Shriram Krishnamurthi

I regret to inform you that we *already* live in the dumbest of timelines. openai.com/supply/co-la...

openai.com

Course advertising banner for my rebooted PL course. Sorry for the janky graphics, that's not my forte. (Reboot details, for those who missed it earlier: docs.google.com/document/d/e...)

RFC: Programming Languages Course Reboot, 2026 docs.google.com

I respect Codeberg's right to take a position on this, and I understand why they might feel this way, but this is kinda' crazy. Glad I'm not using it, because I'd have to move some projects off of it. The article is also just confused in some ways. blog.codeberg.org/protecting…

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs — Codeberg News blog.codeberg.org

I've had this sense in the back of my head but never bothered enough to investigate. @danluu.com took the trouble to actually compile receipts. This is the new media: the best way to establish a brand is to tell people what they want to hear, over and over. danluu.com/zitron/

How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? danluu.com

I really like Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta"—which I'm most probably adding to both my fall semester courses—but I am amused at how AI is basically forcing people to re-discover long-established principles in security (in this case, OCaps). simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/...

The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication simonwillison.net

I've been using Aider for these research experiments (not regular work) and it's been fine. arxiv.org/abs/2606.01522

Type-Error Ablation and AI Coding Agents arxiv.org

A lot of people forget, or aren't old enough to know, that Google has a track record of forcing things in where they don't belong. Just think of Google+. Whole stories have been written about its needless injection everywhere, until its eventual demise. www.theatlantic.com/tec…

Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools theatlantic.com

What I'm referring to is pure prose quality. There's a blandness, airiness and vapidity to a lot of AI prose. It's the prose that makes you think "did a human write this?!?" And indeed people don't *want* to read that: writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reacti...

Report: How Developers React to AI-Scented Blog Posts writethatblog.substack.com

Fisler, Littman, & I have an upcoming CACM op-ed: "Teaching Novice Computing and Programming in the Agentic AI Era". Based on our experimental course+research. We argue that the «flaky compiler» is a useful metaphor for course design. Details in preprint: cs.brown.edu/people/s…

Teaching Novice Computing and Programming in the Agentic AI Era cs.brown.edu

Hi @vauhinivara.bsky.social — I love your work, including this Atlantic piece [ www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/1... ], but was really surprised (not entirely in a good way) by the way you presented Pangram: ↵

theatlantic.com

We should maximize the amount of proof we can get out of AI while the money cannon is on. It's like early days of Uber, except the benefits are 100x more tangible. A fully-verified hw+sw stack? That's like gold everyone can share w/out having to divide. Generational opportunity.

Fucking ghoulish behavior. Crap like this makes life hard for pro-AI people, because we're (somewhat rightly) colored by association. And to abuse the language of education research, too! One thing to drop "don't be evil", another to BE evil. Gotta wonder about these people. (Yes, yes, flame away.)

New research thread: 1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

I used to feel sympathy (and fellow-feeling) for people mad at AI progress, but increasingly I'm just annoyed at folks who use yelling in my replies as their emotional support animal. OpenAI "just produced a proof". Just! Of a Clay Inst problem! And so sure NO understanding will ensue in, say, 6mo?

People on Mastodon and Bluesky get hella mad at me for getting my hands dirty with AI. But I believe, as a professor, I have an *obligation to my students* to stay on top of what is happening in the tech world. Sometimes I deeply disbelieve in it, like blockchain, so I mostly just read. ↵

Well, this is a first (for me) for Bluesky: someone posts a bullshit university press release about the negative impact of AI, and then…deletes it? Nature is healing?

For a while programming looked most under AI threat, but suddenly mathematics has taken pole position. My theory for why is 2-fold: 1. Math has had 1000s of years to get to clean formulations. 2. Math is self-contained: no "network misconfigured", etc. to gum up the works. ↵

Reading Arvind Narayanan made me think: one of the great (and most undersung) achievements of the 20th century was rural electrification. If "AI is the new electricity", what is "rural AIification"? "Rural" here is obviously a metaphor, though it has some literal elements too.

At a party tonight, my inimitable colleague @mlittman.bsky.social (initials: ML) said, "You know, Tamil sounds like the name of a programming language". This suggests the next obvious step in PL evolution. @yminsky.bsky.social and @kcsrk.info, make this happen:

I suspect a lot of folks speculating on AI solving P/NP have not taken a serious complexity theory class. We should, e.g., treat "relativization" as a shibboleth: if you know what that is, great, I'm *maybe* interested in hearing from you; if you don't, perhaps start learning, stop posting?