Reid Burke

Marc Brooker:

Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less of a contributor to the overall speedup. Lowering the costs of the rest of the problem is work that remains to be done. It’s going to take a long time, because the real world is fully of sticky problems, surprising feedback loops, human stubbornness, and the occasional adversary.

There’s also going to be great value in ideas. Integration and translation are solved problems. Simple analysis, and small scale synthesis are too. But new ideas, real transformative new ideas, remain hard to come by. And, as the lever gets longer, more and more valuable.

Software’s first act is over. The second act won’t go like anybody expects, but I can bet that it’ll be more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.

The overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.

Amdahl’s law, Reddy, Martin (2011). API Design for C++. Burlington, Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. p. 210

About an hour ago, Opus 4.6 created VAPID Web Push notifications for a personal web app in 17 minutes while I was spending time with family. It also designed and created its app icon.

The hard part is everything else: Transformative new ideas. Taste and agency. And anything outside an automated feedback loop.

The easy part is converting business logic to code — that cost is quickly approaching zero.

Building my own vehicle repair system which creates PDF records of maintenance work I perform myself

It’s cool having all of this built in the background pic.twitter.com/TsIBV9uEAs

— Reid Burke (@reid) February 5, 2026

OpenClaw gives a glimpse of the future, but my bottleneck right now is time I can spend in front of a computer for a very good reason. I have yet to sit in front of my Mac long enough to bootstrap it, so much of its power goes unused.

Claude does a marginal job making ESPHome LVGL UI because it’s rare but even more so because it cannot yet see the outcome and enter a feedback loop. Same for low level Vite internals.

But when there’s a clear outcome and benchmark, amazing results are possible like building a C Compiler with a team of agents.

These barriers are coming down slowly which will produce more speedup.

It’s an incredible time to be a developer.

Let it rip.

No regrets subscribing to Claude Max. https://t.co/oMFMSYHIuW

— Reid Burke (@reid) February 2, 2026

Peter Steinberger:

RepoBar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening a browser. Pin the repos you care about and get a clear, glanceable dashboard for CI, releases, traffic, and activity right from the macOS menu bar.

Works with GitHub Enterprise. I’ll be trying this out when I’m back to work next year.

RepoBar signs in via browser OAuth and stores tokens securely in the macOS Keychain. It supports both GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise (HTTPS). No tokens are logged.

The Vite Team:

We’re excited to release the first beta of Vite 8. This release unifies the underlying toolchain and brings better consistent behaviors, alongside significant build performance improvements. Vite now uses Rolldown as its bundler, replacing the previous combination of esbuild and Rollup.

Rolldown supports the same plugin API as Rollup and Vite which keeps most existing plugins working.

These Rolldown-powered optimizations are not yet ready but they are very interesting:

• Raw AST transfer. Allow JavaScript plugins to access the Rust-produced AST with minimal overhead.
• Native MagicString transforms. Simple custom transforms with logic in JavaScript but computation in Rust.

The React Team:

On November 29th, Lachlan Davidson reported a security vulnerability in React that allows unauthenticated remote code execution by exploiting a flaw in how React decodes payloads sent to React Server Function endpoints.

Even if your app does not implement any React Server Function endpoints it may still be vulnerable if your app supports React Server Components.

This vulnerability was disclosed as CVE-2025-55182 and is rated CVSS 10.0.

The security fix was implemented in a pull request to patch FlightReplyServer. Upgrade now if you’re affected.

A fix was introduced in versions 19.0.1, 19.1.2, and 19.2.1. If you are using any of the above packages please upgrade to any of the fixed versions immediately.

If your app’s React code does not use a server, your app is not affected by this vulnerability. If your app does not use a framework, bundler, or bundler plugin that supports React Server Components, your app is not affected by this vulnerability.

Some React frameworks and bundlers depended on, had peer dependencies for, or included the vulnerable React packages. The following React frameworks & bundlers are affected: next, react-router, waku, @parcel/rsc, @vitejs/plugin-rsc, and rwsdk.