Adam Keys is Thinking

Interestingly

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:38:45 -0700

Three modalities of creativity I am keen to explore: dirt, screenshots, monk-like.

1. Dirt, metaphorically

Take something worthless (e.g., literal dirt, metaphorically non-working code), put great effort into it, get something nice in the end:

Sometimes things don’t go as planned and the product that comes out the other end is really not what I wanted or needed. At that point, the right thing to do is usually to start over from the original specs (and possibly the wrong code) and restart the spec and design process. Then implement again from scratch. There are absolutely projects that I’ve run through this process five or six times as I figured out what I actually wanted or the right way to explain what I was going for.

Dorodango is, essentially, the process of polishing a ball of dirt into a beautiful, high-gloss sphere. The result is genuinely amazing.

— Jesse Vincent, Dorodango

2. Screenshots

Knowledge workers are all taken with our text files, spreadsheets, or design files. We invent ideologies and workflows, have very specific opinions about how to do this thing, know all the keyboard shortcuts, organize them just so, or not at all!

And then, there are eccentrics who have these giant collections of screenshots, thousands of them. Of order screens and login flows and memorable conversations and receipts and profound quotes on the web and sports scores and seventeen iterations of one document/screen/logo.

During the opening of the conference, Omar honed in on the subversive nature of the screenshot. In popular computing, it circumvents the app siloes that define our contemporary digital ecosystems. A screenshot doesn’t need a log in, bypasses DRMs, and is interoperable between practically every single computational device. Even in the “high-culture” of computing, where text is dominant, screenshots prove subversive. The screenshot is unstructured information which must be parsed to offer the tidy data best suited to computer hacking. They are seen as verbose and unwieldly, despite universal adoption. The Tao of Unix is text files, not bitmaps.

— Cristóbal Sciutto Rodríguez

3. Monk-like devotion to the craft

Deep, monk-like devotion to the craft of software development and its output, the application. I love an in-depth, illustrated essay on decisions that go into a carefully considered application.

The initial vision for Paper was simple — build something that has the core tricks of iA Writer, but in a package that feels even more elegant and minimal

…Have people noticed the effort? Most — probably not… but some have.

— 11 years of Apple text editor solo dev

I don’t have a big connection to make here! Deep attention to detail, knowing when to polish and when to start over, trying to make different media work – that’s it. Make interesting things, interestingly.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:03:45 -0700

I’m on book six of Dune. But, I’m just now finding out the story runs eight books. (Have Frank/Brian Herbert not heard of trilogies?)

Finding focus when working with coding agents, flying too close to the multitasking sun. But, it turns out concise output and taking intentional time away from tokens is the key.

Driving more confident in autocross, trying to use the pedals, both brake and gas, more. But, I’m still slow.

It’s all dumb. But, we learn things.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:29:55 -0700

Watched: Spider-Man: Brand New Day 🎥 Properly rated at ~71% positive. It’s a fun movie. Definitely better than the second Spider-Man, probably better than the third, not as good as the first. Only 2.5 hours, but it felt way longer. There’s a bunch of plot movement to get through.

Holland and Zendaya still have great chemistry. They pulled in a few minor characters from three of our favorite long-running dramas: Michael Mando from Better Call Saul, Liza Colón-Zayas from The Bear, Tramell Tillman from Severance. Jon Bernthal is surprisingly likable as The Punisher, which I don’t even know how to feel about.

Is Marvel back? Possibly! Spider-Man is definitely the best world they have going. But the supporting cast of shows and characters appearing in the upcoming films may make the post-Endgame dip feel mildly redeemed if they can land Doomsday. They’re pulling in the X-Men universe too, ever so gradually. But not blowing it — yet.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:39:44 -0700

Patrick Dubroy, Fast is better than slow:

Think about it — if you’re fast, you get data more quickly. That helps you make better decisions, sooner. It also means you learn faster, and over longer periods it means you learn more. Being fast also means you can try out multiple approaches to a problem and pick the best one.

Fast is more learning is better execution.

Don’t worry about looking dumb. You probably already know that you should share your work early and often. But it’s uncomfortable, so it’s easy to put it off while telling yourself a story like “I have a high bar for quality.”

You’ll get results much faster if you learn to push through that discomfort.

If I’ve learned anything from working with coding agents on a team, it’s to worry less about that one code review where someone points out a howler of an issue with my code. Whether a coding agent generated that code or I typed it in by hand, acting on my teammate’s feedback is an opportunity to show that I care about quality, I listen, and I follow through.

