At Notion, we’ve been doing a quality sprint to increase our test coverage. Friday was the last day, and I wanted to get some more tests written. Time was short, which forced me to break my usual workflow. Not that I really have a usual workflow, these days. New AI-augmented programming tools and techniques come out every day. Everything is...
When generating code with an LLM, sometimes a task seems so laborious to specify that you may as well do it manually. But, sometimes, you can find just the right information to cinch together to let the model do its work. Here’s an example. At Notion, I had built some UI for a new feature. Ken, my designer colleague, revie…
At Notion, we’ve been doing a quality sprint to increase our test coverage. Friday was the last day, and I wanted to get some more tests written. Time was short, which forced me to break my usual workflow. Not that I really have a usual workflow, these days. New AI-augmented programming tools and techniques come out every day. Everything is...
When generating code with an LLM, sometimes a task seems so laborious to specify that you may as well do it manually. But, sometimes, you can find just the right information to cinch together to let the model do its work. Here’s an example. At Notion, I had built some UI for a new feature. Ken, my designer colleague, reviewed the working software...
One morning, my son woke up and came downstairs, deep in thought. He looked up at me and said, “Can we make a game, Mummy?” He’s seven and he’s called Jacob. He told me his game was called Exploding Kitties. He described the mechanics. Bad guys patrol up and down. If they see the player - a kitty - they laser them with their eyes and the kitty...
Cosmos, the book by Carl Sagan, does something remarkable. It starts in a distant part of the universe. It does a slow zoom, through desolate space, through groups of galaxies, through the Milky Way, through a remote arm of the Milky Way, through the solar system, past the most distant plants, finally into Earth. It shows us as a tiny note of...
I can teach you to program with AI
tl;dr: I’m offering coaching sessions where I teach professional engineers a smooth, stay-in-flow technique for AI-augmented programming. All the nitty gritty tips and setup were very helpful. — Andrew J. Email me to sign up!. Let the computer make you more productive My first job after university was working at a software company on their...
Using AI to build a tactical shooter
Enemy AI My latest side project is a 2D shooter where the enemies plan their attacks. I’m using a technique called Goal Oriented Action Planning. This approach was used in an old game from the 2000s called F.E.A.R. It was a sort of spooky tactical shooter. Think Rainbow Six but with that creepy girl from The Ring hanging about the place. In FEAR,...
A few months ago, I started sleeping badly. I had been excited about AI since ChatGPT came out. I’d loved using Cursor to help me program since Jay had told me about it over the phone as I walked from Eureka Heights back home to Noe Valley. But, in January, something changed. The proximate cause was a flood of new AI releases. o3-mini, Deep...
Below is a conversation about game design. I posted it on X and it got basically no likes. Which is insane because it’s magical. It comes from a documentary about Housemarque, an indie game studio, making their game, Nex Machina. The game director and head of marketing at Housemarque are discussing feedback they’ve received from Sony, their...
Become an AI-augmented engineer
My goal is to persuade you that, if you write code, you should use AI to help you. Here’s why. You want to be productive, and AI makes you more productive Your life as an engineer has two parts. First, you build software. You want to ship features. Earn money. Second, you work at getting faster at building software. You want to ship more...
It has been said that a novel user interface idea is not a durable differentiator for a product. The cycle is like this. An idea is conceived and integrated into a product. It provides value to the users of the product, and, initially, brings market differentiation and success to the product. But then it’s copied into other products and the...
Is this a good book for me, now?
I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal. Now, I believe it’s much more useful to say something in this form: this book has this value to this person in this context. For example, Mindset by Carol Dweck was life changing to me when I read it in 2016. The “me” part is...
I made an Apple Shortcut for ChatGPT. I use it on my: Apple Watch - “Hey Siri, talk to GPT”. Mac - run the shortcut and type into a text box. iPhone - talk or type. You can use this shortcut too! Get an OpenAI API key. Install the shortcut by visiting this link on your Mac or iPhone. Enter your API key. Privacy The API key will remain...
Programming environments Code Lauren - An online IDE for beginners. Includes a vm that lets the user run their program forwards or backwards. Watch a demo or try it out. Isla - A livecoding interface and programming language for young children. Games Pistol Slut - A platform shooter. Guns, grenades, parallax scrolling, particle effects. The...
See the books I’ve read on GoodReads. My bookshelves:
I set up my GPT-3 account so I can text with it over SMS. It’s pretty fun. To build this, I combined Airtable and Twilio. Here’s how it works: I text my query to a Twilio phone number. E.g. “What is a good thing to reflect on as I fall asleep?” Twilio receives the text and sends a webhook with the query to Airtable. Airtable receives the...
Future of Coding podcast interview
I was interviewed on the Future of Coding podcast. It was a really fun conversation. We talked about: My work at Airtable helping build tools for non-programmers to make software to do their work. Making software without writing code. GameMaker, an amazing environment for creating games with minimal code. It has been used to make killers...
I wanted to get a better intuition for exponential growth. So I made this exponential explorer. It lets me directly manipulate the starting amount, growth rate and number of periods of a graphed exponential. I can create multiple graphs and overlay them or compare them side by side to see the relative effects of the different factors. I can...
Use Step to get a more precise understanding of how code executes. You see a code listing. You click on the part of the code that you think will execute next. Then you click on the part of the code that you think will execute after that. And so on. This is just a proof of concept. You can’t enter your own code, but I plan to change that. Try...
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