duggan

The stuff you've listed are the kinds of things smart home enthusiasts do with whatever tools are available to them, and are just a sign of people exploring the possibility space.

Some will dig into obscurities that LLMs don't or can't touch, others will orchestrate the tools, Gastown-style, into some as-yet-unknown form.

People will vibe themselves into a corner and either start learning or flame out.

Turned it into a Stripe revenue dashboard and notifier.

Even bought a couple more, flashed them, and gave to my cofounders, complete with AI written (personally tested, though) setup instructions!

Yeah, it’s a bit incendiary, I just wanted to turn it into a more useful conversation.

I also think it overstates the case, but I do think it’s an opportunity.

It’s not just that the barrier to entry has been lowered (which it has) but that someone with a lot of existing skill can leverage that. Not everyone can bring that to the table, and not everyone who can is doing so. That’s the current advantage (in my opinion, of course).

All that said, I thought the Vision Pro was going to usher in a new era of computing, so I’m not much of a prognosticator.

I think it will make prototyping and MVP more accessible to a wider range of people than before. This goes all the way from people who don't know how to code up to people who know very well how to code, but don't have the free time/energy to pursue every idea.

Project activation energy decreases. I think this is a net positive, as it allows more and different things to be started. I'm sure some think it's a net negative for the same reasons. If you're a developer selling the same knowledge and capacity you sold ten years ago things will change. But that was always the case.

My comparison to iOS was about the market opportunity, and the opportunity for entrepreneurship. It's not magic, not yet anyway. This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to.

There are so many opportunities to create software and companies, we're not running out of those just because it's faster to generate some of the code.

There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it.

I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly distributed.

You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different.

Would love an excuse to use it, but one has not come up in like 15 years since, hah.

A personal blog with a mixture of technical posts and other essays. No AI content.

Every time I write a post I find myself adding little features here and there, which is what I always wanted to be able to do with a blog.

This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago.

What's driving it?

But there is an interesting looking-glass effect at play, where the truth seems obvious and opposite on either side.

I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.

If you haven’t been convinced by pure argument in 2026 then you probably won’t be. But the great thing is you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.

This isn’t crypto, where everyone using it has a stake in its success. You can just try it, or not.

I did that a lot initially, it’s really only with the advent of Claude Code integrated with VS Code that I’m learning more like I would learn from a code review.

It also depends on the project. Work code gets a lot more scrutiny than side projects, for example.

Wade through ads

Skim a treatise on the history of centering content

Skim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow

Find some code on the page

Try to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout

Realize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind

Keep searching

Try some stuff until it works

Or…

Ask LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on to the next thing.

Even just moving it to the bottom helped move a lot of our usage into cache.

Probably went from something like 30-50% cached tokens to 50-70%.

It turns out I accidentally purchased one each of a fibre-assembly and direct-attach-copper! I was not paying close enough attention.

From what I understand, the difference between these will be negligible at the range I'm using (1m), but is that accurate?

  -H "X-Auth-Email: $EMAIL_ADDRESS" -H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY"

Edit: and in case you're like me and thought it would be clever to block all non-Cloudflare traffic hitting your origin... remember to disable that.

Instead of cobbling together an impressive array of tools though, I just got a trial of Final Cut Pro and pulled out everything with that. You can get what I think is a three month trial? Anyway, it was plenty for this one time effort of digitizing old Hi8 tapes.

I think I did end up using Handbrake to take the raws down to a reasonable size to give to family members, but the raw footage and project files I stuck on a couple of 1TB Sandisk drives to keep in physically separate backup locations.

Having those prototypes be AI generated is just a new twist.

Your condescension is noted though.

I also believe AI is a tool, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that, due to some facet of human psychology, being "rude" might train me to be less respectful in other interactions.

Ergo, I might be more likely to treat you like a toilet.