Been getting back to writing more after a period where I was very focused on building. I missed it and feel like I have a bunch of ideas floating around that I want to write about.
I upgraded Hugo today.
It was mostly painless.
Apparently, the --verbose flag was removed and the Twitter shortcode was renamed to X.
I had to change my deploy script as a result of the former.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about making it clearer what prompts are used to elicit certain outputs when coding with agents.
Cloudflare’s OAuth library, written largely by LLM agents with human review, includes the prompts in the PR comments, making it much easier to figure out the author’s intent and imagine how you might prompt an agent to build something similar yourself.
I feel there needs to be a better way to automatically commit after each agent loop is executed, including the prompt as part of that commit. From there, we can fluidly move back and forth between commits as necessary, accepting or tossing the resulting output from the agent.
Today I learned the quote
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do
which is typically attributed to Steve Jobs was likely written by advertising copywriters at TBWA\Chiat\Day (the agency that created the campaign) rather than by Jobs himself1.
There were a ton of Cursor issues today. I also saw 429s all day on Bedrock in us-west-2.
I know Cursor just launched their 1.0 and I also heard Anthropic cut Windsurf’s access to Claude models and forced them to scramble to get Claude capacity via 3rd parties.
I’m working on a macOS app that I use daily. However, I also to development on it pretty much daily. It requires several macOS permissions. However, I was running into issues where the app had the same name but couldn’t share permissions. To switch between the two, I had to remove and re-add the permissions.
I gave Claude Sonnet 4 my problem and it walked my through to a solution without a hitch. I gave it screenshots as I made progress and it gave me the next steps or considerations to make if there were several possible paths forward.
I setup a Cloudflare tunnel so I can serve local sites on a public domain for easy testing on a real mobile device.
I’ve been keeping screenshots of projects as I’ve been working on them. Looking back through the progress is gratifying and motivating.
I built a RSS/JSON feed on top of Apple Notes. I thought it would be a convenient way to programmatically read and create actions based off the content in Notes. I think the Python wrapper on top of AppleScript that I was using ended up being a bit too slow for this to be practical. It was taking ~19s to load a feed of ~70 notes.
Chatting with a friend today and we were discussing easily deployable web apps, not tied to any particular build tool or framework. Aspirationally, just using a simple vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS stack.
LLMs are good at building with this stack and deploying them is a matter of hosting them as static assets. Generally, we don’t build with this stack because as things get more complicated, the codebase struggles to scale to the needs of the project. Or at least this is the conventional wisdom.
I definitely felt I think writing was a much more angsty process for me in the past. Maybe I’ve just gotten better at it over time or just found my own coping skills. I wouldn’t attribute all this to LLMs, but I think having a partner now, it’s like I actually don’t feel like I’m solitary anymore.
When I’m getting stuck on stuff, I actually have someone I can talk to and whatever I throw at them, I don’t have to give them all the content. I can just throw things and we go back and forth. Just that of not being a solo writer anymore, but having a collaborator is I think a really huge change for a lot of people.