Oleg Lebedev

Software/ML engineer, rustacean 🦀. Open-source, local-first, CRDT.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Finding myself going back to RSS/Atom feeds a lot more recently. There's a lot more higher quality longform and a lot less slop intended to provoke. Any product that happens to look a bit different today but that has fundamentally the same incentive structures will eventually converge to the same black hole at the center of gravity well.

We should bring back RSS - it's open, pervasive, hackable.
Download a client, e.g. NetNewsWire (or vibe code one)
Cold start: example of getting off the ground, here is a list of 92 RSS feeds of blogs that were most popular on HN in 2025:
https://t.co/dwAiIjlXet
Works great and you will lose a lot fewer brain cells.

I don't know, something has to change.

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

This is so true. I recently did exactly this, delivering complex beast writing in Rust around typesetting and text measurements. ~50k loc and docs. Not only that, I introduced fully new pattern how to build a core library in Rust and expose it via uniffi. This is fascinating.

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

“Is 90% of code going to be written by AI? I don’t know. What I do know is, that for me, on this project, the answer is already yes.” https://t.co/i47ktjbXs0

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

@burdiyan Have you tried @deno_land ? It looks great with its reasonable defaults, it supposed to “just work” IIC (I haven’t tried it, мопед не мой).

[Daniel Lemire @lemire]

Do large language models (AI) make you 3x faster or only 3% faster? The answer depends on the quality of the work you are producing.
If you need something like a stock photo but not much beyond that, AI can make you 10x faster.
If you need a picture taken at the right time of the right person, AI doesn’t help you much.
If you need a piece of software that an intern could have written, AI can do it 10x faster than the intern.
If you need a piece of software that only 10 engineers in the country can understand, AI doesn’t help you much.
The effect is predictable: finding work if your skill level is low becomes more difficult. However, if you are a highly skilled individual, you can eliminate much of the boilerplate work and focus on what matters. Thus, elite people are going to become even more productive.

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

The sweetest love letter to Nix I ever seen

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

@jessfraz Just wait until you use it for like 3 years and suddenly the line between reality and Nix just merges and for a brief moment you feel like you’ve reached some singularity moment

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.

My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance.

Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.

Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering.

AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers.

The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.

Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

Dang, this is soo true.

[prayingforexits 🏴‍☠️ @mrexits]

Jack Dorsey on the power of attention to detail

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

I have read it as a well written summary of a sci-fi novel. Pretty cool and intimidating https://t.co/r76ul67Pu4

[Johannes Schickling @schickling]

Syncing with an existing DB can really feel like hitting a WAL.

[Nervous Badger @glorphindale]

Понаберут сильных программистов, а спрашивают, как с умных.

[Santiago @svpino]

Quick reminder: I'm charging $1,000/hour to fix your vibe-coded mess.

[Niki “No Longer Here” Tonsky @nikitonsky]

Некоторые люди на улице так медленно ходят, как будто им не надо как можно быстрее прийти домой и как будто их не ждет там удобный диван

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

I constantly see this fight in interpreting “simplicity” among toolmakers.

The answer is rather simple: make something that works for both ends of the spectrums, and everywhere in the middle. A simple system that emerges complexity.

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

@schickling Unless you’re rendering PDF locally…

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

@GeoffreyHuntley @ChShersh Oh man, folks with alexithymia (like myself) would find this a pure gold. Thank you!

[localfirst.fm Podcast @localfirstfm]

Episode #21 is out.

Seph Gentle (@josephgentle) on Google Wave, eg-walker, rich text editing and thoughts on AI.

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand. https://t.co/bSWMUdT1A8

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

This

[NixOS Meme Lord @MemesOfNixOS]

When you nixified your dev shells, computers, home lab, deployments, and spouse.

[Oleg Lebedev @olebedev]

Same with Rust :(

[geoff @ 4th of july americana @GeoffreyHuntley]

tbh. claude is a lot of fun.

ask it to make a lpq/cups script printer
then ask it to do it in haskell instead of bash

then ask it to make it better
then ask it to make it better
then ask it to make it better

never stop asking it to be better