Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Can Coding Agents Relicense Open Source Through a ‘Clean Room’ Implementation of Code?
Simon Willison:
There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library.
chardetwas created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 andchardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:
Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!
Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened #327: No right to relicense this project.
A fascinating dispute, and the first public post from Pilgrim that I’ve seen in quite a while.
Donald Knuth on Claude Opus Solving a Computer Science Problem
Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.
Steve Lemay Hits Apple’s Leadership Page
‘npx workos’
My thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. npx workos is a CLI tool, replete with cool ASCII art, that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
The WorkOS agent then type-checks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix. See how it works for yourself.