Update for the week ending on Friday, Oct 2, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on “Why are Coding Agents so Dumb?”
• Add Nix result files to .gitignore

Refactoring English

Book

• Cut versions 1.0.7, 1.0.8, 1.0.9, and 1.0.10
• Ordered test prints of 1.0.8 and 1.0.10
• Wrote a Markdown-to-Asciidoc compiler and converted the whole book to Markdown
  • This is super cool, and I wish I’d thought of it earlier
  • It lets me write the book in Markdown the same way I write Hugo, and then a custom compiler converts it to Asciidoc
• Improved book build performance
• Added an automatic deploy job to excerpt Chapter 11 as a public sample on every commit to the main branch
• Fixed alignment on GOOD and BAD example callouts
• Aligned book indents along a two-code-space grid
• Aligned numbers on table-of-contents page
• Centralized AsciiDoc linters and tests
• Fixed incorrect double colon in PDF document metadata
• Added correct credit for the Beginner School illustration
• Deleted unnecessary page breaks
• Converted my invoice generator to Typst
  • Previously, it was a Python script that generated an HTML page, and I manually converted to PDF in the browser
  • Now, it generates a PDF invoice directly
• Increased the resolution on the cover image
  • This was neat thing AI did for me
  • The designer who did my cover downloaded an image from Unsplash at 1600px width, which he cropped and color-adjusted for my cover.
  • Lulu was complaining that the image was too low resolution for my cover
  • I found out that Unsplash had a higher-res version, and AI was able to reproduce the cover designer’s exact edits on the larger resolution by trying changes in a loop and matching them to the designer’s version.
• Improved the “python tutorial” Google screenshot
• Adjust H4 headings to be larger than body text
• Make sure footnotes are sequential in print version
• Consolidate font choices and measurements to a single, authoritative file
• Normalized quote characters since Markdown has sensible rules and Asciidoc does not
• Moved book credits to the copyright page

Website

• Prepared site for official launch
• Continued working on “Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging”
• Added alt text to all images
• Built bootstrap on a per-component basis
  • I’m still not 100% sure about this change and might go back. It cuts 80 KB out of the bootstrap bundle, but it complicates my build and clutters my Hugo build with Sass deprecation warnings.
• Darkened black fonts on the site to pure black
• Adjusted inline code color and height to match surrounding text
• Switched to light GitHub code theme for code blocks
• Unified site link colors

Feedback app

• Add support for recognizing Refactoring English user IDs instead of only Buttondown user IDs

Weekly Snippets

• Add my private forgejo repo
• Rate limit in response to HTTP 429 errors from forges
• Rewrite the new week script in Go
  • Originally, it was bash, then Python, and now Go, which I think is the more natural fit.

iso-converter

iso-converter is a hacky collection of Python scripts I use to rip DVDs and Blu-Rays for local streaming. I haven’t touched it in over a year, but I realized I had a local .iso on my NAS that I’d never converted to streamable videos.

• Adopted Nix and uv development infrastructure
• Let AI rewrite the CLI semantics into something sensible
  • I was constantly hacking on quick fixes by hardcoding stuff in source.

NixOS config

• Added a repo-level AGENTS.md
• Added jq to the standard AI sandbox environment
• Brought back the CUDA cache, as it’s responding again