Wednesday, 23rd September 2026
SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering. I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and interesting things with and on top of coding agents.
Think of it as an agentic show-and-tell:
Compare notes with other builders and experimenters on things you’re trying, what you're learning, and what you haven’t figured out yet. We’re especially interested in work you haven’t discussed publicly, odd experiments, or unfinished projects that don’t have an obvious market.
Expect one flowing conversation with an informal show-and-tell. Sharing something you’re working on is encouraged but no presentation is required.
This isn't about product pitches, it's about much earlier explorations than that. This agentic AI stuff is weird! Let's celebrate and lean into that weirdness.
Prompt to Fable 5.1 Medium:
Build an artifact to explain shadow roots in CSS with interactive examples
Google released two new Gemini text-to-speech models today - gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts.
They come with a library of over 2,000 voices, plus the ability to create a custom voice with "just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have the rights to use".
I vibe coded this bring-your-own-key playground interface with GPT-6 Astra, taking advantage of the open CORS policy of the underlying Gemini API.
A notable feature of the API is that it makes it easy to define a full conversation between multiple characters, each with different voices and voice style instructions.
Here's a short demo clip of a conversation between two pelicans debating if they should move to the Pacifica Pier. I had Claude 4.5 Opus write the script and generate a URL to render it using the tool.
It took ~20 seconds to generate 1m 18s of audio using Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS (not the cheaper Flash-Lite), at a cost of 2.74 cents.
Comment
My comment on We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary — Hacker News
I've been wanting this from Cloudflare for years.
The classic problem here is if you do that thing where user agents that send "accept: text/html" get HTML, while user agents that don't get JSON or some other format.
This used to be impossible to deploy behind Cloudflare caching, because they ignored the Vary header on anything other than images - so you risked caching the JSON version and then serving it up to someone who was expecting HTML.
(Independent of the Cloudflare feature I ended up deciding never to use that pattern, because I prefer having URL that predictably returns HTML or JSON - I add a .json suffix to my apps to serve JSON instead.)
# 11:14 pm / http, cloudflare