December 12, 2024
Using GitHub Copilot to Build a Mobile App
Cool demo from Burke Holland using GitHub Copilot Edits and a preview Vision plugin for image recognition and UI code generation. Burke was using Claude 35 Sonnet with the plug in for the demo. I gave this a try with OpenAI gpt-4o but couldn’t reproduce the results. While it’s a cool concept to generate boilerplate in another language ...
Read more
Read more
November 25, 2024
Brain Notes - Weekly List of Articles, Videos and Other Media
I like to get a head start on my 2025 projects and with that I'd like to announce the return of the weekly list of random and awesome over on Substack. Check out the latest Brain Notes. Background is that since late 2020 I’ve kept weekly notes, journaling if you like, of everything I’ve read, watched or otherwise considered. A year or ...
Read more
Read more
October 22, 2024
Goodbye .io Domain
Today I embarked on a new journey. I am sunsetting my .io domain. You might have read about the uncertain future of the ccTLD and while it’s a reason to consider a switch it is not the reason. It’s all about the money. $71 USD to be exact. I’ve owned a dozen domains. Most are info pages, blogs or side projects. More recently I started ...
Read more
Read more
September 25, 2024
Microservices are technical debt
Matt Ranney, principal engineer at DoorDash makes the case that most everyone ends up with a distributed monolith. In my personal experience I think he’s right. As an ecosystem matures you often build interdependencies that require multiple changes to be deployed for major changes. Tech debt need not be a dirty word. Microservices can ...
Read more
Read more
July 7, 2024
How Good Is ChatGPT at Coding, Really?
““ChatGPT may generate incorrect code because it does not understand the meaning of algorithm problems.” Yutian Tang, University of Glasgow” Confirmation of what I've long suspected based on my own testing. A number of universities are applying a critical eye to otherwise breathless claims by AI companies. The general consensus is that...
Read more
Read more
July 2, 2024
The Death of the Junior Developer
If you are studying Computer Science and read this, please stay in school. LLM models are trained on existing code, which has bugs. There will always be bugs to fix. There’s been a shift away from hiring juniors but not because of AI. Everyone wanted seniors because they erroneously believe that they can get to market faster by shunnin...
Read more
Read more
May 29, 2024
Putting Chatbots to the Test
Would you trust an AI chatbot with family planning? Investing $1 million? How about writing your wedding vows? the Wall Street Journal asks. I'd like to think that I started this trend with Project Maestro, but LLM technology has reached a point where folks are looking past the hype and benchmarking output in the real world. Stanford h...
Read more
Read more
May 1, 2024
Project Maestro: First Principals Thinking
Howdy folks, quick update on Project Maestro. The next installment is live on Substack so check out Maestro: First Principals Thinking. In this batch we test LLM’s ability to reason using first principals. If you are not familiar with the term it’s a problem-solving approach frequently used in software development, but the concept has ...
Read more
Read more
April 15, 2024
AI could change the architecture of apps
Hear me out. The advent of AI models and advances in ASIC will change the traditional client-server interaction of apps. We’ve seen it before with the introduction of the personal computer and the smart phone. Work is done on the local device and eventually synced to the server. I’ve spent 10+ years building REST/JSON web apps that rel...
Read more
Read more
March 28, 2024
After The Gold Rush - Building Apps With AI
Golden run or gold rush? Surely DHH remembers a time when programming was less accessible to the masses. I would not attribute the current downturn in developer jobs to unreleased tools like Devin. Finance drove the massive dot com layoffs and the end of ZIRP is driving these. But the writing is on the wall, things are changing. Type a...
Read more
Read more
March 26, 2024
LLM's Lack of Context From a Human Perspective
I couldn’t agree more with Nate Jones take in LLM's are bad at code and product. It’s hard to write critically about LLM without sounding overly contrarian or that you are fishing for clicks. I hear claims that AI will replace a job or will accelerating a task and often counter: “So, what has YOUR experience using LLM been like?” The r...
Read more
Read more
March 12, 2024
"Will AI replace programmers?"
The CEO of Nvidia famously said that AI will eliminate the need for people to learn programming. But as a recent blog post at toddle calls out, not exactly. The predictive model of current gen LLMs means that while it cannot solve novel problems, it can generate massive amounts of repeatable code, given the right instructions. It's eas...
Read more
Read more
February 13, 2024
The Art of Retracting AI-Produced Code
No question AI tools have accelerated the speed to write code, but who cleans up the mess? David Ramel asked the question in a recent Visual Studio Magazine piece. He summarized a whitepaper by GitClear pointing out a disturbing trend in maintainability. One indicator is Code churn, measured as lines of code that are reverted or update...
Read more
Read more
February 5, 2024
How to Train Your Large Language Model
Chamath Palihapitiya is a controversial figure, but his recent breakdown of how large language models work, and their limitations is worth checking out. He makes a few great points: First, access to proprietary and constantly evolving data is important. While he doesn't mention the Open AI lawsuits, he implies that owning your own trai...
Read more
Read more
January 11, 2024
Are you shipping? If so, how often?
Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell of Y Combinator make some great points in this short: • Great software companies are built by great software engineers • Tech startups live and die by their speed of shipping software. The first point is common sense, and as a software engineer, I take the challenge to hear to be a GREAT software engi...
Read more
Read more
January 5, 2024
Which calendar are you?
