Wisereads Vol. 143 — Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, Learning on the Shop floor with Shopify's Lutke, and more
Last week, we shared a copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. This week, we're sharing a preview of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angel Down by Daniel Kraus.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
The Inference Shift
Prior to Cerebras's IPO, Stratechery's Ben Thompson argued the future of AI compute lies in memory, not faster chips. "Maybe the most profound implication of agents that act without humans in the loop, however, will be that Moore’s Law doesn’t matter, and that the way we get more compute is by realizing that the compute we have is already good enough."
Agentic Coding is a Trap
Developer Lars Faye worries that the growing disconnect between developers and AI-generated code is eroding skill and quality, and that better prompts won't fix it. "You can marvel at the most beautiful, unambiguous, perfectly structured prompt you've ever written, and the LLM can still output a hallucinated method because it is fundamentally a next-token-prediction engine, not a compiler. You cannot replace a deterministic system with a probabilistic one and expect zero ambiguity."
You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs
When AI speeds up coding without reducing maintenance costs, James Shore models how productivity gains disappear. "Once your agent’s juice is no longer worth the squeeze, you might decide to save your pennies and go back to coding the old way. Like a caveman. With your fingers. Ha! Joke’s on you! When you stop using the agent, all the productivity benefit goes away... but the added maintenance costs don’t!"
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How to Spend Money So It Actually Makes You Happier
Bestselling author Daniel Pink pushes back on the old adage "Money can't buy happiness." Turns out it can, if the spending satisfies any of five rules he's drawn from new research. "Is this a story or just a thing?... Things invite comparison. Experiences invite reflection."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Learning on the Shop floor
If Shopify employees want to work with the company's agent, River, they have to do it in a public channel. The result, says CEO Tobi Lütke, is a company-wide learning culture. "The risk is not that AI does the work. The risk is that AI does the work and we never learn from it. If every interaction with an agent happens in a private window, the only person who learns anything is the person at the keyboard. Everyone else is locked out of the apprenticeship."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
The Complete Guide To Building Skills For Claude
If there’s one Anthropic guide to check out, it might be this original brief on building skills: the folder-based system for teaching Claude repeatable workflows. "Instead of re-explaining your preferences, processes, and domain expertise in every conversation, skills let you teach Claude once and benefit every time."
Hand-picked book of the week
Angel Down
This year's Pulitzer winners were just announced, including Daniel Kraus's Angel Down, a genre-bending story of survival and the supernatural set in the battlefields of France during the Great War. The novel follows Private Cyril Bagger and his comrades on a mission in No Man's Land, told in a single sentence.
"and Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won’t ever end, just like the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,"
We're excited to share this award-winning preview with Wisereads readers. If it hooks your interest, you can purchase a copy wherever ebooks are sold.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Love letters to literature
Thee Book Club is a home for lovers of language, with essays on the transformative power of literature. From 12 Books That Will Make You Dangerously Well-Read: "A well-read person is a dangerous person. They’re harder to mislead, harder to impress, and harder to control. They understand what’s being said and what’s being hidden, their mind is alive, questioning weak ideas, and moving through life with a confidence that money can never buy."