGPT discouraged Adam from cluing his family in. … “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html
This tool looks interesting: runs web search per row in a spreadsheet, and then uses an llm to do something with the results (like categorize, or maybe extract some info) https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-fuels/augmenta-new-tool-for-ai-classification-and-research/
What a fun LLM eval, draw a world map pixel by pixel with this prompt:
If this location is over land, say ‘Land’. If this location is over water, say ‘Water’. Do not say anything else. x° S, y° W
Somehow, it kinda works? https://outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a-blind-model-see-the-earth
A brutal account: What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html
The political fundraising email eval is officially too easy https://kschaul.com/llm-evals/evals/political-fundraising-emails/
Released jump-start as a CLI. Now you can search and use your starters from the command line!
If you don’t know jump-start, it’s basically a shortcut to your favorite code. Put it in a structured GitHub repo, and jump-start turns it into a website. Here’s mine –> @storybook/cli - Storybook
Didn’t realize Anthropic had created dxt: a one-click install for MCP servers –> Claude Desktop Extensions: One-click MCP server installation for Claude Desktop
Fascinating blog post that rethinks how to use LLMs for programming tasks by writing a “program” in markdown and storing “state” in json files –> Taming agentic engineering - Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state
MCP server for accessing Guardian articles –> https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/a-new-tool-lets-your-favorite-ai-model-talk-with-1-9-million-articles-in-the-guardian/