Riding home on the train. The repo on my work computer isn't up-to-date, but since these are all markdown files I can write and trust it will work when I upload later.

A bit of a dip in my new writing habit, mostly because my parents were in town for the weekend. Also maybe have some sort of lingering illness. Hoping it's just a temporary blip. I'm still enjoying the idea of this blog.

Been trying to take some stock of where my work and projects are at. The pace of AI experimentation feels a bit exhausting, and a lot of it feels like hype. At the same time there do appear to be some movements towards steerability, to interaction at a more feature-based and interpretable level that are interesting to me. I'm still looking to carve at the joints and put the right pieces together in the right order to make something that feels empowering and extended, rather than a replacement. But it varies day-to-day how achievable and likely I think that is.

One thing I'd like to explore more is how I should treat AI advancements in relation to kind of daily programming. I think Maggie Appleton mentioned feeling like focusing on craft in web engineering now feels a bit like you're working in the twilight of an era.

That fits with something I heard at the Infinite Wonderland event with Google. One of the artists, I think it was Shawna X, talked about an issue with AI speeding up the creation process too much. Where you didn't have this kind of ramp up time with an idea, where you're doing something like sketching or picking colors (or in my case I feel like the equivalent is kind of getting a project repo ready, getting everything structured, etc.). Your brain is often processing the larger project in the background during this period. There's this nice feeling of kinding of sharpening your tools as the shape of the thing hopefully starts to untangle a bit in your head.

If you can go from idea to prototype (or even artifact) too fast do you lose that valuable processing time?

Of course, as was brought up at the event, there's nothing stopping you from doing things the old way, from spinning up just how you want to. And the perspective that emerges from that may be even more valuable if others are skipping it. Everything should shake out. But it's hard to trust in the sort of deluge of things created (but that could make it all the more valuable to do).