When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.

When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.

To your point, a lot of hobbies are about creating something that wasn't possible before without the investment of time, which is one reason it's rewarding. If people could just take a pill to get muscles to skip all the training, I'm sure a lot of people who put in time to train regularly would feel cheated out of their accomplishment, especially if nobody could tell if they did it manually or with a pill and if everybody started to have the same musculature with no effort.

People who were in the demoscene took joy in learning how to make a computer do things no one had done before and push the hardware to its limits. That's not as meaningful if someone can achieve the same thing by prompting an LLM.

A lot of hobbies are fun because of the human challenge in creating the output and knowing it was only achievable because someone had to take time to create it. Having an LLM accomplish the same thing absolutely devalues the fun in the hobby. Hobbies aren't 100% just about accomplishing something for yourself, even though if you sway to much into doing it for validation or to compete with others it can lead to burnout and lack of enjoyment.

It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.

Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.

Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.

I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.

Other questions and answers were mixed:

How many cards in a deck? > A deck of cards contains 52 cards.

How many cards in a deck if I remove all Queens from the deck? > If you remove all Queens from the deck, there are still 52 cards in the deck.

The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.

What makes the app a little different from others is that it's kind of halfway between an outliner and a wiki. You can place notes in a tree hierarchy, but they can be free-floating as well. You can link to other notes using wiki-style text links, and each note has a unique address, so you don't need to give notes a title or a filename.

Notes can even appear as a child note of more than one parent. The idea is that you can jot down an idea quickly without a lot of friction and then later either add sub-notes to create a note "tree" from it or add it to an existing tree. The tree gives structure to related notes, but the wiki-style links allow you to connect notes together outside of that structure. (I consider the tree structure a "hard" relationship and the links a "soft" one.)

There isn't a single uber-tree where every note goes. Your notebook ends up with lots of free-floating notes and lots of small trees of organized notes, like a card-based Zettelkasten system. You can use search and various filters to find and stumble upon notes easily.

Notes can either be stored in iCloud (so that they sync across devices) or saved in a folder as simple Markdown files.

If you're curious, you can help beta test it. More info here: https://zettelkasten.ussherpress.com/

They could certainly add features to make them more like general purpose computers, but there's a bit of product development and engineering "tax" they'd have to pay over time to maintain that aspect. Much easier from a product development standpoint to create products that provide a walled-garden experience, especially if that's what most customers want.

I think this will be a hit, but the $2k is a bit much for me to even consider getting one. Obviously they'll likely drop that price over time.

Why would news outlets go the extra mile and re-frame it as "Companies are reducing the size of unhealthy products while maintaining the same price and here's why that's a good thing..." unless they were in the pocket of these companies? That would be editorializing to me.

Eventually I got over it now and just use them as places to scribble ideas and don't care if it's ugly. I find that over the years I just started caring more about getting the thing I wanted to accomplish done than making sure I had a pristine record of the thoughts that led up to it. Maybe it's an age thing.

Also, the auto-copy selected text feature is awful. That's another thing that is so counterintuitive. I have never seen a UI where just selecting text means auto-copy to the paste buffer. Who is coming up with these awful UX ideas?

On top of that, the scroll "feel" of the new client (at least on macOS) isn't quite as good as their old one. It just feels off and not like a native terminal.

I hate it too (and others like "learnings" when "lessons" would suffice), but I see the purpose it serves. Asking a team "What's the ask?" is a way of explicitly asking what the concrete requests are which can be documented and followed up on (i.e. "circle back"), whereas just asking for "requests" is more like asking for preferences, which may not be binding, or a vague direction to go for planning.

For those not aware of them, Design Within Reach has a lot of nice famous designed furniture and shelving, but pricey. They often have 15% off season sales though. Good place to shop if you're into the stuff seen in this blog post.

[1] https://shop.noguchi.org/collections/akari-light-sculptures