Cool Things - March 4 25, 2026

Good grief Claude Code is bad at some tasks. (And/or I am bad at steering the ship.) So while I wait for a token reset…

From Laptop

• rileyhilliard/claude-essentials – More development related skills, etc. I’m pretty sure that writing Skills is a secret weapon in rolling out AI
• Skill/Prompt: Technical Debt Manager for PHP/Laravel in Claude Code – Another one.
• blamodex/laravel-ai-agents – see also ‘agents’
• superamped/ai-marketing-skills – boil all the water!
• coreyhaines31/marketingskills – Apparently there is a theme in my tabs this week
• AI slop – Seth reframes ‘slop’ rather well. In the marketing sense at least. I think with code its still needs a bit more refinement but it is close.
• Track Changes - The Origin Story of Canadian Music on the Internet (1990-2010) – New book.
• An open directory of reusable AI agent skills for Laravel and PHP. – for Laravel Boost.
• Automatic Noodle – another book; ‘A cozy near-future novella about a crew of leftover robots opening their very own noodle shop’. Sounds great.
• Good Job: Designing Interviews and Interviewing in Design – Probably less fun than Automatic Noodle, but likely more career-wise.

From Phone

• M&A Technical Due Diligence – Last year I tried to circulate a talk around technical due diligence but no one bit. A bunch of my points are listed here. It is framed to use their tool, but is good regardless.
• Block & Tackle: Job Cuts & the AI Narrative – Om’s teardown of the Block fiasco
• The Journey to a Safer Frontend: Why We Removed React.FC – I don’t know React or its patterns but this line, at the end, is great; ‘Sometimes, progress isn’t about adopting the newest tool — it’s about questioning the ones we’ve quietly accepted.’

(And we’re back to historical tabs – looks like we’re at 2022 now.)

• Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire – where there is a system that outputs money, the system will be gamed by someone.
• The Greatest Films of All Time – according to the BFI, at time of writing.
• How Spotify’s Wrapped campaign for 2022 came together – from a design perspective.
• Microservice API Patterns (MAP) – if you are going to use microservices, you should know the patterns. Most places I’mm pulled towards are better served by monoliths though.
• All the 9s in the World Won’t Save You from Taylor Swift – And no, you shouldn’t worry about Taylor Swift level events. Well, unless you are supposed to handle them…
• What are railroad switch heaters and why are they essential for winter operations? – As someone who lives with winter, this is important stuff.
• 31 Of The Worst Newspaper Headlines That Push The Limits Of Human Stupidity. – at least they are funny
• The Backwards Law – Echos true