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The hero of Project Hail Mary does things no lone scientist ever could—unless he brought along something like an AI coding agent. That's the hopeful vision of AI: not a replacement, but a quiet tool for doing much bigger things.
There are now two kinds of software: gears and ghosts. The best systems will combine them both.
Jonathan Milton on turning his healthcare-operations expertise into useful tools — a calculator that exposes the fully loaded cost of staffing, and a game to coach future health care execs on solving the human problems well.
Jim Hanas spent his career in publishing, most recently as VP of Marketing at HarperCollins, but he hadn't been "under the hood" of technology in twenty years. Then a couple of friends got him "Claude-pilled", and within weeks he'd launched smallpressinsights.com.
Personal software lets you build for the way your brain actually works—not the way someone else thinks it should.
Beta round 2 of the Conjuring Code book launches Friday, May 15th. If you'd like to be a beta reader, sign up here.
Mark Wochner on building software in hotel rooms across three continents, his Historicast app for looking up the weather in the past, and why building for an audience of one might be the most freeing thing you can do.
Sharon Klardie on her "AI minions" and how she's using them to build Board Forge for nonprofit boards, publish puzzle books, and prototype a math game for her 10-year-old.
LLMs are guessing machines—deeply capable and fundamentally untrustworthy at the same time. Knowing when to trust their guesses is the key to using them well.
When AI coding goes sideways, you have an option programmers never really had before: just take a do-over.
Jacquelyn Halpern on how she got started with AI-assisted coding, and how she created a cooking app for herself and her family called Lil' Chef.
AI now handles the tedious, mysterious "bad hard" parts of programming, leaving you free to focus on the "good hard" part of figuring out what's actually worth making.
When software becomes as cheap and disposable as a Post-It note, we'll use it for things we haven't even imagined yet.
The first draft of Conjuring Code (the book) is done! It's now in the hands of early beta readers.
Programming legend Steve Yegge is right: programming is going to be for everybody. And it's going to be the most amazing thing.
Is it OK to let AI write code for you? It depends on three things: longevity, reach, and consequences.
In most fields, software is so crappy, it's practically a bad word. The great deflation in software costs is very good news.
The Super Bowl ad that captures the joy of discovering you really can build software now, even if you couldn't before.
Programming is a series of decisions. AI moves you up the decision pyramid by making all the choices you don't want or need to make.
AI is uneven and changing rapidly. Are you guilty of having an AI fixed mindset?
There are lots of things you can do with AI, and in my opinion, most of them are bad. The only slam dunk for AI is using it to make software.
This feels like the zeitgeist right about now ...
Building software is among the best things you can do with AI, because you can always work on a copy.
I am anti-slop, and I think using AI to make software you actually care about is anti-slop, too.