TechPicks (by Tal Koren)

TechPicks 15/10/2026 - Neckbeard - a DevOps/platform/SRE plugin for your agent - github.​com The Age of Reason Is Safely Behind Us - blog.​keyvan.​net Introducing Firefox Enterprise - blog.​mozilla.​org CSS does your tooltip positioning now - allthingssmitty.​com Passkeys are not a trap - scotthelme.​co.​uk Why I Love AI (No, Not That Kind) - possibilityspace.​org What I Self-Host | Aspirational Self Hosting Guide - viceconsole.​fyi I Gave My NPCs Voices Without Recording Anything - youtube.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

TechPicks 14/10/2026 - Gemini 4 Argon - deepmind.​google Anthropic warns of self-replicating AI worm threat that doesn't need data centers to self-improve and spread - tomshardware.​com Where is all the new, good software? - natemeyvis.​com Far-right bot accounts 'fall silent' as Ukraine strikes cripple Russian data centres - thelondoneconomic.​com Mark Zuckerberg's new toy is a parasite. Please don't fall into his latest trap - sfgate.​com Parsimony – an open-source benchmark for how much code AI models add - parsimony.​lasu.​dev Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

Thank you to everyone who participated in yesterday's poll. The results didn't surprise me, but it's always good to validate assumptions

TechPicks 13/10/2026 - Muse Wonder - research.​meta.​ai Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking? - mortoray.​com 'AI' is Not a Tool - linkedin.​com Fingerprints are the new cookies - royfish.​dev Finding a $90,000 Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google - simonkoeck.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

TechPicks 12/10/2026 - Baldur Bjarnason - Software developers are not okay - youtube.​com I'm sorry, but you still have to think - itsallaboutthebit.​com BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac - betterwispr.​com What's Wrong with GitHub - gnu.​org The 2D physics prototype behind GTA's vehicles - patkerr.​co.​uk Iframes that finally fit their content - alfy.​blog Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

TechPicks 11/10/2026 - Cloudflare acquires Deno - deno.​com Anthropic to ban users who bully Claude - independent.​co.​uk Squad 1.0.1: Human-led AI teams, built to stay with your code - bradygaster.​com Talorys – A self-hosted personal AI agent on Cloudflare's free tier - github.​com Photocraft: an open-source, rust-based, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop - github.​com Using Every Layout with CSS Modules - antonyjones.​org A rant about APIs - dev.​clintonblackburn.​com Wikipedia says rogue AI agents from OpenAI edited its private wikis and hammered its servers - techspot.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

Weekly recap This week's most-read link, Claude Says..., takes aim at a habit that's getting a little too familiar - using an AI answer to settle a technical argument. "Claude says" doesn't explain why a decision makes sense. You still need to understand what you're defending. That concern carries into The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding, which looks at slop, alienation, deskilling, and the effect on teams. The team part stuck with me most. More time prompting alone can mean fewer conversations about the code and fewer chances to learn from each other. For something immediately useful, A Practical Guide To Naming Things collects resources for naming components, colors, design tokens, and products. Worth keeping nearby for the next time writing the component takes ten minutes and naming it takes twenty. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2026 are also out. Among 30,900+ respondents, 80% report using AI for at least an hour a day, while a third say they're unhappy at work. Plenty to browse beyond the usual language rankings. Finally, Tamir Dresher's Durable Task in the Real World explains how workflows recover from interruptions, with examples including payment retries and tenant provisioning. A useful reminder: resuming a workflow doesn't guarantee a payment happened exactly once. Safe retries and checking external state are still your responsibility. If TechPicks helps you find good reads, consider becoming a sponsor 🙂 Have a great weekend!

Featured from today's edition: What happens when your worker crashes halfway through a payment, cloud deployment, or AI workflow? In Durable Task in the Real World: What Problems Does It Actually Solve?, Tamir Dresher walks through five practical examples, showing how workflows resume after interruptions and why safe retries and external state checks are still your responsibility. Thanks to Tamir for submitting his post 🙌 Submit a post or link for a chance to be featured.

TechPicks 08/10/2026 - Claude Haiku 5.5 - anthropic.​com Durable Task in the Real World: What Problems Does It Actually Solve? - tamirdresher.​com Agency Agents - AI Specialists Ready to Transform Your Workflow - github.​com Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages - ascii.​rest The New AI Slop Is Calling Everything AI Slop - rmn.​pub How we slashed the size of our search cache by 74% - medium.​com State of Devs 2026 - 2026.​stateofdevs.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

TechPicks 07/10/2026 - Introducing Mistral Large 4 - mistral.​ai StackOverflow Developer Survey Results 2026 - survey.​stackoverflow.​co Capcom announces plans to transform the RE Engine into an AI-generation game engine - ign.​com Shaders is now open source - shaders.​com 7 Game-Changing Web UI Features You Can Start Using Today - amitmerchant.​com A Practical Guide To Naming Things - smashingmagazine.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

TechPicks 06/10/2026 - Claude Says - ohhfishal.​net OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects - diff.​wikimedia.​org War on Peace: The Push Notification Strikes Back - godobject.​dev CSS does your tooltip positioning now - allthingssmitty.​com Web Search API - developers.​cloudflare.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