That’s what (still) makes great coders. And, fast fingers.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:55:24 -0700

Frozen 2 should be rated R (Interconnected):

Frozen 2 in which the entire city is almost destroyed by a tidal wave… It is SO LAZY.

While we’re piling on lazy writing here: LOST, and most American television, is particularly lazy about generating consequence and tension with lines spoken with characters holding guns at each other. Do we need the cheap escalation of a gun to know that the character really wants to coerce the other to action? To paraphrase Laurence Olivier, did the writers consider letting the actors act?

(Granted, firearms warp most parts of American culture, but this one is difficult to unsee once you recognize it.)

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:02:19 -0700

If the clankers have you down, I recommend: read your favorites, write like that, discover new favorites, write and edit like that, rinse and repeat. It would seem, at this moment, only a human can produce liveliness by chaining words into language and narrative.

Writing is how I build. That’s why I write.

—The Motivation

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:38:37 -0700

Working with agents, summer of 2026: you have an always-on, amazingly deep collaborator. The coding ones can work themselves out of most problems, if you are willing to pay for the effort and thinking costs.

But, wow, you are absolutely right! They are boring as nails and write like an entrance exam question.

It is a real relief to spend a weekend, touching grass or concrete, away from the discourse around maximizing, minimizing, or wisely leveraging them.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:16:06 -0700

The frontier labs regularly run promotions like “hey there’s a long weekend or holiday soon! Tokens or this new model is half-off until the next business day back.” I don’t like the nudge to “always be prompting”, working with the models at all time. To trade a long weekend for better token rates smells even worse.

The new sabbath was an offline weekend or vacation. The new time offline is time away from tokens.

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:40:32 -0700

So what had happened was, my daily reading sort of tailed off. Distractions and all that. Then my writing dropped off. And then, the web hit me with three great ideas hit me right in a row. The web provides energy for reading, the reading transforms into energy for writing. Suddenly, here we are, posting the links again. The web is good.

Mandy Brown, Umyazu:

Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to change.

Austin Kleon, Problems of output are problems of input

When I stall out, it’s time to start taking things in again: read more, re-read, watch movies, listen to music, go to art museums, travel, take people to lunch, etc. Just being open and alert and on the lookout for That Thing that will get me going again. Getting out the jumper cables and hunting down a battery.

Reading Notes: May 2026 :

First installment of this could-be-a-series of monthly reading notes. I thought I haven’t been reading much lately, and there goes my self-awareness.

You (almost) can’t do too much reading. Lovely thing, that.

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:23:41 -0700

Grass touched, wind felt. Mountains driven, autocross done in ski resort parking lots. Bend, OR and its surrounding areas.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:40:36 -0700

Silvermoon Brewing and McKay Cottage in Bend, Oregon

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:19:25 -0700

You ain’t got time for all this – the latest newsletter edition from yours truly. Some of my recent writing, remixed. Some all new links. If you’re seeing this on your computer screen, you might like it!

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:54:32 -0700

🎧 Human Touch is the Phil Collins-est of Bruce Springsteen albums. From one Oscar winner of the 1990s to another.

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:28:07 -0700

📚 Finished: In a Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry. If you’ve ever lived in Texas, even more so if you’re from Texas, this is a great read. It’s not quite Texas as I remember it, as the author was writing a decade or two before my time. But it captures the spirit and backstory of 20th century Texas. Contains great explainers on the rivalries between Austin, Dallas, and Houston. And, that Texas is at least two different things: east Texas, west Texas, and probably south Texas.

The nostalgia was strong as I read this. But, the headlines bear many reminders that the religious right and culture warriors have thoroughly captured and corrupted the state. I hope those who’ve stuck around can recover it, someday.

The local maxima we need to reach the next global maximum

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:00:42 -0700

Half-way through 2026, I’m finally getting around to posting some predictions for the year. Really, ideas about how software development can fix the house to deal with coding agents generating lots of code:

Design with pacing, stable/unstable layers – ala Shearing layers
Correctness by design/assertion – ala “Making Impossible States Impossible”
Formal verification (finally) – figure out if we can do better than compilers and unit tests to know if what we asked for resembles what we received
Even more deterministic static analysis – absent a leap forward in the practicality and ergonomics of formal verification, can we manage the flood plain of incoming code with beaver dams of linters, style checkers, and good old-fashioned grep?
Improve our observability stance – how can we see the emergent properties of the running system, let alone iterate on them? And, can we do so without spending all our lunch money on observability services and stacks?

