German health insurance will reimburse a mental health app within days but cannot provide a therapist within six months. Last week, psychotherapy fees were cut by 4.5%. Baumol’s cost disease — originally about why string quartets get relatively more expensive — explains why the app gold rush and the collapse of mental health provision are the same phenomenon.
I love concerts. I love setlists. I hate building the playlist manually afterward. But do I really? A small automation project, a Deftones show in Dortmund, and the question of whether you should automate something you kind of enjoy.
In late 2025, agentic coding tools went from impressive demos to daily infrastructure. The problem nobody talked about enough: when an LLM agent has write access to a codebase and no formal constraints, reproducibility breaks down. The Ralph Loop is a deterministic, story-driven execution framework that addresses this — one tool call per story, scoped writes, atomic state. A design rationale with a formal sketch of why the constraints matter.
Everyone has a Downloads folder full of “scan0023.pdf” and “document(3)-final-FINAL.pdf”. Renaming them by content sounds trivial — read the file, understand what it is, give it a name. The implementation reveals something useful about how LLMs actually handle text: what a token is, why context windows matter in practice, why you want structured output instead of prose, and why heuristics should go first. The repository is at github.com/sebastianspicker/AI-PDF-Renamer.