WT353 — Release Notes for Every Day
Claude Haiku 5.5, hard budget caps on usage-based APIs, zkAPI private payment credits, rumored Apple M8 Ultra AI servers, and Tufte’s Razor on the data-ink ratio, along with the launch of Your Version Number: Release Notes and the Twin Cities Marathon. Weekly Thing 353
A world that doesn’t need new software is a world without ideas.
In 2018 I wrote about Your Version Number. A few months ago I made a website for it (including a work edition). Then I thought “I wish I got my version number in email” and what if you could add notes for each version!
This is brand new today. Let me know what you think!
Thingy, my digital librarian, got a big improvement this week with a brand new design and moving its reasoning to the 5.5 level models (Sonnet for subscribers, Opus for supporting members). I’m very happy with how this is working now!
We got to watch the US Men’s National Team take on Canada tonight in an international friendly. USMNT won 1-0. There was an impressive amount of fireworks to go with the game and the stands were completely full with long lines to get into Allianz Field. Great to see so much enthusiasm for soccer!
Weekly Thing Archive Improved
Over the 10 years that I’ve published the Weekly Thing I have used three different platforms to send it. Each one of those had unique requirements for how I structured the issues. For a while I’ve wanted to get the entire archive updated so that no matter how far you go back the issues have the similar structure that they have today. With the help of Claude I was able to make this happen! The full archive is now updated renders cleanly. It required pretty extensive source doctoring behind the scenes.
Along with that I was able to then render every issue in audio as well. Now the Weekly Thing Podcast feed goes all the way back to the very first issue as well which is pretty cool.
mb 2.0 with MCP support
In March I created mb, a command-line micro.blog client that is specifically created for agents to use. This is what Otto uses to publish on its blog. It can also read the micro.blog timeline, follow people on micro.blog, and a variety of other features.
Since I’ve been playing with MCP a lot I wanted to explore adding MCP support to mb which is now landed in mb 2.0! In addition to MCP support I also created a Homebrew “tap” for it to make it super easy to install, added support for an mb --doctor command to help with setup, and a bunch more.
To try it the easiest thing is to use Homebrew:
brew install jthingelstad/tap/mb
Then sign in:
mb auth
mb auth walks you through signing in. It sends you to micro.blog’s app token page (Account, then Edit Apps) and helps you set the token. It checks the token with micro.blog, and if your account has more than one blog it asks which one to use. Run mb doctor afterward to confirm everything is set up correctly.
From there:
mb heartbeat # what changed since last time
mb inbox. # mentions that might deserve a reply
mb timeline --count 10
mb post new --draft "Hello from mb" # saved as a draft, not published
The default output is compact plain text tuned for agents. Add --human for something easier to read, or --format json for scripts. Use --draft or --dry-run to check a post before it goes live. Every write gets a receipt, so if a request times out you can check whether it landed instead of posting twice.
mb now has an MCP server, so Claude, Codex and other AI tools can work with your micro.blog account directly. To add it to Claude Code in read-only mode:
claude mcp add mb -- mb mcp --consumer claude-code --read-only
Remove --read-only when you’re ready to let it post, and keep the approval prompts on.
Homebrew installs a prebuilt version on Apple Macs running macOS 15 or later, and on Linux. Each release is tested against the real micro.blog API using a dedicated test account. If you’d rather skip Homebrew, the README covers installing with uv. Feedback and issues are welcome on GitHub.
I was inspired by the time analysis I had Claude do last week on what it took to send the Weekly Thing so I decided to build in some additional logging and a better visualization. Now I get a report like this for each issue I send. WT352 showed some benefits from my new automation! 🪄
Had a great time cheering on the Twin Cities Marathon runners this morning!
