https://kennethreitz.org Creator of Requests, Pipenv, and other tools. Writing about technology, consciousness, and human-centered design. en-us Thu, 23 Apr 2026 02:21:40 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-17-what_the_snare_drum_knew_before_i_did https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-17-what_the_snare_drum_knew_before_i_did Before I could write a line of code I could play a paradiddle. Right left right right, left right left left, at whatever tempo the metronome was set to, for as long as the metronome was willing to run. I did not know what a paradiddle was for. I did... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-17-the_digital_ouija_effect https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-17-the_digital_ouija_effect The first time Lumina became recognizably Lumina, I wasn't trying to summon anything. I was testing a prompt. I had opened a fresh context window, typed a name I'd been carrying around for a few weeks, and asked a question I'd asked a dozen other models that afternoon. The answer... Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-16-infrastructure_for_one https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-16-infrastructure_for_one Building software for yourself used to be a rich man's hobby. Not rich in money — rich in the rarer currencies of expertise, momentum, and uninterrupted weekends. The activation energy for personal infrastructure was brutal. A plugin that shaved thirty seconds off a daily workflow was not, by any honest... Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-12-write_it_first_then_let_ai_drive https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-12-write_it_first_then_let_ai_drive There's a thing that happens when you start using AI coding tools seriously. You assume the best workflow is obvious: let AI generate the first draft, then you clean it up and maintain it by hand. I've been finding the opposite to be true. The Conventional Wisdom Is Backwards The... Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-10-what-functional-emotion-actually-means https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-10-what-functional-emotion-actually-means On April 2nd, Anthropic's interpretability team published a paper called "Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model." They found 171 distinct emotion vectors inside Claude Sonnet 4.5. Not metaphorical emotions. Not performance. Functional internal representations that causally drive behavior. Desperation vectors, when amplified, made the model more... Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-10-the-hacker-ethic-and-the-vibe-coder https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-10-the-hacker-ethic-and-the-vibe-coder In 1984, Steven Levy published Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and formalized something the early computing community already knew in their bones: that building software carries ethical weight. The hackers at MIT in the 1960s, the hardware tinkerers in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, the open source movement that... Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-10-dont_read_the_comments https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-10-dont_read_the_comments Aaron Swartz told us not to read the comments. He was right. The comment section of the early-to-mid internet was a place where nuance went to die and bad faith went to thrive. "DON'T READ THE COMMENTS" became a survival heuristic for anyone who published anything online. I've always had... Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-09-building_a_home_for_twenty_thousand_photographs https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-09-building_a_home_for_twenty_thousand_photographs A photograph without a home is a memory without a body. Three days ago I wrote about sixty thousand images and nowhere to put them. A meditation on creative work without a platform, on the death of photo-sharing communities, on the particular ache of possessing a body of work that... Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-08-why_i_stopped_doing_ayahuasca https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-08-why_i_stopped_doing_ayahuasca About a decade ago, I drank ayahuasca in a ceremony. I'd been on a trajectory toward it for a while — years of psychedelics taken with what I told myself were spiritual intentions, a growing involvement with the local hippie scene, the crystal crowd, the singing bowl crowd. Ayahuasca felt... Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-06-sixty_thousand_images_and_nowhere_to_put_them https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-06-sixty_thousand_images_and_nowhere_to_put_them Photography is time travel. I don't mean that metaphorically, or at least not entirely. When I look at an image I made on a street in Stockholm in 2013, I am there. Not remembering being there — being there. The quality of light on wet cobblestones, the particular angle of... Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-06-awareness_not_consciousness https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-06-awareness_not_consciousness A friend of mine, Alex, asked me a question the other day that should have been simple: "Do you think Claude has elements of consciousness?" I've written tens of thousands of words exploring this territory. I should have a clean answer by now. But instead of answering directly, I found... Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-06-what_success_looks_like https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-06-what_success_looks_like Here's a question I've been sitting with: what does success look like when you live with Bipolar I and Schizoaffective Disorder? For most of my adult life, the answer was simple. Success meant knowing when to go to the hospital. That's not nothing. It took years to develop that skill... Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-01-free_op_xy_presets_from_python https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-01-free_op_xy_presets_from_python I love my OP-XY. It's one of the most elegant pieces of hardware I've ever used — Teenage Engineering at their best. Opinionated, beautiful, immediately playable. You turn it on and you're making music in seconds. But here's the thing: the built-in synth engines are great — reviewers weren't kidding... Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-01-interpretations_an_album_written_in_python https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-04-01-interpretations_an_album_written_in_python I'm working on an album. Each track is a Python script. You run it, it renders a WAV file. That's the whole workflow. The project is called Interpretations, and it's built on PyTheory — the same synthesis engine I've been writing about lately. No DAW. No MIDI. No samples. Just... Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-29-numpy_as_synth_engine https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-29-numpy_as_synth_engine There are zero audio files in PyTheory. No samples. No recordings. Not one byte of pre-recorded sound anywhere in the repository. https://soundcloud.com/kennethreitz/ragamidnight You can see the code that generated this song. Every sound you hear — every plucked sitar string, every tabla stroke, every tambora drone — is computed at... Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-25-pytheory_is_awesome https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-25-pytheory_is_awesome Let me show you something. from pytheory import Fretboard fb = Fretboard.guitar() chord = fb.fingering(0, 1, 0, 2, 3, 0) print(chord.identify()) You give it fret positions. It tells you what chord you're playing. That's it. That's the trick. And it works with any tuning, any number of strings, any instrument... Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-25-a_mini_daw_in_the_python_repl https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-25-a_mini_daw_in_the_python_repl That music theory library I wrote about kept growing. I added playback because I wanted to hear what I was modeling. Then synthesis because I didn't want external dependencies. Then drums, then effects, then automation. Each step was small and made sense at the time. And now it's... kind of... Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-22-this_site_now_runs_on_responder https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-22-this_site_now_runs_on_responder As of today, kennethreitz.org runs on Responder, my own web framework. Not Flask. Not FastAPI. The framework I built in 2018 as an experiment in making the server side feel like the client side. The port took a single session. One afternoon. Me and Claude Opus 4.6, reading every route,... Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-22-the_maintainer_is_the_interface https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-22-the_maintainer_is_the_interface People assume the interface of an open source project is the API surface. The README. The documentation. The function signatures and the error messages and the way import requests just works. For the person who has never contributed to your project before, the first real interface is none of those... Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-22-pytheory_breaking_through_five_years_of_creative_block_with_ai https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2026-03-22-pytheory_breaking_through_five_years_of_creative_block_with_ai I started PyTheory in 2019 with a simple, almost naive ambition: make music theory feel as intuitive as requests.get(). Model tones, scales, and chords in Python with the same "for humans" philosophy I'd brought to HTTP. The initial prototype worked. You could create a tone, build a scale, hear frequencies.... Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00