Spellchecking did not start as a subtle, always-on feature. The early spell checkers were basically batch programs: take a document, compare tokens against a dictionary, print a list of suspicious words On PCs in the 1980s, spellchecking becomes more mainstream, but it is still mostly a deliberate step. Many systems either shipped as separate utilities or ran in a proofing mode inside word processors that you had to run yourself. What is easy to miss is why it changed. I think that a major leap was not just better detection of mistakes but the innovations to make spell checking fast enough to feel interactive: compressing dictionaries with affix stripping (store stems plus prefix and suffix rules), keeping a frequent word list in (limited!) main memory to avoid slow disk accesses, and using hashed / bitmap based membership tests to quickly answer "is this a word?" without storing the full wordlist verbatim. In other words, once it got fast enough, the interface flipped. Spellcheck moved into the background and became continuous. When the editor can underline mistakes while you type, you stop thinking of it as a separate tool and it becomes part of writing. Microsoft Word made this style mainstream in the mid-1990s, right around the Windows 95 era, when I was coming of age as a young computer nerd. I think automated code review hasn't yet made this shift. It is treated like a batch job, and the latency is high enough that people naturally push it to the end. I wrote a short blog post about what changes when review is fast enough to stay in flow, and why timing matters as much as what a tool finds. That work also enabled a feature we just shipped at kluster.ai: Ambient Background Review in your IDE. It runs continuously and only interrupts when there is actually something worth saying. Like spellcheck in Microsoft Word in 1995. At the risk of sounding like this post is written by AI, I think this is a game changer. Attached picture of the Microsoft Windows 95 manual that is usually on my bookshelf, which I recently found myself flipping through again. kluster.ai/blog/fast-high-qu…

If you look at how developers work today, something interesting has happened. Writing code has become incredibly fast. AI tools changed that almost overnight. People are producing more code than at any point in the history of software. But the rest of the workflow did not speed up with it. In fact, some parts slowed down. When you generate more code, you also generate more to review, and the review step starts to feel heavier. PRs get larger, context switching gets worse, and teams end up with a strange situation where the easiest part is writing the code and the hardest part is checking it. This is the problem we have been working on with kluster.ai. Most code review tools were designed for the pull request stage, which means they only look at the code after the fact. Some newer tools have started moving review earlier, closer to where the code is written, but they still feel like a separate step. We wanted something different. We wanted review to happen the moment the code exists, and for it to be fast in a way that would reset expectations. We regulararly see it close to a hundred times faster. It works for all code, human written or AI generated. And because it learns the patterns already in your codebase, it keeps everything consistent in a way that feels natural rather than enforced. It also catches the subtle mistakes that appear more often now, even when an AI assistant does something different from what the developer intended. I think this shift toward earlier review will become normal. It removes friction. It keeps quality high. It fits the new pace of software development.

spent hours debugging why i was having mongodb connection issues, timeouts pushing to aws us-east (claude helpfully suggested migrating to a aws eu region), accessing docker hub and debian repos.. turns out my ISP is under attack. happy friday 🙃

someone cloned our VS Code extension, swapped order of two words in the name, injected suspicious code, and bought fake installs to outrank. we reported it over 24 hours ago using official channel yet still live on VS Code marketplace… how is extension squatting with injected code not an immediate takedown? has anyone else dealt with this? real: klusterai.kluster-verify-code fake: klustfix.kluster-code-verify @code @burkeholland @msftsecresponse

it's great to see that pebble software is now 100% open source. it was my favorite smart watch ever -- it was the right balance. it was also the first (and last) piece of tech that I bought from a vending machine ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-wat…

we just launched a new developer tool on product hunt. if you write code with AI (e.g. cursor, claude code), check it out. it detects bugs and security issues in real time. producthunt.com/products/klu…

We are hiring a postdoc to work with us building machine learning models to help understand Parkinson’s disease from smart home and wearable sensor data. Find out more / apply here bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/deta… #MachineLearning #healthcare #digitalhealth #postdoc