Pinhead Gunpowder is on their first tour in 35 years of being a band. This is them in NYC last week. Highly recommend if they are anywhere near your city.
…but I bet them playing West Side Highway was only for New York, sorry!
If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: https://blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/ai-disclosure
Prototype-plan-stack in a paragraph
Every team I've spoken with is struggling with whether and how to review AI-generated code. I wrote up the prototype-plan-stack pattern we've used at B12 to understand many thousand-line AI code contributions for the past few months, with an actual example: https://blog.marcua.net/2026/08/31/prototype-plan-stack
New blog post! In "Authorize, don't authenticate," I argue for the elimination of the login screen in applications that manage your personal data. You should be authorizing apps to access your data, not logging in for the privilege of handing it over!
The blog post talks to some of the principles of applications that leave you in control of your data, and includes a video of the "authorize an application to access a database" flow I built into the ayb database project. Since rolling it out, I've built a few little apps to manage my to-dos, track streaks, etc. It's been a blast!
https://blog.marcua.net/2026/07/31/authorize-dont-authenticate
Any data engineers in my network looking for a short-term contract setting up a Databricks-based ingestion/analysis pipeline? Would be for an academic lab studying the platform economy in collaboration w/ NYC gov. Happy to connect you!
I'm starting virtual office hours for anyone who is a new/soon-to-be professional in software engineering/product management/design. I'm excited to learn from and give my opinion on questions and experiences participants have in these interesting times for our field.
While my primary goal is to be helpful, my secondary goal is to learn. In speaking with peers who are in our second decade of professional software/product building, we realized we're far from the problems new entrants face, and I'm excited to hear about their experiences directly.
I'd appreciate it if you told me about any mailing lists that might be relevant to participants or if you shared directly!
Dear New York: Today is the day to work through the uncertainty and make some compromises. Go vote!
For designers to work outside a codebase, you have to keep wireframes and implementation in sync. To that end, I'm sharing Figmimic, a bookmarklet that copies any website or webapp into Figma in an editable state.
Try it: https://marcua.net/minitools/figmimic/
Blog post with more context: https://blog.marcua.net/2026/05/05/figmimic
Also our monorepo has been called `crowdsurfing` since 2015, so.
A fine use of CLAUDE.md: a coworker instructed their agent to use Ska bands as example constants in tests. If you're wondering, the examples are geographically spread across the US (not internationally) and the later waves of Ska. They will be on `main` soon.
Late last year, I gave a talk at Northeastern to students in a few software engineering classes about what's changing and what's staying the same for junior engineers in industry with the introduction of coding agents. Slides and notes here: https://blog.marcua.net/2026/04/08/ai-agent-revolution-junior-software-engineers
I've never built anything for a decade professionally, but here we are! https://blog.marcua.net/2026/03/12/b12-30
If you find yourself in Las Vegas, The Punk Rock Museum is a pretty good place to go!
It's like 50% nostalgia for whatever 1-2 decades of punk you liked, 50% stuff Fat Mike / NOFX liked or collected.
Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code"
We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come.
Lots of work and mentorship to do in this space!
https://blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/four-questions-agents-cant-answer
Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code"
We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come.
Lots of work and mentorship to do in this space!
https://blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/four-questions-agents-cant-answer
As an aside: I've never closely read the thinking and tool call transcripts of a Claude Code session before, and I found @simon 's https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts to be incredibly helpful in that. Screenshots in the blog post are courtesy of his tool!
First blog post of the year! In "Claude Code and core dumps" I share how a coding agent helped me resolve a production incident. The agent parsed core dumps to track down a decade-old bug: someone had set a radio stream as their RSS feed!
https://blog.marcua.net/2026/01/28/claude-code-and-core-dumps
While it's hard to know the counterfactual, I estimate the 2.5 hours it took to resolve this issue would have taken many more hours or days, and suspect that without the agent I might have duct taped a less specific solution to get to a fast-enough resolution.
I’m excited to share Review, a bookmarklet that makes it easier for you to code review AI coding agents. The bookmarklet turns all unresolved comments on a GitHub pull request into a Markdown-formatted text blob that you can paste into your coding agent of choice. https://marcua.net/minitools/review/
We're admitting PhD students! (Possible co-PIs include @Zittrain @ianarawjo if interests align.) Here's what we're excited about pursuing with new students:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CTgkYFeM0JWyDfBiEkPl0LiIC0F81F9XGDyyCAiHDBA/edit?usp=sharing
If you are interested in joining our lab, read through the call, ideally fill out the linked Google form, and definitely apply to Harvard SEAS (listing me as a faculty of interest) by December 15th, 2025!
Feel free to re-share! #HCI #phdPosition