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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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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search3 is coming

ChatGPT-created picture for the concept of holistic search. It is a surreal image of a magnifying glass suspended in the air looking at some kind of network of lights. There's a cloud in the background and various orbs surrounding the cloud with vague pictures inside.

Similar to how people have coined the term web3 to describe a proposed radical change in the consumer web landscape, unlocked by the blockchain¹, online search is about to be disrupted by the same technology that gave us ChatGPT. Soon, we’ll be able to search by describing what we’re looking for, holistically, rather than having to think like a search engine.

Or, at least, I hope so.

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Meet HyphenTech

GenAI logo of my made-up term

I’m proposing a new term—HyphenTech—to describe much of the tech landscape, in order encourage a better understanding of our current era of tech. Thinking of every new company as a “tech company” is too generic to be useful, but going just one level deeper is helpful.

Everybody wants to be a tech company. It’s a proven path to trillion dollar market caps. However, that path has also proven extremely narrow, only admitting a few companies into the cuatro comas club. Have we had 15 years of bad startups, or is something else going on?

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