Sliding back into the routine in January is a great time to ask ourselves: “Am I being productive?” Forrest Brazeal’s cartoon from a recent post in his Good Tech Things substack lead me to re-evaluate my own calendar. What does yours look like?
Read more
Read more
December 6, 2023
Are you protecting your new AI project?
The folks over at App Economy Insights break down the biggest security threats from AI in 2024. At a high-level: Adversarial AI has been area of focus in security for over a decade and modern algorithms aid attacks in four main areas: Speed, Scale, Scope, Sophistication. The widespread adoption of LLMs creates additional vectors for ex...
Read more
Read more
November 13, 2023
Rushing for the Cloud Exits is Probably Premature
Move your SaaS out of the cloud, are you crazy? That's exactly what David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) says saved 37Signals a lot of money. But hold on.. Moving out of the cloud might be a good fit for some companies, but not everyone. Forrest Brazeal has an intriguing rebuttal in his Good Tech Things newsletter that includes this chart. I...
Read more
Read more
November 11, 2023
AI is Expensive
A fantastic write up in ArsTechnica about how AI hasn't been profitable for Big Tech. A WSJ article cited says Microsoft loses around $20 per user per month on GitHub Copilot. In fact, the service has operated at a loss despite having more than 1.5 million users. The $10 a month flat fee doesn't cover the average user cost of $20; wors...
Read more
Read more
October 9, 2023
It's Electric
A stark reminder of where the "big three" auto makers rank by market cap. If the future of automotive is electric, Tesla obviously has an early advantage. Toyota takes a slightly different track with hybrids. Maybe you've never heard of BYD, but the Chinese manufacturer has already seen success with exporting vehicles. The Challengers ...
Read more
Read more
October 2, 2023
Money, Time and Energy
This a fun infographic, but I would put the fuel gauge closer to 50% through the central "Working Age" section. That said we can pull levers to move things around, for example: spending money to create more free time. Everything has limits and at the end of the day we all make decisions of what to prioritize for ourselves, our families...
Read more
Read more
September 25, 2023
Emporos - Lighted Bag Project
I'm proud to share that I lead the team that built this integration between the Emporos and the lighted bag system. In collaboration with Product, our engineering team designed, built, tested and delivered a brand-new cloud-based software integration platform to support this system. We also worked with our partners to refine our onboar...
Read more
Read more
September 12, 2023
Does Moore's law apply to GPUs?
Blake Millard had this great point last week in his newsletter about the rate of technological adoption writing that "today’s technologies achieve scale in months and years while prior generations took decades." He included this chart from Goldman Sachs illustrating the point, but it also got my brain spinning. The often quoted "Moore'...
Read more
Read more
September 1, 2023
Spotify's AI Driven DJ
Here's a fun one for the long weekend: Have you tried Spotify's new AI DJ?🎸 If you are a Premium subscriber tap play on the DJ card and the algorithm will curate a playlist. Unlike the other smart playlist, the DJ will hand pick songs from your listening history and group them by theme (or vibe) and if you are not into it you can skip ...
Read more
Read more
August 25, 2023
AI Microtransactions
Should AI have unfettered access to money? The Lightning Network does exactly that, and provides a mechanism for AI to create a wallet, earn money and then spend money on other services in order to complete a task. To paraphrase Lyn Alden's August newsletter: "An AI agent is purposely set up by the creator to have some funds to spend a...
Read more
Read more
August 20, 2023
The Fall of Stack Overflow
Gerggely Orosz of Pragmatic Engineer dove into Ayhan Fuat Çelik's analysis of and speculated that coding assistants like Copilot, Cody, ChatGPT are partly to blame. He speculates that engineers are reaching for AI chatbots for code questions, and it's hurting Stack Overflow's traffic. I would add to that by saying that while searching ...
Read more
Read more
July 13, 2023
The Office of Weights and Measures
It's been a while (April 10th) since I posted anything. In the words of Peter Gibbons in office space "I wouldn't say I've been *missing* it". But it's not what you think, I have literally missed the action of writing and posting. What can I say life intervened. What absurd ideas have been rattling around in my head over the past few m...
Read more
Read more
April 10, 2023
AI, the Next Tech Bubble?
My Joseph Kennedy moment with ChatGPT “Joseph Kennedy famously escaped the stock market crash of 1929 after his shoeshine tried to give him stock tips, leading him to sell all of his stocks and preserving his wealth. ” Probably the only thing I have in common with Joseph Kennedy is that someone who has little understanding of machine l...
Read more
Read more
March 24, 2023
Canceled by ChatGPT
I did a wild Twitter rant.. will I get canceled? Yeah, probably by Niemann Marcus. Seriously though, can we talk about the bad advice on the Internet? Any idiot and a dog could start a blog and now 20 years later and a few slick graphics anyone can be "the News". In your comments, dropping knowledge.. wake up sheeple TikTok deserves a ...
Read more
Read more
March 12, 2023
Sunday Bank Run Fraud - The REAL SBF
Hungry Hungry Hippos 💸🦛 Intended to write a couple of posts but time got away from me the last few weeks. Now in light of the Silicon Valley Bank issue it seems a little tone deaf to ignore the 🧐 obvious elephant in the room. I am not one to buy into the Internet hype cycle, but I spent the weekend pondering how the latest financial de...
Read more
Read more
See more posts »