We keep telling the French Jews to leave. It's not that easy. Had coffee with my French colleague. It could have been me, except for Dreyfus. It could have been me, if I hadn't broken my parents' heart and left anyway. A story. " I'm French. That is what I tell myself when the news come in, as if loyalty were still a kind of protection. My mother’s people have been in Alsace since the sixteen hundreds. We are cousins of Alfred Dreyfus— the name is still said in the family the way other people say the name of a grandfather who came home from the trenches. My father was an orphan of the Shoah. He arrived with nothing, the French police arrested and sent his parents to the Nazis, and stripped him of his citizenship for 12 years. But he decided France was worth loving anyway. He taught us the Republic was not perfect, but it was ours to cherish and make better. I believed him. I finished Sciences Po in the happy 2000s and walked out into Paris feeling that, for the first time, Jews were completely at home. I wanted the big corporate firms. I had the grades, but I do not work on Saturdays. In those years that was still a requirement, not a preference. So I built a private practice, not so bad. My husband is an engineer. Between us we pay the taxes, the school fees, the mortgage, vacations in France. In 2023 we went to Israel before the catastrophe. We were happy to be French Jews. We told ourselves we were the proof that it worked. Of course there were problems... but not like now. There is always the other tax, the one that never appears on any form. Kosher food costs more. The shops are fewer. Schools... The need to always stay a model citizen—never the one who asks for special treatment, never the one who makes the room uncomfortable, never the one who reminds anyone that the Republic’s universalism has always had exceptions. We paid the four hundred and fifty euros a month for each of the three children so they could go to the Jewish school, because the public system is no longer a place you send a child with our last name. I smiled at clients who made jokes about Jewish lawyers ethics but expected me to twist the laws for them as a matter of course. I stayed honest. I proved, year after year, that I belonged. Now many clients are "uncomfortable". Some say it is “because Palestine.” Others do not say anything; their partners simply will not sit across from a Jew. I watch the billing time like a hawk. Last month they sprayed my plaque in the street with a "Zionist w...re" and a "Palestine map." Outside, the city is still sweeping glass from the weekend. A synagogue in the nineteenth was ransacked. Groups warned m people not to go for afternoon prayers because the streets were not safe. I know the figures—more than thirteen hundred acts last year, half of every religious crime in the country, and we are less than one percent. I know friends are leaving. Nearly four thousand already this year. And I see the new arrivals to France. They do not arrive as model citizens. They do not hide their names or their calendars or their demands. They lay down their own rules in the neighborhoods, in the schools, in the streets, and the Republic that once asked me to prove I was French enough now asks nothing of them but taxes me extra to care for them. Their Djihadi Antisemitism is" an opinion", not as the old poison it is. I am still expected to be the quiet one, the integrated one, the one who pays the extra private guards when they overwhelm the police. If we go, my mother stays. 1/2

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i love writing. i never let agents write for me. whether it's docs, or tweets, or shitposts, or even prompts (okay maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents) there's a simple reason for that: i still strongly believe that writing is thinking. it's a skill i hope to never give up. it's also important to me that whatever i say is always authentic, mistakes and all. my favorite posts are the ones that i just full send without any editing i suspect it also helps with prompting. being able to clearly express what i want, and knowing the vocabulary i need to be able to direct my agents does seem to make for more effective usage of agents. in the same way that engineers have an advantage when we prompt agents to write code, because we are intimately familiar with the words that make up the discipline knowing the right word incantations to get an agent to produce a desired goal almost feels like spellcasting. as models get more capable, and that input box looks more and more like a magic box that can output anything, words become the interface between you and the genie there may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain-computer interfaces. but until then, i'm writing every word.

You're absolutely right! 😅️ Which is why I think that statements such as "there was slop before" are dangerous (not to mention misleading, because it's a false equivalence), and that the implication is that we shouldn't care about the code. Code is a part of the context. Arguably its biggest part. And if it becomes a bloated slop, it's more difficult for the agents to deal with it too. So yeah, we need to steer the agents to write good code, and part of that steering IMO shockingly involves reading some of it 🤷‍♂️️

i think your POV is potentially biased slightly by the fact that you have access to infinite tokens :) i would measure maintainability by how many tokens are needed to add a new feature or make a change the same product can be written in a clean codebase or a messy one. if the latter makes every future change 10x more expensive to make, that still matters, right?

it's very interesting how many replies i've gotten about maintainability and clean code being still important. i would argue that that is no longer true and we all need to update our priors on what Good Code really means in 2026. clean code has always come at a cost - performance. indirection and making code readable/understandable for a human is not free, it often comes at the cost of worse performance. we have historically been okay with this because of Moore's Law and the fact that most code is not on the hot path. these principles also came from a time where humans maintained code. it made sense to optimize for humans then, but it makes less sense now when agents are already writing all the code. we will in fact probably discover and come up with new principles: principles of agent friendly architecture (i plan to write more thoughts about this soon)