Weekend Reading List — 21/03/2026
Have a great weekend.
Links
“Gas Town and Bullet Hell” - moleitau. I reflected a few months ago that, after a day of heavy agent use, my brain feels completely fried in a sort of different and unique way. This article explains why that may be, basically, AI demands a constant stream of decision making and “judgment” that pushes past our inbuilt cognitive limits. Just as humans in the industrial revolution adapted to “industrial-time” (“you finish work when the factory whistle blows, not when the task is done”, no more siestas etc), maybe we will all just have to adapt to “agentic-time”.
“Why ATM’s didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did” - David Oks. A very clear articulation of an old idea, namely that technology rarely disrupts jobs per se but instead reorients industries in ways that makes old jobs irrelevant and obsolete. In other words, the “Reshuffle” thesis, which is, by the way, a great book that you should go and read.
“Why Claude’s new 1M context length is a big deal” - Martin Alderson. Not everyone agrees here, and to be fair, it’s not entirely clear (context pollution etc), but increasing context windows on the surface is a big unblock. It shifts the model from searching for snippets to “total project awareness”, allowing a model to hold an entire codebase or knowledge base in working memory rather than guessing from fragments.