April 19th, 2026

Articles of the week

This week I picked up these articles:

Learned/Notes

How to understand things

When I opened the article and saw how many likes it had I was like "Woah! I think I found a really good blog", and yep, it is really good. Here are a few points I want to share:

  • I learned a concept called directness from the book Ultralearning - Scott Young, this article touches on that, but I thought it'd be good to just explain it: Directness is when you learn to do the thing, by doing the thing, literally directly, or as close as you can.
  • The article also touches on how to learn things deeply; You have to force yourself, because it's hard to keep going when it gets difficult, and in order for you to be able to force yourself, it has to be important to you, otherwise you won't even bother.
  • My favorite part of the blog was that it encourages the reader by saying that smart individuals have traits that can be learned, and I totally agree. All kinds of smart people have some natural qualities such as recalling information easily, learning fast, being able to explain the concept with ease, but everyone has different levels of them. However, every single one of them has grit, a desire to go deep, genuine curiosity, and every single one of those can be learned/honed.

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

I use Claude at work via GH Copilot, as well as home via Claude Code. It was my favorite model, and I really like the company. However, I did notice that the quality dropped, and so did my friends. This postmortem goes into what happened. Not that anyone will care, but I canceled my Claude subscription, partly because of this, partly because it's expensive.

  • The article talks about three things that made Claude drop the quality of their responses, as well as some bugs. Each of them in my opinion could have been avoided. They could have tested more, rolled the changes to less users, incrementally. They could also be more vocal about what they're doing instead of silently changing the configurations for every single one of their users.
  • I definitely think they are trying to do the right things, every wrong thing that happened was because they were trying to reduce latency, or token usage. However, it still looks bad when they are worth so much money, yet they seem to be doing things carelessly, it looks like they have no quality controls in place.

High Amplitude Disagreeableness - Stay SasSy

  • This article's main point is good: There are folks who have the startup mindset, and big companies need them. Why? Because they care a lot about what they do, and they work hard. There is an easy way to spot them: Somebody who doesn't argue often, but when they do, they won't drop the argument.
  • The reason behind that first point, according to the author of the article, is because those type of devs care a lot, but they only go to the extreme of arguing when the other person is wrong, or at least they think so.

I personally agree with that point, do you?