Review of "Lost Letters" (4 stars): Wow
Just wow. Who would have thought that a graphic novel could once more be so captivating and so deep. The plots were twisting quite hard on this one. Just pure art.
Best of Kevin’s bubble - June 2026
This month consists of only 3 links and some book reviews.
Enjoy
Links
It doesn’t matter if it works
The one “new” thing I learned from this article was an effect of the industrial revolution I never thought about. “Machines” took the highly specific skils and knowledges of experts and automated them, making these experts “useless”. And therefore “de-skilled” the workforce overal. As that specific knowledge/skill was not necessary to have anymore. Which also allowed companies to pay less for workers that were able to handle these machines. It makes me once more wonder what our work life will look like in a few years when the AI boom has settled.
LLMs and performative productivity
I need to be honest with you, by the time I write this I haven’t finished reading the article yet, because it’s way too long for my typical “blog attention span” 😅 Still it triggered a thought.
This month I started playing around with cursor and Claude a bit more. I specifically worked on a feature where I needed a backend, but the backend developers were all busy with other stuff, so instead I let one of my dear colleagues help me with having a good mental model of what should happen in the backend and then prompted away with nothing but hopes and prayers in my backpack. So far, it looks good enough by I started realizing something while chatting with Claude. It felt like I was guiding a junior through the codebase, stopping them when they were about to do something unnecessary, adjusting their direction where I felt it was necessary, and other than that let them do and then look at their result in gitlab. And this is where I feel similar to the author, working with the chatbot felt like I was helping a junior finish their task, while in reality it was doing my task. Which by the way didn’t stop at backend code generation. I hooked up an atlassian MCP and gave it the necessary Test Rail and gitlab CLI tools so it could do all kinds of stuff I usually need to do when finishing a task, but with which I often have a hard time getting myself to do. And just like the author it almost felt addictive, I wanted to play the chatbot game further. Very, very weird. I am excited to see where this goes, and how my usage of the bot develops over time. We’ll see.
The amazing mail sent to a video game publisher
Independent of if you know this publisher or not, it is wonderful to read through this post. Next to all the bad news and things I see on a daily basis, it is human interactions like these that still give me hope for us.
Books
This month I managed to create the “Books” page, that holds a list of all the books I registered on wyrms. And one of the cool things of wyrms is that there is a review rss feed for every account. So what I am gonna attach from now on is my review entries of the month 😊
Review of "Harrow the Ninth" (4 stars): None
Rated "Harrow the Ninth" 4 stars
Review of "Harrow the Ninth" (5 stars): Ultra strong characters, all flawed to the bones
Just recently I had a discussion with colleagues of mine where I said that I can't stand books where the main character is a man and just awesome at everything and ultra powerful, because he is the man man. No flaws, no failures only pure masculinity.
And in stark contrast there is this book, which is full of strong characters, and they are all so flawed, and I love it. In addition, by the end of every chapter I thought I finally knew what was going on and predicted what was happening next, only to be utterly suprised by the next chapter. It was again a book where it was hard for me to put it away at night, and where is was longing the whole day to be finally back to bed so I could read further.
Review of "Dungeon Crawler Carl" (5 stars): A DnD nerds Dream
I am a DnD player, and not just a player, a dungeon master. I am also a lifelong RPG gamer. It feels like this book was written for me. Which might also explain why a lot of people close to me and in my bubble read the series and said they loved it 😄
If you are like me, try to get this book and read it, so you can fall in love with Carl and Princess Donut as well ☺️