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Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Omarchy

  Their words

  Omarchy is going to be the best place to get every major AI harness and tool, configured with minimal effort

  x.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  The arcane config files and error messages that kept Linux off the desktop are exactly what make it the right operating system for agents.

  Linux

  Their words

  Linux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

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  Customising an operating system by asking an agent replaces esoteric config syntax as the way customisation actually works.

  Their words

  Now you can have a quake style console in your operating system. Except with an infinitely patient agent to help you customize it instead of esoteric variable names and slash commands like in the 90s

  @tobi on Xx.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

  Their words

  String theory for the masses. This is how popular science books should be like: interesting, enchanting, inviting.

  rakhim.org

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Adding a config option so nobody breaks compounds into permutations no test suite can cover, because it is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.

  Their words

  If you count all the permutations, you can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.

  Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com

Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.

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  KEF LS LUXE

  Their words

  The LS LUXE offers something arguably more valuable for many listeners: extraordinary performance with almost none of the complexity that has traditionally accompanied high-end audio. It's elegant, beautifully engineered, wonderfully musical, and refreshingly easy to live with.

  stevehuffphoto.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

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  New laws often get enacted the way untested code is pushed to production: unread, poorly monitored, slow to show results, and hard to opt out of.

  Their words

  new laws are like code that is pushed live to production without even being read (let alone tested), often in the face of tremendous opposition, affecting millions of citizens, with minimal monitoring to ensure they’re producing the desired results, an extremely slow customer feedback cycle, and few ways to truly opt out.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  Transit investment should prioritize raising ridership on already well-used lines over creating minimal service where none exists.

  Their words

  it's more important to invest in trains that can get more riders than just the railfans; taking a line from 0% to 5% modal split is less important than taking it from 20% to 40%

  Prioritizing Rail Expansion in New Englandpedestrianobservations.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

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  Tailwind is a good way to build a site you're happy with, even without strong CSS skills of your own.

  CSS

  Their words, before

  I ended up making this site with Tailwind CSS, and it helped me make a site I felt pretty happy with my minimal CSS skills and just 2 evenings of work!

  Their words now

  I’m a lot better at CSS than I was when I started using Tailwind Ultimately Tailwind is limiting: if you want to do Weird Stuff in your CSS, it’s not always possible with Tailwind. Those limits can be extremely useful (a lot of this post is about me reimplementing some of Tailwind’s limits!) but at this point I’d like to be able to pick and choose.

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  Education cannot be done to a person: without at least a minimal act of will from the learner, no method, resource or reform works.

  Their words

  Education is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  Some theorems may only ever be provable by unintelligible case-by-case brute force; the four colour theorem still has no conceptually elegant proof.

  Their words

  I mean, some problems have been basically solved by pure brute force. The four color theorem is is a famous example. Um, we have still not found a conceptually elegant proof of this theorem.

  youtube.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

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  Direct communication with customers matters more than small, incremental product tweaks.

  Their words

  That communication with the customer is more important than minimal, gradual improvement.

  thebootstrappedfounder.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Claude Code

  Their words

  TL;DR: Ghostty + Claude Code + minimal tooling = maximum productivity.

  steipete.me

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.

  Their words

  Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.

  lg.substack.com

Brazilian software engineer, creator and maintainer of GoReleaser; works on Copilot CLI at GitHub. Writes about tooling and his setup at carlosbecker.com.

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  Moonlander Mk1

  Their words

  Moonlander Mk1 keyboard (firmware config)

  carlosbecker.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  An Elegant Puzzle

  Their words

  A long overdue read for engineering leads.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  Lua

  Their words

  A simple, elegant scripting language.

  worrydream.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

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  Science explains the Younger Dryas freeze by the Gulf Stream shutting down but never explains what shut it down, and a comet impact is the elegant answer.

  Their words

  But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.

  youtube.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Rapidly growing organizations need a developer environment that works well out of the box for new engineers

  Their words

  In a rapidly growing organization, it's much more important to have a developer environment that "just works" out of the gate, with minimal setup pain for new engineers.

  Stripe's monorepo developer environmentblog.nelhage.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  As models get better at following instructions, techniques like finetuning and constrained sampling for structured outputs will become less necessary

  Their words

  I suspect that in the future, it'll be easier to get models to output exactly what we need with minimal prompting, and these techniques will become less important.

  huyenchip.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  Cargo ships can be electrified with a cheap, heavy, low-performance battery, because carrying heavy things cheaply is the one thing ships are good at.

  energy

  Their words

  Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.

  Why Battery Powered Cargo Ships are Compellingaustinvernon.site

Indonesian software engineer, educator and engineering manager at Zero One Group; open-source enthusiast writing at ripandis.com.

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  Tailscale

  Their words

  Tailscale is a zero config VPN for building secure networks. I'm using this for connecting all my devices.

  ripandis.com

Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.

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  Occasionally suspending your trust in everyone and digging into one question as deeply as you can is the single most formative thing you can do for how you think.

  Their words

  Minimal-trust investigation is probably the single activity that's been most formative for the way I think.

  cold-takes.com

Technical educator, conference speaker and developer relations engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. Author of the Anubis bot filter and of over 400 articles at xeiaso.net.

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  suckless tools

  Their words

  Suckless offers an alternative to this continuous cycle of bloat and meaningless redesign. Suckless tools aim to keep things simple, minimal, usable and hackable by default.

  xeiaso.net

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  Proofs from the book

  Their words

  If you like clever proofs, this is the book for you. It's filled with some of the most elegant arguments in math, taken from combinatorics, geometry, graph theory, analysis, set theory, and more. I can't think of any other books with a higher density of "aha" moments.

  3blue1brown.com

President of the VideoLAN non-profit and one of the lead developers of the VLC media player; active on the project since 2005.

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  KDE/Plasma

  Their words

  My desktop is KDE/Plasma, tweaked to a minimal state, with very few widgets.

  usesthis.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

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  Software should unbloat over time: the longer it is around, the more elegant it should become.

  Their words

  I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone.

  Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com

Scottish GP and writer; author of Adventures in Human Being, Shapeshifters, Intensive Care and Recovery.

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  That the Best Physician is Also a Philosopher

  Their words

  There's another ancient text I could have mentioned: Galen's That the Best Physician is Also a Philosopher. It's essentially a call to arms for doctors to concentrate on the perfection of their clinical skills and to give up on ideas of attempts to get rich through their art. It shows all the ways in which he doesn't trust those doctors who use their talents for a gain other than the benefit of their patients. It is short and elegant.

  fivebooks.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

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  Simple, straightforward solutions can also be elegant, though not every elegant solution is straightforward.

  Their words

  Not every elegant solution is straightforward, but "stupid" ones are, per definition, and can also be elegant.

  Write Stupid Codethorstenball.com

Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.

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  Adium

  Their words

  I use Adium for chat, because you can make it v. minimal, but Google's crippling of XMPP has made less useful and I have to use Gchat as well.

  usesthis.com

Programmer, photographer and musician, best known for the Python Requests HTTP library and other Python tooling.

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  Terminal.app

  Their words

  I use Zsh in the fantastically minimal Terminal.app.

  usesthis.com

JavaScript programmer; creator of the jQuery library, author of Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, and long-time engineer at Khan Academy.

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  iTerm2

  Their words

  For development I use Chrome, vim (vim config), Textmate, and iTerm2.

  usesthis.com