Latest posts
- The Center Has a BiasApr 11, 2026Armin Ronacher
Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has been more polarising than AI coding agents. What I keep noticing is that a lot of the criticism directed at these tools is perfectly legitimate, but it often come
- Mario and EarendilApr 08, 2026Armin Ronacher
Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil. First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post. This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board. Last year chan
- Absurd In ProductionApr 04, 2026Armin Ronacher
About five months ago I wrote about Absurd, a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service, a compiler plugin, or an entire runtime to get durable workflows. You need a SQL file and a thin SDK. Since then we’ve been running it in production, and I figured it’s worth s
- Some Things Just Take TimeMar 20, 2026Armin Ronacher
Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that. Because some things just take time
- AI And The Ship of TheseusMar 05, 2026Armin Ronacher
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same, but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was by going via the test suite. Something
- The Final BottleneckFeb 13, 2026Armin Ronacher
Historically, writing code was slower than reviewing code. It might not have felt that way, because code reviews sat in queues until someone got around to picking it up. But if you compare the actual acts themselves, creation was usually the more expensive part. In teams where people both wrote and reviewed code, it never felt like “we should probably program slower.” So when more and more peopl
- A Language For AgentsFeb 09, 2026Armin Ronacher
Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-existing code would cement existing languages in place but now I’m starting to think the opposite is true. Here I want to outline my thinking on why we are going to see more new programming languages and
- Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClawJan 31, 2026Armin Ronacher
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you will have noticed this week that a project of my friend Peter went viral on the internet. It went by many names. The most recent one is OpenClaw but in the news you might have encountered it as ClawdBot or MoltBot depending on when you read about it. It is an agent connected to a communication channel of your choice that just runs code. What you might
- Colin and EarendilJan 27, 2026Armin Ronacher
Regular readers of this blog will know that I started a new company. We have put out just a tiny bit of information today, and some keen folks have discovered and reached out by email with many thoughtful responses. It has been delightful. Colin and I met here, in Vienna. We started sharing coffees, ideas, and lunches, and soon found shared values despite coming from different backgrounds and d
- Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?Jan 18, 2026Armin Ronacher
You can use Polecats without the Refinery and even without the Witness or Deacon. Just tell the Mayor to shut down the rig and sling work to the polecats with the message that they are to merge to main directly. Or the polecats can submit MRs and then the Mayor can merge them manually. It’s really up to you. The Refineries are useful if you have done a LOT of up-front specification work, and you h