Update for the week ending on Friday, Oct 9, 2026

mtlynch.io

Published “Why are Agent Harnesses so Dumb?”
- It got a decent response on Hacker News and Lobsters
Added notice about my book’s launch to the self-ads at the bottom
Removed extraneous social-sharing buttons from posts and notes
Stripped dead links to indiehackers.com
- Sadly, they threw away the old forum, and Internet Archive doesn’t have records of them because they were implemented in a weird client-side rendered custom app.

Officially launched the book and offered the print version for sale
Published Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging
- Went to #1 on Lobsters, /r/programming and peaked at #8 on Hacker News
Pitched to Oxide and Friends to see if they want to talk about writing on the blog again.

Bumped version to 1.0.10
Added “diff-against-version” script
- I wish I’d done this earlier
- It converts every page to PNG and does a visual diff againt a specified git reference
- It’s helpful to me in verifying exactly how a change affects rendering, as sometimes a change in the book rendering infrastructure could have unexpected effects
- It’s already saved me in one case where the rendering change accidentally added periods before footnotes
Fix alignment of title and subtitle on title page
Fixed an issue a reader reported with dark mode in iBooks
Added credit for the cover image in addition to cover image designer
Fixed more awkward page breaks between introductions and the example they were introducing.
Adjust color to match Lulu’s guidelines better
Added ligatures for body text
- My font supported them, but it turned out that Asiidoctor wasn’t taking advantage of them, so I had to hack it in.
Automatically calculate the print cover based on the page count
- Previously it was a manual process where I had to upload the content to Lulu, then adjust based on their generated cover template
Converted all quotation marks to straight, ASCII-style quotes
- Asciidoc needed curly quotes in certain cases, but since I converted to Markdown, I don’t need to anymore

Changed the regional pricing dropdown to include every country
- Too many people were emailing me saying that their country wasn’t listed and missed the note that it only includes countries with a PPP difference, which, admittedly, is not clear.
- One person emailed me angry because they thought I excluded their country for political reasons, when it was just that their country had a strong currency
- New behavior is that every country is listed, and if you click a country with no discount, it just tells you that there’s no discount.
Fixed the <base> tag in the page template
Adjusted the web example callouts to match the book’s PDF cards
- Before
- After
Canonicalized all links to blue instead of having a mix of colors
Added preview deploys with Surge
- They just recently added support for this without the requirement for delegating DNS to surge also

Track the admin user from the backend rather than in consuming apps
- It’s otherwise confusing if every consuming site has to track which user is admin when it’s always me.
Return email validation responses as JSON
- I realized I need both the user’s ID and their admin status
Fixed upload-prod-db script to work even if there’s a persistent disk.

Added a “Purchase Access” button for users who receive a link but don’t have access
Added support for new backend protocol for user information
Changed the download data script to archive all the book data first
- It was downloading book files one by one, which scaled poorly as we reached 15+ historical versions and like 30+ files per version.
- Now, it stores the files in a tar archive first and then does one SSH command to copy them locally rather than 1000+ separate SSH connections per file.
Improved diagnostics in Buttondown migration script
Gave the backend a friendly name instead of “Refactoring English backend” which was getting confusing in code

go-app-starter is my template project for all Go web apps

Converted my new-week script to Go
- It was originally bash, then I rewrote it in Python, and it’s finally in Go, which is the more natural language for querying many web services
- Having it in Go makes it easier to automate some of the gruntwork

Created a web app for my wife to print things
- She’s constantly running into issues where Ubuntu can’t connect to our home printer, and she has to email documents to me to print
- Now, she can print directly by visiting a web app and uploading a PDF
- Bonus: We can both easily print from phones too