"Cheating is often more efficient"

Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless

Lessons:

- The only way to constrain what the lawnmower does, is make sure what do desire is enforced by law (physics)

- A reminder, the lawnmower will chop your hand off and think nothing of it

- The lawnmower is not "evil" but if the laws that constrain it allow for evil behavior, it may do "evil" things.

If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.

Some people say AI is great and some people say AI is terrible - but how can anyone compare these things because they depend so much on the skill of the user.

Case in point - the demo video. The user says "find me all the HCI articles on hacker news" and then a research task started... ok great so far.

Then the user says "they should be made into slides"

What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean "from the set of results you found, narrow them to be only the ones that have been made into slides" or does the user mean "I would like you to then take those results and make them into slides"

There will be people who read this and say its obviously the former and people who read this and say its obviously the latter, and neither of those is the point I am trying to make, the point is that its very ambiguous and if the AI did the "wrong" one, then the user would complain that AI is garbage but the real problem is that the instruction was very unclear because the users communication skill was poor.

I dont think they can be fully autonomous yet, I still need to guide them.

I think an important aspect of the AI enabled future is going to be good taste, good aesthetics.

With AI its too easy for someone with no taste to say "omg, add X ... omg add Y .... omg and also add Z!"

And what you get is a rube Goldberg whizbang machine with 1000 dials and whistles - even worse is that because the creator has worked on it so long, to them it doesnt appear to be this, because the cognitive burden has never been jarring because the myriad of additional features were added slowly and their perception had time to adjust, almost like a "detail version" of hedonistic adaption.

Less is more

Latin amator, French amateur, means lover.

In this sense, it means somebody who is doing something because he/she loves it, not as his/her profession. It is not a large semantic shift to infer that he/she is not as skilled.

Oh, I have. A LOT! In my friend group theres at least 5 of these right now. They work day jobs (that they dislike), they try to build a side hustle but never get it off the ground because they endlessly rewrite perfectly serviceable software and never release, the reason is:

- they believe that running a startup only requires writing a good product

- they avoid releasing because thats "judgement day" and might flop

- they think if they code it "just right" a money Waterfall will open up magically like a lottery ticket win and be instant success

- they believe that because theres the occasional exception to these rules above, it will happen to them too (everyone thinks they are the special exception,) because thats easier than accepting building a successful business takes discipline, hard work, and doing the tasks you dont want to do.

You havent come across them because by definition they never release and they dont share (they are embarrassed it might fail) so theres thousands and thousands of them, grinding away under false assumptions. They enjoy the act of building (which is totally cool!) but think thats all there is to it. Convinced that just one more rewrite is the thing holding them back from success - because they'd rather rewrite than talk to users. Millions of people doing this, millions of dreams that will die, because /just one more rewrite/

Just because you havent seen them, doesnt mean they aren't there

50% because by the time you get to this your typing speed has crossed a threshold of no longer being the bottleneck and 50% because you are experienced enough not to make all the silly little mistakes and your unit of work is larger and more complex

I think theres still a lot of room for traditional engineering - methods that have been robust enough to stand the test of time are enduring because they work! Hype will always hype, but when its delivery time and the system is stress tested, we will see what happens...

You explored agentic coding, didn't like losing control to vibes, so stop doing it.

The beauty of pet projects is that they are yours to define, you set the terms, if you dont like how agentic coding played out then just dont do it?

You're not under pressure to ship, youre not being forced by a manager, this is yours : so own it. The only "pressure" you are under is the pressure in your mind that youre getting from sitting on social media drinking hype juice all day, the lesson here is the motto of the royal society - Nullis in verba- THINK FOR YOURSELF