Caleb Fenton spent last month writing 20,000 lines of code in a language he doesn’t know. He used AI agents to write it, and his verdict: it was easier than using the language he’d relied on for a decade.

That’s a sentence worth pondering.

Many developers have gravitated toward Python because it is forgiving. You can be loose, approximate and casual. Python mostly lets things slide and figures it out. That philosophy made sense when humans were doing the coding. Humans get frustrated. Humans lose patience. Humans quit and find a different approach when a tool keeps telling them they’re wrong.

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Something wasn’t right with my iOS app. I couldn’t pinpoint it. The screens worked, the features functioned, but the whole thing felt slightly off. Like a suit that fits everywhere except the shoulders.

So I did what any reasonable person does in 2026. I assembled a panel of AI judges.

I took screenshots of the current state, pulled up the original product spec and fed everything independently to three models: Claude AI (Sonnet 4.6), ChatGPT 5.3 and Google Gemini 3. Each got the same brief. Review the spec. Review the current design. Tell me what’s wrong and what you’d do differently.

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There is now a button. A literal one. Two ex-Apple engineers who worked on the Vision Pro have built a brushed-aluminium puck that looks like an iPod Shuffle, costs US$179, ships in December, and exists for one reason: you press it, and a chatbot answers.

It is called Button, it is in Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch, and Wired’s Boone Ashworth got the demo.

The founders are Chris Nolet and Ryan Burgoyne. The pitch has two pillars. Privacy: it only listens when you push it, unlike the always-on Friend pendant or the Bee. Speed: replies inside a second, unlike the Humane AI Pin, which took so long to answer it died of embarrassment.

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Saw this thread from @paoloanzn doing the rounds and it nails something I’ve been chewing on. vibecoder asks claude code to build a chat app, gets a working prototype in 20 minutes, immediately tweets “just killed slack and discord”… brother you don’t even know what a distributed system is. you don’t know what database replication means. you have no idea how websocket connections behave at scale or what happens when 50k people are online at once and someone’s message needs to show up in 200ms across 3 continents

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I couldn’t help it. I went back for a second screening of Project Hail Mary. It’s that good. This time I chose the biggest screen I could find short of IMAX (I had to settle for 24 metres wide - not the 32 metres of IMAX). Importantly the massive screen was matched with a superb sound system. And it made all the difference, because this film has one of the most remarkable scores I’ve heard in years.

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I’ve followed Ross Gittins now for 45 years as he’s delivered high quality common sense economics to the readers of The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age. Days after I turned 18 I was delighted to be able to lure him into a pub and buy him a beer. It was surreal. I was in my school uniform toasting my economics hero with alcohol. Anyway both saddened and relieved to hear of the health hell that Ross has been going through.

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Tey Bannerman tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. He couldn’t. Because the name now refers to at least 78 separate products and tools. There are Copilots inside Copilots. Copilots for other Copilots. A physical key on your keyboard for summoning them. And a tool for building more Copilots.

Visualisation by Tey Bannerman. Interactive version at teybannerman.com.

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Simon Willison nailed it. In a conversation with Lenny Rachitsky doing the rounds this week, he said using coding agents well takes every inch of his 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and by 11am he’s wiped out for the day. A 48-second clip has cleared 1.1 million views. That ratio tells you something.

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simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/…

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Forty-two dollars a week. That’s what Trump’s Iran adventure is costing the average Australian household, and most people don’t even realise it yet. John Naughton highlighted a neat calculation on his blog this week, drawing on methodology from the Financial Times. The IEA reported the UK consumed 4.4 million terajoules of oil and gas in 2024. Convert that to barrels, apply the roughly US$40 per barrel price increase since the Iran war kicked off, and British households are about £22 billion worse off.

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