The next Field Notes newsletter is coming on Monday! Here’s the last one, in delayed web form.

I love a good gadget that isn’t just a black rectangle.

We debate whether AI will take our jobs, but what about the jobs that remain? Knowledge workers could end up simultaneously bored and overwhelmed – reduced to typing prompts and reviewing output, with the value of the process lost. mattcasmith.net/2026/02/01/ai-…

One of the understated benefits of writing is perspective. Events that would be quite unfortunate for most people are just new material for a writer.

This applies just as much to journaling as it does to public writing, btw. You can have an awful day and think: “This will make a hell of a journal entry to look back on in ten years.”

One of the things I hated about moving from MySpace to Facebook as it gained popularity was that every profile looked the same. Give me that CSS editor.

Whenever I hear Very Serious Businessmen make confident pronouncements about the future of AI, I remember what the very same people were saying in 2021 about the Metaverse and NFTs

Uploaded the latest Field Notes to the blog on Thursday. Normal article service will resume next Sunday, and I’ve got some great stuff jotted down for March’s newsletter – sign up to get it first. mattcasmith.net/2026/02/05/fie…

Only impulse control prevents me from living in a flat surrounded by tens of £200 mechanical keyboards. X shows me a new design I love on a daily basis.

I like the speedometer and the physical switches and buttons. I dislike the number of rounded rectangles.

I know that for whatever reason X claim they don’t have enough staff to maintain Dim mode, but did they have to push me to the blinding white Day mode? I’m sure everyone who used Dim would prefer Night.

AI discourse is in a weird place right now. As the tech continued to develop, I thought (perhaps naively) one of the pro- and anti- camps would fade away as its trajectory became clearer. Instead, they're both at fever pitch.

A startling number of the replies are from people aggrieved that ChatGPT-4o is no longer available.

It’s bad enough that Microsoft used an AI knockoff of somebody’s pre-existing diagram, but the lack of care is painful. Will be sure to “continvoucly morge” all future bug fixes. 👍 nvie.com/posts/15-years…

SF guy eating a delicious blueberry: in 18 months everything will be blueberries

I wish it was possible to hide the Read Along sidebar box on Spotify podcasts. It's so distracting when you have a podcast playing on a second screen.

This is the fabled "taste" everyone in tech is talking about right now.