Reid Burke

Apple:

Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year. Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs.

“Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we’re proud to significantly expand our footprint in Houston with the production of Mac mini starting later this year,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We began shipping advanced AI servers from Houston ahead of schedule, and we’re excited to accelerate that work even further.”

This expands the $500 billion U.S. spend commitment made one year ago and an additional $100 billion commitment in U.S. manufacturing last August for a total of $600 billion. This expands the Houston facility beyond manufacturing AI servers announced one year ago.

Apple supports more than 450,000 jobs with thousands of suppliers and partners across all 50 states — including significant expansions last year in Arizona, California, Iowa, Kentucky, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Utah.

Since announcing its $600 billion commitment to the U.S. last year, Apple and its American Manufacturing Program partners have already reached several milestones:

• Apple exceeded its target and sourced more than 20 billion U.S.-made chips from 24 factories across 12 states, including those of partners like TSMC, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments.

• GlobalWafers has begun production at its new $4 billion bare silicon wafer facility in Sherman, Texas. At Apple’s direction, wafers produced in Sherman will be used by Apple’s chip manufacturing partners in the U.S., including TSMC and Texas Instruments.

• Supported by Apple’s investment, Amkor broke ground on its new $7 billion semiconductor advanced packaging and test facility in Peoria, Arizona, where Apple will be the first and largest customer.

• Corning’s Harrodsburg, Kentucky, facility is now 100 percent dedicated to cover glass for iPhone and Apple Watch shipped globally, and by the end of this year, every new iPhone and Apple Watch will have cover glass made in the state.

• In 2026, Apple is on track to purchase well over 100 million advanced chips produced by TSMC at its Arizona facility — a significant increase from 2025.

• Apple opened its Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit, which is already supporting more than 130 small- and medium-sized American manufacturers with hands-on training in AI, automation, and smart manufacturing. The academy recently expanded with new virtual programming, giving businesses across the country on-demand access to the curriculum developed by Apple experts and Michigan State University faculty.

Matt Shumer:

The person who walks into a meeting and says “I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days” is going to be the most valuable person in the room. Not eventually. Right now. Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what’s possible. If you’re early enough, this is how you move up: by being the person who understands what’s coming and can show others how to navigate it.

Build the habit of adapting. This is maybe the most important one. The specific tools don’t matter as much as the muscle of learning new ones quickly. AI is going to keep changing, and fast. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won’t be the ones who mastered one tool. They’ll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself. Make a habit of experimenting. Try new things even when the current thing is working. Get comfortable being a beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable advantage that exists right now.

Here’s a simple commitment that will put you ahead of almost everyone: spend one hour a day experimenting with AI. Not passively reading about it. Using it. Every day, try to get it to do something new… something you haven’t tried before, something you’re not sure it can handle. Try a new tool. Give it a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for the next six months, you will understand what’s coming better than 99% of the people around you. That’s not an exaggeration. Almost nobody is doing this right now. The bar is on the floor.

Marc Brooker:

Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less of a contributor to the overall speedup. Lowering the costs of the rest of the problem is work that remains to be done. It’s going to take a long time, because the real world is fully of sticky problems, surprising feedback loops, human stubbornness, and the occasional adversary.

There’s also going to be great value in ideas. Integration and translation are solved problems. Simple analysis, and small scale synthesis are too. But new ideas, real transformative new ideas, remain hard to come by. And, as the lever gets longer, more and more valuable.

Software’s first act is over. The second act won’t go like anybody expects, but I can bet that it’ll be more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.

The overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.

Amdahl’s law, Reddy, Martin (2011). API Design for C++. Burlington, Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. p. 210

About an hour ago, Opus 4.6 created VAPID Web Push notifications for a personal web app in 17 minutes while I was spending time with family. It also designed and created its app icon.

The hard part is everything else: Transformative new ideas. Taste and agency. And anything outside an automated feedback loop.

The easy part is converting business logic to code — that cost is quickly approaching zero.

Building my own vehicle repair system which creates PDF records of maintenance work I perform myself

It’s cool having all of this built in the background pic.twitter.com/TsIBV9uEAs

— Reid Burke (@reid) February 5, 2026

OpenClaw gives a glimpse of the future, but my bottleneck right now is time I can spend in front of a computer for a very good reason. I have yet to sit in front of my Mac long enough to bootstrap it, so much of its power goes unused.

Claude does a marginal job making ESPHome LVGL UI because it’s rare but even more so because it cannot yet see the outcome and enter a feedback loop. Same for low level Vite internals.

But when there’s a clear outcome and benchmark, amazing results are possible like building a C Compiler with a team of agents.

These barriers are coming down slowly which will produce more speedup.

It’s an incredible time to be a developer.

Let it rip.

No regrets subscribing to Claude Max. https://t.co/oMFMSYHIuW

— Reid Burke (@reid) February 2, 2026

Peter Steinberger:

RepoBar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening a browser. Pin the repos you care about and get a clear, glanceable dashboard for CI, releases, traffic, and activity right from the macOS menu bar.

Works with GitHub Enterprise. I’ll be trying this out when I’m back to work next year.

RepoBar signs in via browser OAuth and stores tokens securely in the macOS Keychain. It supports both GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise (HTTPS). No tokens are logged.