Notably absent from this list: guardrails, specs, swarms, optimization, maximalism, orchestration. These aren’t even local maxima, they’re just shiny objects or shovels someone is trying to sell us along the way.

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:57:16 -0700

Exploring the Rich History of Funk and Soul Music: A Journey Through Rhythm and Emotion:

Funk and soul music aren’t just sounds; they’re vibrant threads woven into the fabric of musical history. Emerging from the rich cultural tapestry of African American communities in the 20th century, these genres have become a cornerstone of musical innovation. They blend gospel’s fervor, jazz’s complexity, rhythm and blues’ groove, and rock’s edge to create a sound that moves both the heart and the feet. Here, we’ll dive into their roots, evolution, and the enduring influence they wield, keeping audiences captivated across the globe.

I couldn’t have introduced the funk better myself.

Related: Maggot Brain is highly rated but still underrated. That album could stand against any of Stevie Wonder’s “classic period” albums.

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:49:14 -0700

🛬Back from Spain. Vermouth de grifo, Hieronymus Bosch and Matisse, old buildings, and public green spaces are pretty great.

📚Still at it with Power Broker and the first six Dune novels. Larry McMurtry essays are making me a little nostalgic for the idea of Texas (but not contemporary Texas itself). Contemplating adding the giant book of all the Montaigne essays to this list.😎

🎥 Hoppers was fun and feels like possibly a return to form for Pixar. Mandolorian and Grogu isn’t the best or worst Star Wars, but it is fun and hits all the expectations.

📺 Rooster is great if you’ve ever fancied becoming a sharp-witted author and visiting professor in New England. Widow’s Bay is great if ever you’ve wondered what being the mayor of an obscure but definitely cursed island in the northeast might look like.

⭐I should call out Hacks here. That is how you end a series, a comedy in particular. I will now enthusiastically recommend this show to everyone as The Ideal Comedy television series. If you haven’t, go watch it. Five seasons, no skips or lulls.

Mon, 25 May 2026 10:47:51 -0700

Fits on a floppy, great idea:

Software has lost its way. Apps that once shipped on a single floppy disk now demand gigabytes of your storage, minutes of your time, and far too much of your patience. We accepted this gradual bloat, but that’s not progress.

Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline. The floppy disk is the measuring stick: 1.44 MB. If the software that ran entire businesses could fit in that space, then a modern, focused, single-purpose tool certainly can.

Yep, these criteria make the good stuff:

Launches instantly. Faster startup, nothing unnecessary to load.

Does one thing well. Focused features, fewer bugs, software that lasts.

But, I disagree on some details:

Native only. No dependency bloat, every line of code earns its place.

I usually don’t feel like “native” is crucial these days. Whatever your definition of native is, it’s not a prerequisite for building great software. Even for desktop/mobile platform development using the vendor-intended language and frameworks, the downsides are…a lot, lately.

You can create software that is fast and focused with any language or stack if you’re careful. So, I might replace this one with something about attention to details and care for the craft.

Runs on older systems. Older devices deserve love too.

I love it when this happens. It’s easier to make it work outside native environments, too!

I think the applications are less important than the data. I’d change this one to something about the ability to store one’s own data on a floppy-sized local file instead of in an opaque cloud or a row in a SaaS database somewhere.

Maybe the big idea is that the application and data should fit on the floppy. 🤔

Sun, 24 May 2026 12:23:54 -0700

Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger is underrated. Twenty five years later, still no skips.

Wed, 20 May 2026 08:01:00 -0700

Previously in tech, the joke was that Microsoft’s org chart was a bunch of divisions in a Mexican standoff.

Fast-forward to now, instead of pointing guns at each other, every division at Microsoft is yoked to the other via KPIs and bonus allocations. None can maneuver freely enough to ship excellent software. They all have to prioritize “synergy” (Copilot everything!) and integration instead.

In retrospect, at least the drama of a standoff yielded the turnarounds of distributed systems and open source work in the 2010s.

Tue, 19 May 2026 18:26:58 -0700

Madrid–Barajas and Heathrow, day 10.

Mon, 18 May 2026 16:30:12 -0700

Madrid, day 9.

Thu, 14 May 2026 01:54:10 -0700

Toledo, day 8.

Tue, 12 May 2026 08:01:22 -0700

Toledo, day 7.

Mon, 11 May 2026 07:52:24 -0700

Madrid, day 6.