Crawshaw gives two prompts for personalizing software with an agent. The first forks it.
In the News: August 3, 2026
David Crawshaw names the nightly upstream rebase as a harness primitive, and closed-source agents as the wall it hits.
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A nightly cron job that rebases your fork is now a harness primitive
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Epoch's leaderboard puts a price on autonomous project size
MirrorCode asks a model to reimplement a whole program from a compiled binary, documentation and example inputs and outputs, with no internet, no original source, and held-out end-to-end tests. Twenty-five targets include Unix utilities,…
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The factory everyone cites has been quiet for two months
StrongDM's software factory is the canonical existence proof for non-interactive development: specs and scenarios in, agents write and test, no human reviews code. Its Weather Report is the most frequently updated page on that site,…
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A harness deliberately de-automated, with the cost stated
Sethi puts a block in every agents file on his personal projects forbidding the assistant to "create, edit, move, rename, or delete project files" or run any state-changing command, requiring it instead to "show me every proposed edit in…
Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26)
A vendor stating the build-versus-buy decision out loud: "We spent a lot of time deciding on whether we should use an off the shelf solution like Codex/Claude Code, but ultimately wanted the independence and freedom that came with building it in house." Reads directly against item 1.
Show HN: Armature (YC P26)
Analytics and evals for agent sessions, and unusually for a Show HN it reports a measurement: "the exact same success rate as without our instrumentation (89.17 % vs 89.15 % pass rate out of 870 runs)". Its named failure mode is worth the click: small models hallucinating audience IDs so a campaign goes to every contact by default.