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Vibe Coding2026-07-21 · source-backed
In a July 20 essay Willison argues the barrier to reverse-engineering home devices and undocumented APIs was never technical, it was effort versus payoff, with maintenance burden making the initial investment feel risky. "Coding agents change that equation entirely. The effort to get a simple automation working has dropped, as has the cost of trying and failing to get it to work." That generalizes well past home automation. When code is cheap to produce, abandonment stops being a sunk cost, which unlocks an entire class of projects you previously killed at the maintenance-burden question. I've started three things this month I'd have talked myself out of a year ago.
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The number that reframes everything isn't ten. It's two thousand. OpenAI published "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science" on August 1, claiming an internal version of Astra produced new results on ten problems that had seen no progress on the main resul...
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