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Michael Bleigh

@mbleigh.dev

Building the servers for serverless at Firebase. Web platform aficionado.

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Latest posts by Michael Bleigh @mbleigh.dev

Find someone who loves you as much as Gemini loves filling in `gemini-1.5-pro` as the model name for everything.

02.03.2026 16:47 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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AI slop It’s not slop because it was created by an AI. It’s slop because it’s slop. I just read the first two pages of a sci-fi novel on my Kindle. The author proudly proclaims that the 4…

This is the most resonant definition of slop I've seen: "It’s when we prioritize volume over impact."

Because this accurately captures the things that are slop but not AI (SEO farms, bad genre fiction, a whole ton of kid YouTube...).

01.03.2026 23:40 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Is it weird to say that coding with agents feels more...organic?

It feels more like tending a garden than building a house. You plant seeds (write specs), water them (poke it along), pull weeds (refactor messes).

It's a different skillset but very informed by existing knowledge.

28.02.2026 22:45 πŸ‘ 56 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 4
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Welcome to the age of the Slop Fork Open-source libraries with extensive test suites can now be autonomously cloned into competing implementations. What will it mean for open-source?

With Cloudflare forking Next.js and tldraw yoinking unit tests from their public repo, it seems like something significant is happening in open-source this week. We're entering the age of the Slop Fork.

26.02.2026 00:46 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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.agents.lib - agent guidance for libraries .agents.lib - agent guidance for libraries. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Who implements this today? Nobody. But if you're a library author, it couldn't hurt to start adding this. If you're an agent builder, it couldn't hurt to start detecting it. Let's make it easier to teach agents how to use open source!

20.02.2026 20:08 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

.agents.lib is a directory distributed with open source packages that contains guidance and configuration for common coding agent customizations (specifically AGENTS.md, skills, and MCP servers).

Rather than invent new distribution mechanisms, let's use package managers!

20.02.2026 20:08 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

If you're a library author, it's a pain to figure publish agent skills in a way that your users will actually see.

If you're a developer using libs, it's a pain to make sure you're using the best and latest agent guidance for them.

Let's solve it! I'm proposing .agents.lib

20.02.2026 20:08 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1

Engineers dunking on Claude Code's memory usage or perf are really telling on themselves.

Claude Code went from zero to $2.5B run rate business in a year. Every engineer should aspire to such colossal success and impact of their work. You can optimize later. Win first.

15.02.2026 22:50 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I use this prompt far more often than I'd like to admit:

"I've done a bunch of work without properly breaking it into small commits. Please look at the current state and do some incremental commits. Each commit must have tests passing."

That being said, it works pretty well!

14.02.2026 07:08 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Has there ever been a successful company that launched itself by buying an incredibly expensive domain name or a superbowl ad? Because all I can think of are abject failures and it's surprising the lesson doesn't get learned by either founders or their investors.

10.02.2026 00:29 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It feels like a glaring oversight that, despite inventing MCP, Anthropic did not work to incorporate either hooks or skills into MCP when it would obviously fit, help standardize, and solve a bunch of problems.

09.02.2026 17:51 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

For some reason I can't stand tab completion in AI coding. If I'm actually touching code these days, it's because I have specific stuff I want to do and I need language server autocompletions not LLM guessing.

01.02.2026 01:33 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Companies with eccentric bespoke build systems have shot themselves in the foot in the AI era since these types of problems in particular hamper the "write, check, fix" inner loop that agents need to successfully build software.

28.01.2026 01:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The difference between "too early" and "too late" in the AI era is ~2 months.

26.01.2026 23:07 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I'm not sure any TV series will ever have as ruinous of ending as Game of Thrones. This is largely because few shows will ever be as good as it was at its peak.

It took really special circumstances to be that good and then fumble that hard.

03.01.2026 05:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

TIL that XXL and 2XL are in fact not the same size and I'm still reeling.

30.12.2025 01:09 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The real way that the ultra-rich avoid paying their share of taxes is by being able to borrow cash at extremely low interest rates secured by illiquid assets, thus being able to realize the benefits of liquidity without triggering capital gains. Fix that, don't do wealth taxes.

29.12.2025 20:38 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

My contrarian awards season take is that 28 Years Later deserves to win "Best Original Song" for "Boots". It's grating and unpleasant but one of the most effective auditory cinematic experiences I've ever had. Truly makes my skin crawl.

Oh wait, but Sinners also deserves it...

09.12.2025 20:53 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The best outcome for AI is a no-clear-winner ecosystem where there are dozens of different agents forced to interoperate via standards like MCP.

Such a result would keep pressure and incentives towards open, hackable systems like Web 1.0 and less like app store walled gardens.

09.12.2025 01:30 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

The show so far is basically just extrapolating from the answers to those two questions, and it's just incredibly compelling.

It also subverts "mystery show" tropes by setting up and then immediately revealing the answer to questions instead of having them linger. So good.

05.12.2025 20:14 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Pluribus is maybe the best high-concept writing of all time. It takes an inherently captivating premise: "What if a hivemind took over nearly all of humanity overnight?" and layers on an incredible answer to the question of "And why don't they just kill the remaining outliers?"

05.12.2025 20:14 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I'm fine with people sending me an AI-generated report and saying "I had AI research X and there was some interesting stuff". It sets expectations that I should skim for interesting bits not read carefully.

If you want to communicate, though, send the prompt not the output.

01.12.2025 15:40 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

If you want to use AI to aide your writing do it by having the AI help you organize your thoughts into an outline or summarize a bunch of research. Have the AI critique your writing for brevity and clarity.

Writing is communication. Every word written should have intent.

01.12.2025 15:40 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

I dislike AI writing slop much more than other forms because there's no transformation of intent, only bloat.

Media gen: transform language to visuals
Code gen: transform language to behavior
Text gen: transform language into puffed-out language

It literally just wastes time.

01.12.2025 15:40 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Adding "It's not [just] X, it's Y" to my list of things to avoid in writing forever now.

30.11.2025 18:18 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

ML researchers creating SWE-Bench which only tests Python is like a hockey fan creating a hockey trivia benchmark and calling it Sports-Bench.

It's maddening that the only benchmark every lab universally hill-climbs on is so deceptively limited.

16.11.2025 16:48 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

If you are creating a tool that in any way allows image input, the single most important UX polish you can add is supporting pasted images. Do it yesterday.

11.11.2025 20:38 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

MCP is far from perfect but if you just think of it as "LLM-optimized self describing 'stuff' for agents" it's a great set of primitives.

I think the consumption of MCP by clients should be way more sophisticated than the current SoTA. Something I'm hoping to explore more soon.

08.11.2025 22:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Everyone hates on MCP because it adds a bunch of tokens to the context but like...that's not MCP's fault?

Agents need to think about progressive disclosure everywhere and there's no reason that can't include both MCP server and tool activation.

08.11.2025 22:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

It's funny how differently people use coding agents. I have never had to compact my history - I tend to break work up into tasks that can easily be completed without hitting context limits and spawn new threads frequently.

But this seems to be an important feature to many!

08.11.2025 21:04 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0