I’ve been accumulating browser tabs again, and Bench makes it easy to turn my browser upside down and shake out all the good stuff I’ve looked at recently. AI is like a dirt bike for the mind.

AI and code

• Y Combinator is going all-in on AI agents, making up nearly 50% of latest batch · 67 out of 144 startups are AI agent companies. That’s… a lot.

  • I didn’t actually read any of this, but rather spend ~$3 for Bench to do it all for me: Y Combinator Spring 2025 Batch: Comprehensive Market Analysis

• GitHub survey finds nearly all developers using AI coding tools · 97% of developers use AI tools but only 38% of US orgs encourage it. Classic corporate lag.

  • Again, this isn’t really me browsing. This is an eval for Bench: What Top Developers Want in 2025. Prompt here:

    Analyze the latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey, GitHub's State of the Octoverse, and other major developer research reports. Create a comprehensive report on 'What Top Developers Want in 2025' covering compensation expectations, preferred tech stacks, work-life balance priorities, and career development preferences.

• My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · Tired of AI skepticism, makes the case that modern agents can actually do useful things like interact with Git and run tools. The discourse is exhausting but this is a good counterpoint.

• Andrej Karpathy on UIs and AI collaboration · Products with rich UIs but no scripting are “ngmi” in the AI era. dobe is probably sweating.

• Sriram Krishnan’s LLM wishlist · Wants personal data always in context and automatic task agentification. Same, honestly.

• After court order, OpenAI is now preserving all ChatGPT user logs · Court ordered them to keep all logs, including “deleted” chats. Turns out delete doesn’t actually delete. Shocker.

• unpdf: PDF extraction and rendering across all JavaScript runtimes · Works everywhere, optimized for serverless. I needed this for making Bench documents render markdown for SSR.

Web rabbit holes

• A History of DHTML and Web Applications · Deep dive on BrainMatter, a 1999 web spreadsheet that only worked in IE. The more things change…
• Ryan Florence on iframes · “This time I’d like you to read up on iframes.” Cryptic but Ryan’s usually onto something.
• New wave of ‘pog’ mania crests over Hawaii (1993) · Kids in 1993 preferred cardboard milk caps over Nintendo because “everything is different every time.” There’s probably a lesson here about unpredictability vs. algorithmic content.
  • these were all part of generating History of Pogs with Bench.
• Adam Nash’s Apple transparency story · Teaser for a Steve Jobs story involving volleyball and transparency in 1997. Need the full story.

Hot takes

• Document databases as “sloppy software” · “Stinky software engineers pervert it with document DBs and other sloppy software.” Harsh but not wrong.
  • The quoted tweet is a cathedral
• I encourage all my competitors to take weekends off. More time for the rest of us to read links and build things.