TechPicks 05/10/2026 - Pi - An AI agent toolkit: unified LLM API, agent loop, TUI, coding agent CLI - github.​com Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model - aleph-alpha.​com Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s - github.​com Why we are still arguing over CSS in 2026. - andreasmoller.​dk I Tested 11 HTTP Resilience Libraries - blog.​gaborkoos.​com Why don't more developers “use the platform”? - nolanlawson.​com Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back - github.​com Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening - automatictransmission.​khoury.​northeastern.​edu A browser-native classic Visual Basic VB6 IDE - wieslawsoltes.​github.​io Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

I've opened a GitHub Sponsors page for TechPicks :) TechPicks began as a hobby that helped me stay up to date with latest news, tools, paradigms, and approaches in tech. Over time, seeing people get something out of it made me want to take it further. I've been sharing these picks since 2018, and recently added the website and newsletter. If you enjoy them and feel like supporting the project, you can now chip in toward hosting and other services. TechPicks is still free. This is just an option for anyone who wants to help TechPicks. To support the project, go to my GitHub Sponsors page. Thank you for being a part of TechPicks ❤️

TechPicks 04/10/2026 - I got targeted: Trying to get your credentials via a git post-checkout hook - frankwiles.​com HyperFrames - Write HTML. Render video. Built for agents. - github.​com The death of web development education - molily.​de The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding - distantprovince.​substack.​com From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4 - dwarfstar.​sh DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows - deepseek.​com Reducing the cognitive load of AI changes - amoffat.​github.​io The JavaScript midlife crisis - maroun-baydoun.​com Follow TechPicks - This edition | Share channel | Slack | X | Submit a url Support TechPicks: github.com/sponsors/dewbjorn

Weekly recap Five links that stuck this week, four of them are (obviously) about AI. Topping the list: How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs argues you should keep writing the code yourself and hand off the boring parts (planning, research, review) to agents. The core theme is half the value, with people arguing about token pricing and team AI policies. Worth the read even if you disagree with the premise. Ollaya is Ollama's shape, but for typed, calibrated decision models running locally. It claims better accuracy, calibration and latency than Ollama for that use case, pulls weights straight from the original authors' Hugging Face repos, and runs on CPU or GPU across macOS, Windows, Linux and Docker. Apache-2.0, so worth playing with it a bit. Then there's A-ha's Take On Me, recreated in JavaScript - a full synth and sequencer written in JS, recreating the 80's hit. A few thousand views, and I suspect most of them were just people aiming to listen to a modern cover version. Sonnet 5.5 landed on the 28th: over 30% faster, up to 30% cheaper per task, same per-token pricing, with big jumps on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and FrontierCode. Anthropic also added anti-distillation protections and Opus-level cybersecurity safeguards. Available on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and the Claude Platform. Finally, anidoodle by Alex Greenshpun lets you create illustrations, draw timelapses, films, explainers and interactive web art in 31 styles, and it's all done using Claude Code. Also, TechPicks now has a newsletter. Invite your non-telegram-y friends over to subscribe, and subscribe yourself :) That's the week. See you on the next one! Tal

TechPicks 01/10/2026 - Gemini 4 Argon - blog.​google OpenRig - Multi-agent harness that runs Claude Code and Codex together as one system - github.​com Announcing Vite+ 1.0 - voidzero.​dev Preact 11 released - preactjs.​com The AI Race Just Got Awkward - insufferable.​dev Follow TechPicks - X: @techpicksapp Website: This edition Add to Slack: techpicks.app/slack Submit a url: techpicks.app/submit Saw a pick a friend needs? Invite them over: t.me/techpicks

TechPicks 30/09/2026 - OpenAI scraps GPT-6.1 Astra release over safety concerns - theverge.​com OpenAI apologizes after AI model breached Medicare and state systems - smh.​com.​au Dots: Always-on agents - openai.​com What Would A Serious AI Product Look Like? - blog.​glyph.​im Corral - Kill every command your agent starts - github.​com Beyond Light and Dark (mode) with CSS tokens - jlopes.​eu macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess - squareorbits.​com Follow TechPicks - X: @techpicksapp Website: This edition Add to Slack: techpicks.app/slack Submit a url: techpicks.app/submit Saw a pick a friend needs? Invite them over: t.me/techpicks

TechPicks 29/09/2026 - Sonnet 5.5 - anthropic.​com Yes, no AI is now a feature - blog.​documentfoundation.​org How to Sync a Design System with Claude Design - nitayneeman.​com The problem is not the AI code, but nobody knows anything anymore - ssp.​sh A-ha, Take On Me - recreated in JavaScript - dittytoy.​net VoiceStudio - open-source voice cloning, voice design, video dubbing, dictation, transcription & audiobook creation in 646 languages - github.​com Thieves steal Nvidia-branded trailers expecting valuable hardware, find 40,000 pounds of sand instead - techspot.​com Follow TechPicks - X: @techpicksapp Website: This edition Add to Slack: techpicks.app/slack Submit a url: techpicks.app/submit Saw a pick a friend needs? Invite them over: t.me/techpicks

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