christiannolan.bsky.social

I’ve been on team “skills are all you need” for a minute, but stateless MCP + recent model advances are changing that, much like @simonwillison.net explains in his blog: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/...

Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp) simonwillison.net

“The most important skill in prompting is expertise in the domain you’re prompting for.” I have nothing to add except yes, amen, and read this post: www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-...

LLMs reward expertise seangoedecke.com

Read the whole thing, very persuasive RCT in a real world setting: pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/...

pubsonline.informs.org

This by @mmullins.coginiti.co is so good. Summary: philosophers have had a place, especially around metaphysics, in tech, but with LLMs epistemology and ethics take center stage and are no long just a necessary foundation, but a product differentiator open.substack.com/pub/msm…

Philosophers in the Machine - Matthew Mullins open.substack.com

This by @mmullins.coginiti.co is so good. Summary: philosophers have had a place, especially around metaphysics, in tech, but with LLMs epistemology and ethics take center stage and are no long just a necessary foundation, but a product differentiator open.substack.com/pub/msm…

Philosophers in the Machine - Matthew Mullins open.substack.com

Adjacent to this: I’ve found that AI helps me create prototypes or demos that allow someone to “see” themselves or their workflow in the solution space. It used to be “trust me” and now it’s “come experience with me.” Doing a webinar where I go into more detail: dagster.io/eve…

How we use AI to get to yes (and no!) 2x faster at Dagster | Events | Dagster dagster.io

Excited to share that this week I joined Vercel as a Forward Deployed Engineer! Vercel is building the future of agentic infrastructure, and I can’t wait to work with some of the largest organizations in the world as they transform their organizations with AI.

If you think AI generated posts on LinkedIn are bad, wait till you see AI generated spreadsheets with all hard coded values

Data engineers to software engineers who are all excited about context pipelines. (AI engineering is a data engineering shaped problem) #dataBA

the data influencer to AI influencer pipeline

I think some people are missing the point of these “my agentic harness migrated this library to rust” posts. These are interesting benchmarks precisely because they are a known, difficult, solvable problem that has objective grading criteria (i.e. the test suite and “it compiles and runs!)

I’ve seen a lot of skepticism about AI similar to the famous “you can see the computer revolution everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Everyone is being told to adopt AI at work, but to what end? Where are the outcomes? This paper by Ethan Mollick has an answer:

The real AI transformation was the bog standard process improvement methodology actually adopted by teams along the way.

Love the description by Jeremiah Lowin of the change in data pipelines from a DAG of tasks to a DAG of outcomes in the age of AI. Declarative is the programming model humans want but has been incredibly hard to pull off.

I've started putting a "Human TL;DR" at the top of AI generated PR descriptions. The AI descriptions are useful and re-writing them feels like a waste of time, but the human TL;DR means the reviewer can scim the AI part for the parts they find of interest.