Friday, 6th February 2026
When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for my experiment. All of this gets summarized in an extensive set of notes, with links back to where each piece of information was found. Using these notes, codex wires the experiment and makes a bunch of hyperparameter decisions I couldn’t possibly make without much more effort.
— Karel D'Oosterlinck, I spent $10,000 to automate my research at OpenAI with Codex
An Update on Heroku. An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news.
Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features. We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers.
Based on context I'm guessing a "sustaining engineering model" (this definitely isn't a widely used industry term) means that they'll keep the lights on and that's it.
This is a very frustrating piece of corporate communication. "We want to be clear about what this means for customers" - then proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
Why are they doing this? Here's their explanation:
We’re focusing our product and engineering investments on areas where we can deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.
My blog is the only project I have left running on Heroku. I guess I'd better migrate it away (probably to Fly) before Salesforce lose interest completely.
Running Pydantic’s Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly
There’s a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone’s building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic’s latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python package. I got it working in WebAssembly, providing a sandbox-in-a-sandbox.
[... 854 words]I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.
[...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software shift from scarce to abundant. Compulsive behaviors around agent usage. Dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change. It's not fear necessarily just the cognitive overload from living in an inflection point.
— Tom Dale