Weeknotes vol. 4: Coding like it’s the 80s (with stickers)
By Garrett,
This week saw major progress with both the web based application and the marketing website. Granted, I did find the Code Like It’s the 80s playlist by JetBrains on Spotify which has been quite the productivity booster.
Making thought capturing as simple as it can be while ensuring the data is ready to be processed in an easy yet useful way later isn’t an easy task. And as I get deeper into processing thoughts into useful things, the decisions to ensure simplicity are getting harder and harder. It’s a puzzle but it’s a fun puzzle, and this week was very puzzly.
(I guess that’s why most software gets so bloated.)
On the design front Phil got to a good place with the marketing website and I’m ready to launch it yesterday. It captures Braindrop perfectly.
For the first time in 18 years my work day is spent worry-free with no other responsibility other than build this little software company at my pace and how I want. On one hand, this is a scenario that I wouldn’t have ever imaged given the road it took to get here, and on the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to manufacture some urgency! As I write these weekly notes I’m realizing that the pace could be turned up a few notches.
Next week will see some hard deadlines added to the calendar.
Oh, and I ordered a limited supply of coasters from Sticker Mule! If you want to spice up your desk, join our email list and I’ll be sending to the first 100 subscribers.
Like this? Get email updates or grab the RSS feed like it’s 2008.
More from the blog
-
The state and the machine
> What little we saw of Fable and Mythos offers both cause for excitement and concern. It was widely and credibly seen as a model of a completely different caliber from those that had come before. Perhaps the risks in this instance were overstated or amplified for political ends. What is more profound is that the short time we had with the models offered a clear glimpse of a future in which a single company is making significant progress toward a superintelligence with the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation-states or even massive corporations. That juncture was never going to ar…
-
We have ways of making you pay
> The true cost of AI work is hard to measure; the value of AI work is also hard to measure, and metering changes which of those two blindnesses you notice first. It drags the cost into the light, itemised and arriving monthly, while the value stays diffuse, lagging and easy to argue about. That asymmetry is exactly why the panic is showing up now, ahead of any definitive verdict on whether the spending was worth it.Simon Willison did the arithmetic on himself. He pays $200 a month across his Anthropic and OpenAI consumer plans, and when he ran the [ccusage](https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusa…
-
Bloated: how chat made you fat
> It helps to remember the time you save generating a document is not free. It is borrowed from every person who has to read it, at interest, and the longer the distribution list the worse the rate of return.The pitch for writing with a language model is that it saves you time: you describe the memo, the model produces it and 90 seconds later you have four pages (okay, maybe forty) instead of a blank document. Someone still has to read those pages though. The model did not remove that work. It just moved it downstream to your colleagues or suppliers, and on the way it produced more than any h…
-
Apple’s bicycle without a chain
Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. Apple Intelligence so far is more like a bicycle with no chain. The frame is gorgeous, and the engineering is extraordinary, but you cannot get far with it.In early 2025, Xe Iaso published a [piece that landed like a brick through a window](https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/) in the Apple developer community. The argument was simple and damning: Apple had built the holy grail of trusted compute with Private Cloud Compute, a genuinely unprecedented piece of security infrastructure, only to fill it with half-baked not…
-
Weeknotes vol. 17: business, schmizness
Hello and happy casual weeknotes Friday.I stopped writing these [about a year ago](/blog/weeknotes-16/) when I began the transition into consulting (solving fun and challenging problems), and to say a lot has changed since then would be the understatement of the century.In summary: [Iain](/blog/iain/) joined full time, we're helping people solve operational problems and optimize their work across pretty much all aspects of business, and we're having a lot of fun doing it. Iain has his masters in AI for Business, which has pushed me to go down the biggest rabbit hole I've been down since HTML/…
