Fast Lane Literacy — 10 September 2026

pit in the world

From Poe to pet (for some) and place, learning pit is very useful. Explore pit’s use in the world with this one-page survey (PDF).

pit is one of Fast Lane Literacy’s 100 words.

Time is Precious, and Limited: Application Bloat Edition

James Barron reported recently in The New York Times that New York City elementary and middle schools have 38 tools with “AI components,” which the city says it will now disable. 38 digital products to purchase, learn, maintain, leverage and share (effectively) with students. Season with network access, updates, training and hardware issues.

Read the full post

What language are agent skills written in?

Read plicara labs’ research on agent skill languages

Mostly English, and that is changing fast. An analysis by plicara labs of about 1.9 million distinct agent skills on GitHub found 85.3% written in English, while the non-English share of newly written skills rose from 13.0% to 16.3% between the first and second quarters of 2026.

“Reviewing the data, it turns out that the claim is stronger than the obvious version of it, because English is not a proxy for American. GitHub’s fastest-growing developer population by a wide margin is India, which writes in English, as do Nigeria and Singapore, so a language count cannot see any of them. The non-English share is therefore not a measure of how much of this ecosystem sits outside the United States. It is a floor beneath it …”

— plicara labs, What language are agent skills written in? (24 August 2026)

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