Introducing vibe coding in Google AI Studio

In this podcast episode, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti and I chat with guest Anandi Knuppel about MCP servers and the role that technical writers can play in shaping AI capabilities and outcomes. Anandi shares insights on how writers can optimize documentation for LLM performance and expands on opportunities to collaborate with developers around AI tools. Our discussion also touches on ways to automate style consistency in docs, and the future directions of technical writing given the abundance of AI tools, MCP servers, and the central role that language plays in it all.

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We’re not quite ready to swap rustling candy wrappers for rustling leaves, but this week’s list of things to do in Philadelphia is already ramping up the fall fun.

It’s Halloween, baby! Philly goes all out with Halloween events for kids, grown-ups and kids at heart like Halloween Haunts at Stateside Live! (Friday), the Haunted Circus at Philadelphia School of Circus Arts (Saturday) and the Halloween Little Tot Parade in Spruce Hill (Friday).

Shifting back to soup mode, this week features annual traditions like Apple Festival in Peddler’s Village (Saturday & Sunday) and Día de los Muertos events throughout the city (Saturday & Sunday), along with off-the-beaten-path fests like the 2025 Pierogi Festival at St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church (Saturday & Sunday) and the Philly Flannel Festival at Braid Mill (Sunday).

And it’s curtain call for several theater shows, including Kimberly Akimbo at the Academy of Music (through Sunday) and Million Dollar Quartet at Walnut Street Theatre (through Sunday).

Plus, your last chance to frolic at seasonal harvest fests like FallFest at Shady Brook Farm (through Thursday) and Pumpkinland at Linvilla Orchards (through Sunday).

Also happening this week: Halsey at The Fillmore (Thursday), CraftMONTH 2025 (begins Thursday), the start of Native American Heritage Month (begins Saturday) and the opening of Afrofuturism in Costume Design at the African American Museum in Philadelphia — with a showcase by Black Panther’s own costume designer (opens Saturday).

Below, find the best things to do in Philadelphia this week and weekend, October 27 to November 2, 2025.

"Snippets of proprietary or copyleft reciprocal code can enter AI-generated outputs, contaminating codebases with material that developers can't realistically audit or license properly." That's the warning from Sean O'Brien, who founded the Yale Privacy Lab at Yale Law School. ZDNet reports: Open software has always counted on its code being regularly replenished. As part of the process of using it, users modify it to improve it. They add features and help to guarantee usability across generations of technology. At the same time, users improve security and patch holes that might put everyone at risk. But O'Brien says, "When generative AI systems ingest thousands of FOSS projects and regurgitate fragments without any provenance, the cycle of reciprocity collapses. The generated snippet appears originless, stripped of its license, author, and context." This means the developer downstream can't meaningfully comply with reciprocal licensing terms because the output cuts the human link between coder and code. Even if an engineer suspects that a block of AI-generated code originated under an open source license, there's no feasible way to identify the source project. The training data has been abstracted into billions of statistical weights, the legal equivalent of a black hole. The result is what O'Brien calls "license amnesia." He says, "Code floats free of its social contract and developers can't give back because they don't know where to send their contributions...." "Once AI training sets subsume the collective work of decades of open collaboration, the global commons idea, substantiated into repos and code all over the world, risks becoming a nonrenewable resource, mined and never replenished," says O'Brien. "The damage isn't limited to legal uncertainty. If FOSS projects can't rely upon the energy and labor of contributors to help them fix and improve their code, let alone patch security issues, fundamentally important components of the software the world relies upon are at risk." O'Brien says, "The commons was never just about free code. It was about freedom to build together." That freedom, and the critical infrastructure that underlies almost all of modern society, is at risk because attribution, ownership, and reciprocity are blurred when AIs siphon up everything on the Internet and launder it (the analogy of money laundering is apt), so that all that code's provenance is obscured.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s been a while since I last looked at Tiny11 Builder, the PowerShell-based successor to Tiny11 that helps you install a cleaner version of Windows 11 than the stock version provided by Microsoft.

That sounds good. But Tiny11 Builder, like all Windows 11 “debloater” solutions, can be problematic as well.

In some ways, Tiny11 Builder couldn’t be easier, as it’s just a script that you run to build a custom version of the stock Windows 11 ISO, which is used to make Windows 11 installation media. But in other ways, it’s not particularly flexible in that you can’t easily customize what is installed and what isn’t. Unless, of course, you really know what you’re doing.

In the good news department, you can later (re)install anything that Tiny11 Builder lopped out of the install image, so if there are a few apps it removed, like Clipchamp or OneDrive, that you actually do want in Windows 11, you can get them back. But that’s not true of the more aggressive Tiny11coremaker script variant, which not also carves Windows Defender and Windows Update out of the install image while making it impossible to later reinstall apps and features and keep the system updated. For this reason, I will ignore Tiny11coremaker here and recommend you do so as well.

I last looked at Tiny11 Builder about a year and a half ago, soon after its initial release. Since then, Tiny11 Builder’s author, NTDEV, updated the utility to disable telemetry and with improved Microsoft Edge removal. And Microsoft, of course, shipped Windows 11 version 24H2 and, just recently version 25H2.

I am interested in Tiny11 Builder, as I am tools like Tiny11 Builder, because of their potential ability to lessen the enshittification of Windows 11. I will consider documenting this utility in the 25H2 edition of the Windows 11 Field Guide if I can determine that it’s effective at this task.

Of course, Tiny11 Builder isn’t really designed for that purpose—it’s more about shrinking the install size and resource usage of Windows so that it can run on older, less capable PCs—but if some de-enshittification happens as a byproduct of its central purpose, that’s just fine with me. The questions are how Tiny11 Builder can help and whether this is more or less effective than a utility you run against an existing (normal) Windows 11 installation. You have to clean install Windows 11 using a Tiny11 Builder-created ISO (and, thus, installation media), and that alone may be problematic for many users.

So I gave it another shot, this time with Windows 11 version 25H2.
Use Tiny11 Builder to create a custom Windows 11 ISO
To use Tiny11 Builder, you need the latest Windows 11 ISO, which you can and should download from the Microsoft website, and the Tiny11 Builder ZIP download, which you can find on GitHub (click the green “Code” button and then select “Download ZIP”). If you will be creating installation media with the modified ISO you make with Tiny11 Bu...

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