Hey there 👋

Welcome to this installment of Pixel Perfect Picks. Here I'm sharing something that I heard, read, and saw. You can subscribe to this newsletter here. I'm additionally publishing a more extended essay about software development, design, and freelancing every month.

I went to the cinema last week to watch Backrooms and it was kind of exactly what I hoped for: deeply unsettling, patient, and genuinely committed to its premise. The film is directed by Kane Parsons, who started making the original YouTube found-footage series at 16 and somehow turned that into an A24 feature at 20. That alone is a wild story. The first hour is the best of it, all suffocating uncertainty and liminal wrongness, and there are two or three scenes that will stick with me for a while. It also sent me back to House of Leaves, which I've been reading again this week. The two go together very naturally, which is either a good sign or a warning, depending on who you are.

Geoffrey Litt wrote something this week that I keep coming back to. As AI agents write more and more of the actual code, the bottleneck shifts from writing to understanding. Not just verifying that something works, but genuinely grasping what it does and why, enough to meaningfully shape the direction. His argument is that this makes tools for comprehension just as important as tools for generation. Understanding is the new bottleneck. Quiet piece, big implications.

This one is shorter but it seems like it resonates with a lot of people I talk to recently. Alec Scollon wrote about having LLM burnout, the specific fatigue that builds up from spending all day inside AI-generated text. The repeated patterns, the emphatic fragments, the relentless helpfulness. He's not anti-AI about it, he's honest about it, and that's what makes it land. I Think I Have LLM Burnout. A quick read, and if you're deep in this world, you'll know exactly what he means. Anyway, I get back to the agents now 🚂

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-Marvin