The AI Landslide Is Happening

When it comes to AI changing the tech world, we’re at a juncture where you’ve either:

seen some shit with your own eyes or you believe your imagination of where this is going
or, you haven’t and you’re dubious

It feels like people are living in a fractured reality. For the moment, that is stable. But reality is not completely subjective. The way we each get to live in the world is shaped by things outside of our subjective perspective. That is going to hit all of us, regardless of what we believe.

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CDAP: a revolutionary way of working with AI agents

I have adopted a new way of taking on complex projects, and it is radically increasing my productivity. The idea is simple: I use documents as the shared canvas for collaboration between myself and chatbot sessions. The result is far more powerful than the sum of its parts.

I call it chatbot+document-assisted projects, or CDAPs.

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Brave new world: rethinking software development

We’re in the midst of a massive pivot in the entire line of work of software development. At least in some places, like where I work, everything is different.

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Truly persistent terminals in VSCode and Cursor

There are times when I am embarrassed to realize that I have accepted a painful limitation for years. In this case, it is my resistance to restarting my IDEs because I don’t want to lose my terminals. Now, thanks to a burst of motivation and a modern chatbot, I’m setup for my IDEs to resume exactly where they left off.

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$5 millionaire for a week: riches to rags in the startup world

For a few brief moments, my stock holdings in my former employer were hypothetically worth $5 million. This is the wild story of how I realized less than 1% of that value.

I’ll be pretty specific about some of the numbers, because equity compensation is a mystery to most people. Until I went through this, I never knew what’s possible and what’s normal. It’s a very complicated topic, but I hope that by sharing a real world situation, someone else might be able to learn something useful.

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Ready or not: The Fake Story of Music

A cartoon rocket ship launching, leaving behind an exhaust cloud and musical notes

For almost a year, I have been crafting and re-crafting a project I call The Fake Story of Music. It has been stuck in its present state for more than half of that time, and there’s so much more I want to do before it matches the vision in my head. However, I think it’s already pretty good and I’m letting go of my perfectionism.

Start with the story behind the fake story, or jump right in.

Let me know what you think in the comments on this post.

LLMs think

It’s interesting to see scientific people categorically reject the notion that LLMs “think”. People write them off as “fancy autocomplete” or regurgitating their source material, and conclude that they do something categorically different than what humans can do. That it’s all just a parlor trick. I think¹ that’s wrong.

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GraphQL was not the future

The GraphQL logo. Credit: the GraphQL Foundation

Six years ago, I wrote Is GraphQL The Future? for the Artsy Engineering Blog. At the time, I thought it was possible devs might bypass REST and reach directly for GraphQL when designing APIs. We can now confidently say that the answer is “no”, but I’m still very proud of that piece, and I think I was right about a lot of other things.

I find myself revisiting GraphQL for the first time since working at Artsy, and the piece has been a useful refresher. I think I really nailed describing what GraphQL actually is, rather than analogizing it to things it has fundamental differences with.

So, what happened to GraphQL?

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Rust: First impressions

My new company uses Rust heavily for its backend systems. I’ve been interested in Rust since its beta days, but only from a distance. I was very intrigued by the ownership system, which is Rust’s most distinctive and innovative feature. I also knew it inherited a lot from languages like Scala and OCaml. How hard could it be?

Read on for some loosely organized hot takes.

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Arc of a job search

It is always helpful to have a roadmap for an unfamiliar experience. I did not, as I embarked on an intense job search. But maybe my reflection will be useful to others.

I noticed that the process has followed an arc. Much like chess, it has a distinct opening, middlegame, and endgame. Each of these phases has a very different feel, and has required me to optimize in different ways.

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