Recently

2026-02-04

I want to write more! I like the format of Tom MacWright's Recently posts. So here's what I've been doing and thinking about recently, for the first month of 2026.

#Family

My wife and I just had our third child at the start of this year - our third son! The older boys are 5 and 3, and they are very proud to have a baby brother. I have to say, it's so lovely to have a baby! And family life with three kids has not been so much different from two so far. Maybe since my wife was rather sick during her pregnancy, so I'm used to entertaining the boys.

#Reading

I reread The Path to Power, the first Lyndon Johnson book by Robert Caro. It's an absolutely incredible book. The combination of LBJ's life being incredibly dramatic, and him working incredibly hard; unprecedented levels of research by Caro and his wife; and Caro's stellar writing. Chapters are thematic and have excellent narrative arcs, making for really great reading.

#Programming

The biggest shift in programming in the past year is the rise of agentic coding. Having an agent (a program using an LLM) write code for me is incredibly fun! I made a spelling game for my oldest in an hour that has given us hours of fun.

My oldest has almost learned to read. This morning I made a macOS game for him: It shows a random <5 letter word and you have to speak the word out loud. It was a great success! pic.twitter.com/xFbamJhJ33

— Vegard Stikbakke (@vegardstikbakke) January 6, 2026

For the past weeks I've switched from Claude Code by Anthropic to using the pi agent, which Armin Ronacher wrote nicely about here. Pros compared to Claude Code:

• It's minimal, in a good way.
• It doesn't ask for permission at all (yes you can do that with Claude Code, too).
• It's open source, extensible, and sessions can easily be shared.

#Watching

My wife and I got completely hooked on The Pitt, a medical drama series. We binged season 1 as fast as we could. It's a medical drama series which I was sure I was too high brow to like, but it was so fun. It did win five Emmys last year! One season spans one shift at the ICU, so it's real-time, which is a very neat format.

In the evenings when my wife is sleeping and I'm soothing the baby, I've watched the first two seasons of Veep. It's laugh out loud funny. Great characters, great dialogue. Turns out Jesse Armstrong of Succession fame is one of the writers. Succession is possibly the best and funniest TV series I've seen, so I'm not surprised!

#Work

Next week is my last at Dune, where I've worked for five years. When I joined I was the fourth person in the company, we're now more than 60. We raised a Series A, a Series B. I worked with so many incredibly kind and smart coworkers. It's been very fun, and I've learned a ton. But now it's time to try something new!