From the Couch of Ben Johnson

Father, Principal Engineer at Prodigy Education, serial hyperbolist.

✴ Weird

If you ask an agent to “spin up a SaaS product” it’ll sprinkle in some sampling but it’s mostly going to do the task based on the mean of its training data. I find it helpful to think of prompting as pulling the agent directionally away from the mean.

Models are great at CRUD, and they do that well because CRUD is the mean. If you want models to be fantastic, picking Python’s a good choice, because they’ve seen so much Python. But, what if we don’t want the mean? What if we want something different? The further you need to go, the more effort it takes. The harder the model has been trained on…

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Dan McKinley (of Boring Technology fame) with another excellent talk on building evals for agents. Figuring out what good is is the job now. Great distillation of good ideas in this talk.

✴ TWSBI Eco O-Rings for Posting

I managed to lose the O-Ring on the back of my TWSBI Eco. It can come off and get lost when being removed from a pen loop. I searched for the size it needs but couldn’t find any info. I contacted TWSBI support and they sent me some replacements.

For anyone who needs the O-Ring for posting at the back of the barrel, the size is:

  • 10x1 Metric Size
  • OD: 12mm
  • ID: 10mm
  • CS: 1mm

You can get these at hardware stores, industrial websites, and sites like Amazon. It should be listed as ID × CS, so 10x1 means 10 mm inner diameter, 1 mm thick. Or TWSBI support sent them for a nominal fee.

(Shameless…

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“In the early beta, data retention was enabled by default for non-ZDR users. Based on your feedback, we changed this. We are now going further to protect privacy.”

It is both funny, and incredibly not funny, that the opposite of ZDR for Grok was full exfiltration of your codebase to XAI’s servers.

I’m going to RAID together all the 8GB USB keys hiding in the junk drawers into an “AI Storage Cluster” for my Series A.

I’m at the dump. There’s a story behind this sign.

Signs indicate that children under the age of 12 must remain inside vehicles for their safety.

The real enemy in Arc Raiders is the tumbleweeds.

Agent frameworks really need an option to hide test code from themselves. If the orchestrator can’t see the test code, then we’re doing actual deterministic verification with true red/green.

Boring Technology is even more true in the world of AI. You get such a quality benefit choosing technology the models have been trained on. Plus, picking boring things makes it easier for both humans and agents to judge what good looks like.

Somewhere in my context somewhere, I have the word “spine”. And so Claude has decided that everything has a spine. “That’s the spine of this debate.”, “The spine of this problem is in the architecture.”, “We’ll start by building the spine.” It’s… kind of… gory.

It is frankly ridiculous how much tastier Premium Plus saltines are versus No Name Brand. You would think that saltine technology would have reached an apogee to a degree to which brand does not matter. It does.

This saltine opinion is not sponsored by Premium Plus or sanctioned by my employer.

✴ Introducing Roost: a bullet journal notebook companion

I’ve been a diligent GTD person for years — OmniFocus, Things, all of it. The capture flow on those apps is excellent. But late last year I started bullet journalling, and it solved a problem I’d been having forever: digital task apps never end. Tasks accumulate until you spend more time grooming the library than doing the work. The notebook forces a daily reckoning. Rewrite it or let it go. It also means I get to use a nice fountain pen.

I love the journal. But I don’t always have it with me and I still need to capture things in the moments I can’t reach it.

If I use Things to do capture, I…

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I bet Apple is really happy that they started moving away from Storyboards before AI agents became a thing.

It’s still jarring that you can have a conversation with the AI about complex programming topics and the pivot to a discussion of ideal bread rise timing with the same model.

The grandma pizza attempts continue. Not enough dough for the too-big 16x12 pan I bought on sale. Needs another 1/3 the dough to get that crispy edge. 🍕

“Put a brownie on the menu. Everyone likes a brownie.” “But, we’re Tex-Mex. A brownie isn’t Tex-Mex.” “Just like… make it Spanish or something.”

Senor Brownie

I’m trying to cancel a Github Actions job. Now, I haven’t actually cancelled the job. I’ve just successfully requested the cancellation. Whether or not the job actually cancels… who knows the future (spoiler: it doesn’t).

You have successfully requested the workflow to be canceled.

“No, Lisa, I’m not some casual amateur. I need a yogurt that can handle my extensive expertise.”

A container of Activia Expert yogurt with prebiotics and probiotics, labeled as plain and containing 7g of protein.

“No, I’m not some goddamned amateur. Give me the professional yogurt.”

A container of Oikos Pro plain yogurt displays 19g protein.

Can’t stop listening to Stephen Spencer’s songs with lyrics by his 3-year-old daughter. I need an EP.

The mcp server for Bear is a game changer for my quality time spent shuffling my notes from one organizational system to another.

Waiting in eager anticipation for a new LLM with the personality of Janet from The Good Place.

I don’t know how I should feel about the fact that I can look at a picture of the side of a cat and my brain immediately goes “Oh, that’s Maru.”

I love Simon Willison’s plan to charge for a newsletter summary with less content than his raw blog. Time is valuable. It also provides some space for reflection and pattern hindsight.

It seems crazy to me that in 2025 you can’t make Pocket a viable business.