pglevy

That's fair. It depends on the goal. I'm not trying to change careers. And I didn't get that sense from original poster. I'm mostly interested in prototyping or addressing niche productivity issues. But I feel I learn quite a bit from seeing what the LLM does and asking follow up questions or looking things up. I've been around software dev a lot so that helps with knowing what to ask sometimes. My main point is if someone is interested in building software, they should start building as soon as possible. Don't feel you have learn everything first.

What I took away from your post was not that you want to learn computer science but that you want to build things with software. If so, now is a really exciting time because it's never been easier for people without a CS background to go from idea to working software.

As a UX designer, I've worked with developers for a long time, so I've picked up knowledge along the way. I've read some books and merged some PRs at work but nothing that would qualify me as a developer.

What am I'm having a lot fun with right now though is building with LLMs. If I have an idea, I'll just throw it into Replit or Claude Code to see what it comes up with and then decide if I want to pursue it further.

My 2 cents: learn by building. Start working down your list of ideas and dig deeper into questions and topics that come up. Will probably keep things more interesting than slogging through a course.

EmailImprov — A realistic email simulation system designed for testing AI agents and agentic workflows. Generate dynamic, contextual email interactions using distinct personas powered by Ollama LLM integration.

Just got this POC up and running the other day. Realistic sample data for prototyping and testing is frequently a pain point. Even more so for anything having to do with email.

So I wanted something that would pretend to be someone and send and respond to fake emails. And it seems like local LLMs are more than capable of this nowadays. Uses Ollama. Vibe-coded with Claude. UX designer here so be gentle.

https://github.com/pglevy/emailimprov

Thanks for the link! I wonder how this works. Is there just no practical impact of the "book value" being so far off the market price? Surely any exchange is done at the prevailing rates.

> The market value of a gold bar depends on its weight, purity level, and the prevailing market price for gold. Rather than market pricing which fluctuates daily, the New York Fed uses the United States official book value of $42.2222 per troy ounce for gold holdings.

This is an important point. I hope they'll address this soon. I've just started tinkering with Code and took it for granted that I wouldn't lose the "conversation" when the terminal restarted.

Maybe just ask it to save off the contents of the session as it goes?

Definitely slower loading and jankier scrolling on my phone.

Designer and vibe coder here... I also had trouble getting Claude to create an MCP server. What I finally realized was I could just point it at one of the Typescript demo repos from Anthropic. Then it easily cranked out what I was asking for. Maybe not an issue now with Claude 4.

Much better, thanks! I'd still like to see a more mobile-friendly comments link though. I sometimes scan those first to see if the article is worth reading.

Just happened to read Heidegger's Memorial Address this morning. Delivered to a general audience in 1955, it is shorter and more accessible. Certainly not as complex as his later works but related.

> Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.

https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/DiscourseOnThinking/MemorialA... (p43)

Mobile responsiveness?

The author mentions it at the end, but continuing to experience long-form content like reading books and listening to multi-hour podcasts — particularly in other knowledge domains — should counteract this.

I've been using Claude Desktop with built-in File MCP to run operations on local files. Sometimes it will do things directly but usually it will write a Python script. For example: combine multiple.md files into one or organize photos into folders.

I also use this method for doing code prototyping by giving it the path to files in the local working copy of my repo. Really cool to see it make changes in a vite project and it just hot reloads. Then I make tweaks or commit changes as usual.

As much as I would like it to, I don't think fully remote is going to survive this. These problems are going to get worse and we'll naturally revert to doing things in person to feel more secure.

Same. Though this looks like the first EV I might actually consider.

I thought it was Frontier Models.

I started out copying and pasting from Claude Pro. Then I hooked up MCP so it could edit files directly in my local repo.

I set up this template with all the shadcn components pre-installed so you can prompt something like, "make a prototype of this mockup using shadcn" and then just drop the page in without any extra importing or routing. https://github.com/pglevy/vibe-coding-boilerplate

We recently got Gemini at work so trying to use that now since everyone has access.

Not using Magic Patterns but absolutely +1 this workflow. I'm a designer working across multiple teams and it's so fast and fluid to get react prototypes out of an LLM. I put together a vite project to drop the resulting typescript files into. Much quicker iteration with PMs and then we capture spec from the prototype. I see this as a way to scale our design efforts across the org since we can get higher resolution iteration done faster.

I think about this daily.

It's also loud because everyone is playing sound out of their device speakers, especially young parents who set up mini tablet theaters as soon as they sit down at the table. I don't understand why restaurants allow it. Why would I pay more for that ambiance?

Mermaid.js.org links directly to Mermaid Chart, and there is a blurb on the org site that says, "Mermaid + Mermaid Chart... Mermaid Chart is a major supporter of the Mermaid project."

We did this with our kids, now college freshman and high school junior, and it was absolutely worth it. In middle school we established "screen break" from Friday night to Saturday afternoon. It was challenging at first but they came to love it. We've had many conversations and read many books on those breaks (and still do). Advice to new parents: keep them off screens as long as possible, and then build in and enforce breaks that become a part of your family routine. Chances are they will end up noticeably different from other kids.

Seems like some of the techniques described here could be part of a larger "accuracy-based commission" form of compensation (as opposed to what is apparently presented).

Guess what... Sometimes I need to take a left exit. And there will frequently be a bunch of clumping chumps doing 20 over in the left lane. So I get over when I can.

This is what I do with my Obsidian repo. Feels like best of both worlds to me. I have my files in open format in my repo. And I use Obsidian primarily for the editing experience. If I want to quickly capture a thought on my phone, I use the GitHub app to create an issue in that repo and process it later.

I go to the gym regularly but I probably should put something like this contraption between me and my family size bag of peanut M&Ms.

Just previewed the hi-hat from scratch vid. This channel looks great. Thanks for sharing!

One of my favorites that I return to regularly and am continually fascinated by is an ex-library book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century. It's an "enthno-archealogical" study of about 30 families in early 2000s California.

I love the ambiance of libraries and used book stores so I tend to buy books with a little wear and tear and appreciate their uniqueness.

At the same time I'm loathe to make my own marks in books. I hadn't thought about that contradiction before.

Was just reading this on the pain of parenting in Medea by Euripides this weekend:

"Suppose that the children have grown into youth And have turned out good, still, if God so wills it, Death will away with your children's bodies, And carry them off into Hades. What is our profit, then, that for the sake of Children the gods should pile up on mortals After all else This most terrible grief of all?"

I try not to think about it too much.

One thing that stuck with me from the book Stroke of Insight (memoir of brain scientist who has and recovers from stroke) was how intently she prioritized sleep when everyone else kept trying to drag her out of bed.

In a more mundane context, I've been fortunate to organize my schedule such that I don't use an alarm to get up in the morning. So I can let my body figure out how much sleep I need.

Thanks for sharing! I love the idea and did something similar, but with Jekyll on GitHub Pages. I like that it's mobile-friendly but I can print off the PDF as well. https://github.com/pglevy/resume