Laird Stewart

I publish a monthly email newsletter with personal updates and interesting things I read or learned that month. The latter is archived below. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, email me.

January 2026 Roundup

Fewer questions were asked last month on Stack Overflow than during its first month of operation.



Stack Exchange, Anonymous Post

Every contribution to Claude Code in December by its creator was via Claude Code.

A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day.

Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5. Claude consistently runs for minutes, hours, and days at a time (using Stop hooks)

X.com, Boris Cherny

India received $140B in personal remittances in 2024. That's more than the profit of their largest 70 publicly traded companies combined ($120B). The U.S. accounts for roughly 30%.

Personal remittances, received (current US$) - India, World Bank
List of largest companies in India, Wikipedia
Remittances to India, Wikipedia

A good blog post on software work estimation

The common view is that a manager proposes some technical project, the team gets together to figure out how long it would take to build, and then the manager makes staffing and planning decisions with that information. In fact, it’s the reverse: a manager comes to the team with an estimate already in hand, and then the team must figure out what kind of technical project might be possible within that estimate.

How I estimate work as a staff software engineer, Sean Goedecke

Central Stockholm renters face a 20-year wait due to rent control

If you’re looking for a standard rental contract in Stockholm, you’ll have to be prepared to wait. Apartments are allocated through a waitlist, and in 2025, new tenants in the city center had waited an average of 21 years. Rents are regulated, and can be far below half of market rents at the most attractive addresses.

the up•date, Stefan Schubert

Gemini's performance on the "Needle in a Haystack" test blows competition out of the water.

They've got some secret sauce, maybe sub-quadratic attention, maybe RL improvements. Unfortunately, we won't know anytime soon. google seemingly solved efficient attention, Celeste

A 2014 interview with Walter Isaacson at Khan Academy

I'm a fan of Isaacson's books, but had never heard him speak. He's quite charismatic. He thinks one driver of creativity which we've lost is the connection between the arts/humanities and science/engineering (the classic Steve Jobs mantra). Similarly, he thinks that cities which lack creative types and a culture of humanities will fail to produce innovation in the long run. He was more bullish on SF than Palo Alto/Mountain View. Granted, this was 10 years ago. SF is back on the rise, but confounded by AI. Suggest starting at 24:00

Yeah, and I'm trying to say if you look at Ben Franklin, the most important scientist of his period. Even though you probably don't... You know, we think of him as a doddering dude playing his kite in the rain. Single fluid theory of electricity that comes from his electricity experiments is up there in that century, you know, with Newton, even. I mean, he's the best experimental scientist of his time. Jefferson would have thought you were a Philistine if you didn't study botany and everything else. Nowadays, people like a Ben Franklin don't do electricity experiments.

Walter Isaacson - President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, Khan Academy