I generated a lot of code this week.

In my opinion there are two ways to go about working with LLMs. 1) You do the same work as you used to do pre-AI, just with a lot less attention. 2) You get more work done than you used to, but with the same amount of attention towards the important stuff, just enabled by LLMs.

Every team (and solo dev) has a lot of work in the backlog, specially the things they actively have to de-prioritise. Things they want to get to as soon as possible, but can never seem to. These are the things that get enabled by LLMs.

For example, we had the task of making our design system as an independent npm package for about 3 years. Doing this itself is not that big of a deal, if your design system already lives separately and has its own package.json file. The more time consuming part is making sure all your imports still work across the monorepo, all the builds for upstream packages happen, the visual tests run fine, and the CI passes. The expected effort increases over time.

This kind of work is now perfect to be offloaded to the LLMs. Things either work at the end or they don’t, and they keep trying until they do.

As this need became more relevant for connecting the DS to Figma, I was able to get to this and other similar work with the help of mid-tier models, while saving the time to focus on the more important work with the same attention I would want to give it.

Book I want to read

‘The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think’, by Jennifer Ackerman

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman | Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Geniu…

It isn’t fiction, but I reached the book through a reddit → goodreads rabbithole and it seems so interesting.

Interesting reads and watches

1. Software for one
   Just plain truth at this point. I am planning to build an app where my brother and I can compete on step-count etc daily between Android and iOS without any extra bells and whistles. You can just build things now.

2. Magnolias Are So Old That They’re Pollinated by Beetles
   I love discovering these pieces of information

3. Let’s make the worst HTMX ever
   I would definitely try this. I just used HTMX in https://rational.tools/ because I didn’t want to bother finding something better, but I think this may replace that

A project I discovered

gVisor is the missing security layer for running containers efficiently and securely.

The Container Security Platform - gVisor

I updated the hardening script for my VPSs yesterday, and realised that I cannot use MicroVMs for user/work isolation as I was planning to with the shared vCPU that my cheap Hetzner and Ionos VPSs provide. Then I discovered this. Pretty cool, I think.

A photo I took

See you next week!