Love it. Especially the random interval. Wondering if anyone has ever proposed doing this whenever you get a text or social media alert. Seems ridiculous I guess but why not?
2,151 karma · joined July 22, 2021
> Write the initial version yourself and ask AI to review and improve it.
> Write the critical parts and ask AI to do the rest.
> Write an outline of the code and ask AI to fill the missing parts.
So well put. I'm writing these on a post it note and putting it above my monitor. I held off on using agents to generate code for a long time and finally was forced to really make use of them and this is so in line with my experience.
My biggest surprises have been how much the model doesn't seem to matter (?) when I'm making the prompts appropriately narrow. Also surprised at how hard it is to pair program in something like cursor. If your prompting is even slightly off it seems like it can go from 10xing a build process to making it a complete waste of time with nothing to show but spaghetti code at the end.
Anyway long live the revolution, glad this was so technically on point and not just a no-ai rant (love those too tho).
If anyone knows of similar games / apps / software tools that I could show as examples of solo developer small scope simple UI games I'm always trying to find more..
My favorite classic suggestion down this rabbit hole that they probably mention (pay walled) is Francis Bacon's full-insano-mode preserved studio. I didn't really get his work until I saw his studio. Fun fact they literally used a painting of his to design the chest-burster in Alien? (I just learned that somehow)
https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/studio
http://alienexplorations.blogspot.com/2015/02/ridley-inspire...
I might have missed it but would be very curious to know more about what field the writer was / is currently working in and what a potential career switch into tech looks like right now. I transitioned to coding after almost 10 years teaching but that was before the glorious AI revolution began.
Seems like the break-into-tech narrative has changed drastically. Maybe not though, curious what others perceptions are.
Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
And just my two cents as an under-qualified former art history teacher...
It's fascinating and totally valid to try to analyze these symbols as proto-linguistic, but it can be even more interesting to imagine the cognitive roll these kinda of abstract symbols might have played outside the scope of language as we understand it.
Trying to imaging the structure of the mind and experiencing reality with a complete absence of language can be immensely mind-expanding, even just as a thought experiment. At least it was for me.
> “I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
Super exciting to imagine what new structures and ways of making and sharing art might arise in the aftermath of this system. It seems like in a lot of ways the gallery / collector relationship is still running essentially the same way that was established in the 1870s.
And to echo what others are saying I have spent the last month experiencing for the first time how not simple throwing a meaningful test suite together is for a ginormous legacy codebase. I was glad the author briefly seemed to acknowledge that but still... the pain...
They said the playwright ui was supposed to make it easy... Just plug it into an LLM they said... It should just take a few days right?
I agree I would have loved more of a hard / concrete definition oriented approach to the whole piece but everything they were saying really resonated at least in terms of my personal experience. I haven't ever come across a writer focusing on this. It was really unexpected / refreshing. It's already is reshaping little moments in my day like hugging my son just now. Very unexpected transcendental value for an HN skim while ignoring a boring zoom standup. The truth is out there.
Regardless this just made me shudder thinking about the weird little ocean of (now maybe dwindling) random underpaid contract jobs for a few hours a month maintaining ancient Wordpress sites...
Surely that can't be our fate...
I don't have any personal aversion to working more to pay for more expensive options but the tradeoff of time keeping my relationship with my kid and my marriage healthy is hard to ignore and seems like a really concrete deal-breaker.
We're at the edge of Land Park in Sacramento where my extended family is from. We thought it might be temporary before getting pulled back to the bay for work or schools maybe but the culture here has just been so positive and conducive to family. The public and private schools are excellent with dozens of options, everything is bikable and green, there are literally more museums and restaurants than we can keep up with and the parks / sports options for kids are amazing. And it's swarming with healthy young working / middle class families about half of which are bay area expats. The city obviously has some known issues but I'm continually grateful with the amount of new development going up in every direction and the overall feeling of being a culture / city that supports young cool people having families.
Anyway I'm just surprised and disappointed at how hard it is to justify moving to SF right now as a native who loves it there. Even as someone working in tech / AI with a strong desire to go back. If you have a family, it just seems impossible to make SF make sense right now. I could be missing something of course.
Curious what other SF or Sac tech parents have to say about all this. So much of this has had to be hypothetical on my end because I know so few parents with young kids in SF...
Nothing can move fast enough to keep up with these hype-fueled TED talk expectations all the way up the chain.
I don't know if there's any solution and I'm sure it's not like this everywhere but I'm also sure I'm not alone. At this point I'm just trying to keep my feet wet on "AI" related projects until the hype dust settles so I can reassess what this industry even is anymore. Maybe it's not too late to get a single subject credential and go teach math or finger painting or something.
Anybody aware of similar resources for other early computer patents for Apple, Commodore, Tandy etc? Or another IBM resource specifically covering more than just keyboards ie the 5150, PC Jr etc?
For whatever it's worth after years of being in a space that felt very similar to this my solution was... Having a kid and / or going to Recurse Center and / or moving to a non-LA/NY city.
I don't know if any of it's causal but I have finally crossed over some kind of line. I read books again (like I ever really did), I don't think about social media, I don't have that toxic icky parasocial relationship feeling, I don't even know how to use social media UIs when I see them anymore.
Its fantastic, I'm sure writing / reading this kind of post is a good first step so bravo and welcome (back) to the resistance.
Wait does HN count as social media? Does linkedin? Does Slack ir Teams at work? Does SMS??
You're my blog hero, thank you for being cool and setting a good example. Also really important LLM hype reminder.
> KEY POINTS
> The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday said it's granting contract awards of up to $200 million to several AI companies.
> The DoD's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said the awards will help the agency accelerate its adoption of AI solutions.
> The recipients of the contract awards include Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI.
[https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-...]
I'm likely going to be switching into gear with the physical space towards the end of September but I'll try to find you on Zulip and say hello before then : )