Winter Garden

I’m Robin Sloan & this is my pop-up newsletter of early 2026: an attempt to inject what I believe is a useful per­spec­tive into the dis­cus­sion around AI: its prop­er­ties & potential.

I have been working with these tools since 2016. We are coming up on the tenth anniver­sary of my intro­duc­tion of a text editor plugin that pro­vided an early — maybe the first? — preview of the LLM-powered tab com­ple­tion now ubiq­ui­tous in IDEs.

This pop-up newsletter will run for six edi­tions & then I will delete the email list.

My friend & fellow trav­eler Craig Mod is the clear model here. The vibe is: active interest with reli­able “proof of life”; respect for everyone’s time & attention; & pub­lishing some­thing because you want to — because you feel absolutely compelled — not because you built a media machine you can no longer control.

Views of Polar Regions, ca. 1840, Charles Hamilton Smith
Views of Polar Regions, ca. 1840, Charles Hamilton Smith

Here’s the archive:

  1. AGI is here (and I feel fine)

  2. Flood fill vs. the magic circle

  3. Where is it like to be a lan­guage model?

  4. TK

  5. TK

  6. TK

Of course there’s a colophon!