Links and Notes - January 18th 2026

The dangers of working the bot

I came across this post on X

... my original love—building things, with my hands on the tools—was lost for almost a decade. Claude Code has brought back my fire. It feels like I have 50 (nearly) free super-genius employees living in my terminal. If I wake up in the middle of the night, there’s a 50% chance I say “fuck it” and go downstairs to mainline Claude Code at 4 a.m.

Sure this is one of those over bloated hypey jumpey "LOOK AT MY AI USAGE YOU LEFT BEHINDS!" kind of posts. But, that line about mainlining Claude Code at 4 AM strikes me as a soon to be real thing.

Two things are true.

There are indeed people with obsessive natures about getting things done.

The bottleneck of people having real lives often kept some impulses in check (unless you ran into those bosses who normalized calling people at 10 pm and barking orders at them. Urgh)

With Claude, Jules, or any of these always online long running web agents we have kind of lost the second one. And last night I experienced the dangers of this. In between two social functions at the same event, while there was a lull as guests moved about, I published a blog post and realized there was a bug in my plugin.

I didn't have to wait to fix it though. I just spun up a Jules session and asked for a fix.

In retrospect, this was a terrible step in the wrong direction. Just like a remote worker can log in at any time and keep working, one shouldn't do something just because they can do it.

The point is, with this "always on" AI mentality, and our penchant for giving orders and making things happen, there's a real danger that we forget to have any boundaries in our life. I know I did yesterday. I don't intend to let that happen again. No matter how productive it may seem.

Set your boundaries and times with your AI minions people.

Came across this too that further reinforces what I mean (while also recognizing that this bragging online is insufferable)

I’m starting to develop bad FOMO if my agents aren’t running 24x7. It feels like the opportunity cost is extreme. It’s like you have a team of 100 engineers just sitting there because you haven’t given them work to do. Not a great feeling actually. And I’m feeling this even after shipping a feature on a Saturday. Anyone else experiencing this?

Lord give my eyes more space to roll please.

Spry Fox goes independent again

After three years under the Netflix umbrella, Spry Fox is once again a fully independent studio

To make this work, we’re also making real sacrifices. All of us are taking large pay cuts. Daniel and I have reduced our salaries to $20,000/year, and we’ve spent our own cash to buy the studio back. And we are taking all the equity in the new company and giving the majority of it to the rest of the studio’s employees. In a world where executives tend to make 10x the salaries that employees do, and have 100x the equity, we want Spry Fox to be an example of something fairer and hopefully much better.

Yesterday I mentioned Hytale actually launching independently after being rescued back from Riot games. While spirit crossing from Spry Fox didn't actually need rescuing in that sense, it's nice to see yet another example of a studio being able to buy itself back and then proceed to do good.

Admittedly, while I love cozy grove, I just didn't end up wanting to play a game daily. I feel similarly about spirit crossing. That said, I will be whole heartedly supporting the game as it makes its way to the bigger world via steam and other platforms.

Anyone who loves cozy games – or who’s been craving a game that cares about community – might benefit from knowing about Spirit Crossing. And it would help us a lot.

We’re making a big bet: that a lot of people are hungry for a massively social game about self-expression, friendship and community, built with intense respect and affection for everyone who plays it. If this sounds like something you might be excited about, here’s how you can get involved:

Please give them a look and wishlist if it looks like something that works for you. I've played the game on mobile and no matter what, it's delightful.

The iPad mini is delightful

A bit late to the party (very?) but I got myself an iPad mini today. Over the past year I've slowly disconnected myself from short form media consumption. I almost never touch Instagram. I kicked the YouTube shorts habit. And I've controlled my threads consumption a lot. I definitely lost control of browsing X over the past few weeks because I was trying to understand the AI landscape better. But, my primary consumption is either newsletters or paid media via things like the economist (got a great deal), wired, 404media, and the examiner. The point is, long form media is taking up more and more of my consumption rather than endless slop scroll.

Reading all of this on the iPhone is a... painful process sometimes. I don't need that much screen space. The kindle is pretty close to good enough. But no phone can have a screen like that. Except for maybe foldables. And honestly, I was so close to buying a foldable but the price of these things are insane. Even if I opted to upgrade my iPhone 11 when their foldable launches, I don't think I could ever justify the price.

Turns out, the iPad mini is the closest to something that would fit all my needs. Small enough to be held in one hand. Can slip into the pockets of my shorts to quickly carry around. Perfect size for reading. Supports the pen for random sketching. Great size for tutorial videos.

The only problem was that I had to make a bet on this since no store had a sample unit for me to look at and get a feel for. I had to go by gut based on YouTube videos and just buy it before I held it for the first time. My relief was beyond description. I've had way too many regret purchases and I'm so darn happy that this was not just not a bad purchase, but it's actually a delight.

I don't know if they'll release the v8 this year. But if you are thinking of it, I can give no higher recommendation of it right now. It's got more than enough power, especially for a small form facto. It'll be supported for years to come and will probably get more real use than most larger tabs do normally. Start of the year and probably will be my highlight purchase of the year. Will definitely report in on that last statement though at some point 😁

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Posted on January 18 2026 by Adnan Issadeen