Hello hello!

I'm no stranger to ambitious plans that fizzle out, but here we are—attempting a newsletter. Let's see if this one sticks.

This being the first in its (indefinite) series, I should probably introduce myself. I'm Patrick Prunty: web‑developer, wannabe artist, wannabe entrepreneur, and wannabe financially free kind of person. I like endurance sports, sunny weather (haha, I'm from Ireland), and a few beers on the weekend (…also from Ireland).

Software engineers—developers, tech‑bros, whatever you want to call us—take part in the often tortuous thing known as the daily stand‑up:

what did you yesterday → what are you going to do today → is there anything blocking you from doing your work → (“AGHH I NEED HELP!”).

I call them tortuous but really, they're great. They're the social glue that prompts collaboration, idea‑sharing and the odd weather joke. This newsletter will be my weekly stand‑up: side‑projects I'm tinkering with, articles that made me think, new software trends, and anything else that sparks joy.

Primarily I'm writing to future‑me—to reread and cringe, and/or smile, and/or discover something new about myself. But if anything here helps you, even better. My inbox is always open.

The Weekly Stand-Up Newsletter

Weekly insights on AI, web development, and the cultural shifts shaping our future.

Subscribe

* Unsubscribe anytime

• "I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it." Paul Graham's essay on how to write simply transformed my approach to content creation. Coming from an academic background where big words are used to facade intelligence, writing for the internet has been refreshingly different—I re‑read that piece before nearly every post.

• Thorsten Bell's post on How to Build an Agent ("or: The Emperor Has No Clothes") went viral this week on X and demonstrates how-to create a Cursor-like code-editing AI agent in under 300 lines of code. The article details how LLMs are fine-tuned and "eager" to use what is known as "tools" to help them do certain things by executing some code you have predefined. A "tool" can be code to read_file, edit_file, call_api, etc.

  • Aside: The subtitle "or: The Emperor Has No Clothes" riffs on Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 tale The Emperor's New Clothes, in which a vain ruler parades naked because everyone is too afraid to admit they see nothing until a child blurts out the truth.

• Inspired, I shipped magikarp —a plugin‑based agentic LLM framework in Go. It's early days, but I'm exploring a system where the agent can create tools on demand ("Could you convert this PNG to SVG?" → "Let me create a tool for that" → creates tool → runs tool → "Here you go, I've converted your PNG to SVG using a new png_to_svg tool). More to follow and contributions are welcome!

• I've historically face‑planted at salary negotiation time during interview processes. Reading Patrick McKenzie's classic "Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued" was a splash of cold water:

  "Your salary negotiation—which routinely takes less than five minutes—has an outsized influence on your compensation."

  "We overwhelmingly suck at it. We've turned sucking at it into a perverse badge of virtue."

  Game plan for next time:

  1. Apply only to jobs you actually want.

  2. In the first recruiter screen, never volunteer a number. Say:

     "I'm focused on whether the role and team are the right fit; we can discuss comp later." If pressed: "Let's start at $1 so we can keep talking." (Delivered with a smile.)

  3. Ace the interviews and prove you're the rockstar they need.

  4. Research the top of the range salaries with Glassdoor and Levels.fyi for the role you interviewing for, i.e "L2 Software Engineer". Aim for that—or higher, adjusted for inflation. That's not a ridiculous thing to ask for; the numbers on those sites are real.

  5. When HR asks, "Would that be a deal‑breaker?" answer:

     "Yes‑if we can't get closer on salary, I'll need to rethink."

     They've sunk time and budget into you; don't flinch. Always be a Yes‑If person, never a No person.

  6. Don't let fear push you to settle. Patrick McKenzie notes that recruiters who shave a few grand off your offer might get "a dinner at TGI Friday's," but if they land a high‑priced A‑player they look like heroes to their boss. By the time you're negotiating, the company has invested thousands in interviews—the worst that can happen is you end up with the original offer, because "negotiating never makes worthwhile offers worse". Rescinding an offer over a polite counter is very rare, especially for high performing candidates. They don't want to lose you.

  TL;DR: If you can outperform the average in your industry, grab the fruit on the highest branches.

• Ogryzek's music isn't my typical cup of tea but it makes for great background music during a workout or running session. As seen in many TikToks/Instagram Reels.

• I subscribed to X Premium this week and have started posting more regularly with moderate success. I've almost hit double digits for followers. Double digits as in one, zero. 10... This might take some time.

• Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town—now they just need a women's expansion pack for all the great moms out there.

• An Unsure Calculator for when your numbers come with uncertainty—useful for estimating living expenses, forecast investment returns, or sanity‑check any estimate that can't be nailed down to one exact value.

• A fabulously designed website and service. Heftwork makes Indie magazine printing painless and accessible for independent creators and small businesses.

• "But the most powerful tool on the web is still words. I wrote these words, and you're reading them: that's magical." Justin Jackson puts it beautifully. A picture tells a thousand words but words are still the glue that gives information its value.

• Wondering how I made the profile picture on my site? I ran a plain selfie through PINTR, a browser‑only tool by Javier Arce that converts photos into plotter‑style single‑line SVG/PNG drawings. Very cool.

• Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice explores fascinating territory in voice technology. Human speech relies on subtle pitch movements to encode additional meaning—compare a flat, downward‑gliding "Hmm ... I don't know." (↘ signals closure) with a curious, upward‑tilted "I have no idea, actually" (↗ invites the other person to continue). Linguists call the first a falling intonation, often used for certainty or disengagement, and the second a rising contour, which keeps the conversational floor open. Children learn these cues early as emotional sign‑posts, and English dialects even have hybrid rise‑fall tunes that mix both effects. Training AI to decode and reproduce such nuances is hard, but—as Sesame's demo shows—progress is real.

• I've chosen my big SaaS focus for the year—details soon. Stay tuned. The mission is huge.

• Joined the standing‑desk club. My posture already thanks me.

Thanks for reading! Be back next week (maybe).