Alex
@alexleighton.com
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alexleighton.com
I didn't have to wait long to see more investment in the automatic context management area — Claude will cleanup old tool calls now.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
New Claude Context Management
Automatic deletion of tool calls.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Looking at Justin Pombrio's 'Imagining Language Without Booleans' through a monad lens — he defines return and sequence, but not bind.

I'm sure there are other interesting observations down this path for those with more category theory under their belt.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Re: Imagining a Language Without Booleans
Thinking about how Monads fit into the article's picture.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: Easier Said Than Done by Pool Kids.

Melodic rock, combining some influences in ways I can feel but can't figure out who.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: Easier Said Than Done
By Pool Kids
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Burned through Katherine Addison's entire Chronicles of Osreth series on vacation. Started with The Goblin Emperor and couldn't stop — political intrigue meets murder mysteries!

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Reading The Chronicles of Osreth
A review of four novels.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: Purity Ring by Purity Ring

Their signature electronic pop sound, though I think this album isn't as consistently on-theme as previous albums.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: Purity Ring
By Purity Ring
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Some interesting thoughts on context management from Thomas Ptacek, including giving agents access to their own context to "lobotomize themselves like Eternal Sunshine".

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Self-Editing Coding Agents
Context surgery as a tool.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: VAPOR DRIVE by arcologies

Chill, atmospheric Drum & Bass / Jungle.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: VAPOR DRIVE
By arcologies
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
My collection of advice on asking technical questions effectively:

- No Hello
- Don't ask to ask, just ask
- Avoid the XY Problem
- Stack Overflow's guidelines
- "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Just Asking Questions
Asking questions that get answered.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: Neo Brut by BROKINPAPER

More dark and angry electronica from BROKINPAPER.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: Neo Brut
By BROKINPAPER
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
"Redis is faster than postgres when it comes to caching, there's no doubt about it... Well, I think I'll still use postgres."

Maintaining two dependencies multiplies probability of failure and increases complexity, all for performance most apps don't actually need.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Postgres v Redis
Software engineering tradeoffs.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
"Corporations have identified the monetizable parts of both curatorial and transformational fandom and made them all consumptive fandom. Fans are encouraged to want what’s been approved by the creator and to back up that approval by buying more and more."

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Quote: The Decade Fandom Went Corporate
Harnessing fandom to feed consumption.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: the theory of you by ivri

Rock — a little grimey, meandering, and whimsical.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: the theory of you
By ivri
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Interesting concurrence between Tigerbeetle and Zed blog posts: both want to capture code conversations alongside the code. Tigerbeetle wants git/text editors for reviews, Zed thinks git is insufficient and is building a new VCS.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Capturing Code Conversations
Concurrence between two blog posts.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Watched "The Death of the IDE?" discussion hosted by Zed — interesting thoughts on future tooling. Steve's vision of engineers directing coding agents using many small programs connects to the Unix philosophy with agents as the ideal glue between programs.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Maybe Death of the IDE
A discussion on tooling and unix.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Re: Armin's post on MCP and context rot. I've been thinking about designing programming languages specifically for language models — what if we embraced DSLs with layered abstractions to reduce context limitations?

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Re: Your MCP Doesn’t Need 30 Tools: It Needs Code
Thoughts related to Armin's post.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Mitchell Hashimoto is extracting the terminal engine from Ghostty into libghostty - an embeddable library for terminal emulation.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Libghostty
Terminal emulation in a library.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
The coding agent free lunch is over. Both Cursor and Zed switched from flat pricing to usage-based models — turns out abstracting LLM token costs into subscriptions wasn't economically viable.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Coding Agent Pricing
Cursor and Zed switch to usage-based pricing.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Finally built image support for my site! 2 months of work constructing a system to generate multiple formats (JPEG, WEBP, AVIF) at multiple resolutions, and store them.

First image: my dog Ki at the dog park 🐕

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Changelog: Images!
This site now supports posting images.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: Exinfinite by Venera

Dark, industrial, atmospheric at times.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: Exinfinite
By Venera
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Re Trump H-1B Order: Callous cruelty.

It's already hard enough to get an H-1B visa, and it's a lot of work to leave your life behind you. They are at the mercy of whichever megacorp sponsored them — if they get fired they are forced to leave the country.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Amazon H-1B Memo
H-1B workers face impossible choices.
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Listening To: Bloom by RÜFÜS DU SOL.

Electronic dance music, house adjacent.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Listening To: Bloom
By RÜFÜS DU SOL
alexleighton.com
alexleighton.com
Seattle Police Department is blatantly violating Washington's Public Disclosure Act by "grouping" journalist Erica C. Barnett's records requests, ignoring their own settlement agreement with the Seattle Times.

alexleighton.com/posts/2025-0...
Seattle Police Records Requests
How they dodge Washington's public disclosure act.
alexleighton.com