May 10th, 2026

Articles of the week

This week I picked up these articles:

Learned/Notes

Be the idiot

I have a skill that I use to give me an estimate, summary and a read or don't read for articles. It told me to skim the article, I'm glad I didn't because I loved it. I have an upcoming post on this AI skill I've been using for almost 6 months, the things it's helped me with, and how I continue to improve it, stay tuned!

This article talks about how being an idiot is a good thing and it's something that perhaps the industry needs more of. Being an idiot, according to Luminouismen is just asking "dumb" (but the right) questions when others won't.

Some good points: (go read it though, it's that good!)

  • We can learn communication from the military, who have been optimizing for people to not die for miscommunication while doing operations. Three things in the example that I noticed the communication had:
    1. The message itself.
    2. Confirmation of the message.
    3. End of communication.

Too many times I've stopped talking to someone, thinking they understand what I said, or me thinking I understand what they said/wanted, only to realize that they/I were/was wrong.

  • He showcases two effective communication principles:
    • Duplication of information (Be extremely clear and don't allow ambiguity)
    • Additional information (I immediately thought of configuration files my team has where we could do this!).
  • He has like a list of good questions to ask to provide more clarity:
    • What happens when it fails?
    • How do we know about it?
    • What does done mean?
    • Can you show me an example

I turned my calendar into an AI-powered time tracking system

I would recommend anyone who cares about their time and has tracked or is tracking it to read this article, especially if you haven't used AI with the Google calendar MCP (like myself). Fran Soto would track their time manually, which he says introduces a lot of friction. As someone who has tried that and dropped it, I agree, the amount of time and effort it takes to open the app, manually add or edit something, it's too much.

He created an AI skill that in a matter of seconds does what would take him a couple minutes, and he can do it in natural language now! He seems to have a smart system in place to track his time across his personal and professional life. I didn't have time today to make it myself, but I already have a slot for next weekend to do it, shouldn't take too long and I can see the benefits of having it already. Imagine just typing in your terminal: "Hey, I just got to work, going to start working on a task", and then 50 minutes later: "Hey, I just finished working on that task, now I'm going to be joining a meeting". The AI agent will go to your calendar and create those events for you, with whatever tags, description and info you want, all of this while you continue your work.

Formatting an entire 25 million line codebase overnight: The rubyfmt story

I think this is the first article I ever read from the Stripe team, the first time seeing their website and holy shit, it's such a cool looking site!

I've noticed that a lot of tools have been written in Rust when speed matters, which made me think it would be cool to pick up at some point!

The blog goes into the problem Ruby had, which is that there was no formatter for it, only a linter. Fable Tales saw the need for a formatter so he started working on one, he then joined Stripe and the project wasn't ready, Stripe helped fund it and put a couple engineers to work on it full time. The result was incredible, formatting millions of lines of code in what they say is the biggest Ruby codebase in the world. This requires excellence, amazing job by Fable and the Stripe team.