Discussion

Remember the GitHub Arctic Code Vault? A veritable "strategic reserve" of open source code? I felt proud to be a part of this, but it feels almost absurd now, because what seems most likely to endure is less the code and more the weights, of which I contributed a small fraction, and my contribution isn't even legible. https://archiveprogram.github.com/

Maybe someone will just list every open source contributor on GitHub in 2022 and say "they contributed to the agentic brain," but it's far less satisfying.

Nolan Lawson

@nolan@toot.cafe replied · 9 hours ago

Maybe someone will just list every open source contributor on GitHub in 2022 and say "they contributed to the agentic brain," but it's far less satisfying.

Nolan Lawson

@nolan@toot.cafe replied · 9 hours ago

I mentioned this in a recent post, but the fact that I could easily, with one prompt, reproduce the kind of work that used to take me years to produce, is a bitter pill to swallow. My conclusion is that having working code is very low-value in 2026, and the bar for a worthwhile open source project just shot through the roof. https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/31/building-a-browser-api-in-one-shot/

Read the Tea Leaves

Building a browser API in one shot

TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of…

Nolan Lawson

@nolan@toot.cafe replied · 9 hours ago

I've said this a dozen times, but I get no satisfaction out of any of the things I've been saying lately. If anything, I feel like I'm just sounding the alarm.