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

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  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

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

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."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  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

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

• Usesrcmnd.app

  KDE/Plasma

  Their words

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

  usesthis.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.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Terminal.app

  Their words

  I use Zsh in the fantastically minimal Terminal.app.

  usesthis.com