Claude, sudo make me a sandwich.

People of the Northeast United States: if you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to live in Northern California, it feels like this. 365 days a year.

I ran in to an acquaintance at my favorite wine store, whom I’d never seen there before. It turns out he’s been shopping there for 30 years, and knows all the same people I do. I’ve “only” been shopping there for 20 years. I know it’s killing you, the place is The Wine and Cheese Cask in Somerville.

The most important skill in computer programming, or any other art, is criticism.

The most valuable skill in software is making an LLM do what your employer wishes it would.

I sense that some are confused because I express intense enthusiasm for AI while also mocking it at every chance. This is how I roll. I worked for Apple for several years, simultaneously believing it made the best human-facing platforms, while lambasting them at every turn for how bad they are.

Because of AI help, I’m getting about, if I had to guess, 4x done in the same amount of time I used to spend, leaving even more time to make quippy comments here.

Muhammad AI. #RuinALegendWithAI

For years and years and years, I emphasized “communication skills” on my resume as an advantage for working well with others. Now it has become the most important skill for working well with AI.

God give me the confidence of an AI chatbot that has just delivered its 20th consecutive “this time we finally got it!” declaration.

AI is neither useless nor flawless. To build something great with its help, you have to accept it as the most prolific idiot you’ve ever worked with.

AI is neither useless or flawless. To build something great with its help, you have to accept it as the most prolific idiot you’ve ever worked with.

I think there should be a special award for getting contiguous grey lines in Wordle. Wordle 1,719 4/6* ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Almost 20 years ago (!) I opined: “C is the New Assembly”, suggesting that we had moved beyond the need to optimize things by writing assembly code. If I wrote the same article today, it might be “Is Hand-written Code the New Assembly?” redsweater.com/blog/278/…

During any tech transition, the people who retain old-school knowledge while the new-school is developing are particularly valuable. Nobody needs to know punch cards anymore, but I’m sure that while punch cards were being phased out, extensive knowledge about them was incredibly useful.

Parallels to the past: C Programmers who benefitted from knowing Assembly. Java programmers who benefited from knowing manual memory management. UIKit programmers who benefited from knowing AppKit. SwiftUI programmers who … well, they kind of got a raw deal.

We’re at a turning point, where everybody 20 years old or so, and older, will have a fundamental advantage against every younger programmer when it comes to “coding with AI”. Younger programmers will have no natural incentives to learn non-vibe coding techniques. Things are gonna get weird.

Most of the downsides of inviting AI into your software development workflow can be mitigated by insisting on understanding everything you let it do.

Of all musical instruments, the most important is the ear.

Just coerced my family into watching the first episode of “The Wonder Years,” and I was pleasantly surprised how well it holds up. I’ll be curious to see how it progresses, but after episode 1, it’s even better than I remembered it.

I love that all of AI’s prompting/agents/skills/etc. infrastructure is 100% text based. It makes it so easy to monitor and update exactly what is being fed to the LLM. It would, of course, have been impossible to have such human-auditable configurations before software could “interpret” settings.

The only reason to lay off 40% of your staff because of AI is if 40% of your staff can’t use it. Smart companies will keep their staff and rocket past the competitors who fired everybody who might have mastered it.

If I talk to an AI critic for one minute, I can usually tell why they turn their nose up at it. They have no idea what it can do.

My $1M book idea is “How to Push Back on AI.” It’s a delicate art.

I used to buy almost all of my clothes second-hand. Recently I landed in a thrift store where I found this delightful western plaid, which called to me. In this age of thrift/vintage inflation, it’s not uncommon for a shirt like this to cost $60, but I picked it up for $15.

Music is a language just like any spoken one. It’s thrilling to learn a few basic phrases, and then there’s a long slog. Finally you become fluent, and self-expression is unlimited.

Inspired by a post about “starting over” with Claude after leaving ChatGPT: An important part of dealing with any AI is teaching it how to accept the guidance you’ve developed for every AI. Be cross-platform with your AI from the start.

Do you know how painful it is for a self-professed punk to admit that “Ripple”, by the Grateful Dead of all fucking bands, is the best song ever written? www.youtube.com/watch

AI has the intelligence of a 5000-year-old and the wisdom of a 5-year-old.

If my product were so essential to the government that the President threatened me in public with consequences of withholding it, I would think … that’s a pretty good day of PR. #Claude

Programmers aren’t going anywhere. But to be frank, “Able to leverage AI assistance for massive productivity gains” should be at the top of your resume.

Remember before the robots took over, it was popular to say “everybody should learn to code”? Now? Everybody should learn to sew by hand. Very satisfying.

I connected to Xcode’s MCP server (xcrun mcpbridge), and requested a list of all the tools. Then I threw that at Claude and had it whip up a “cheat sheet”. In case you’re curious what the agents have at their disposal.

The Xcode MCP support exposes a small list of “tools” that can be invoked by agents. They accept parameters and return results of a pre-determined type. Maybe if they keep working on it they’ll invent AppleScript dictionaries.

“By 2030, almost 80% of people had lost their jobs.” www.aicandy.be/giorgio-1

Listening to the “How I Built This” interview with Jim McKelvey of Square. He acknowledged our dear departed Tristan O’Tierney as the original iOS developer for the service. Tristan always described himself as a “co-founder” ... https://danielpunkass.micro.blog/2026/02/24/listening-to-the-how-i.html

I just hugged my 17-yo son goodnight. It was a good hug. We always tell each other “I love you.” I hugged him at drop-offs in elementary school and other parents lamented “I wish my kids hugged me.” I know every kid is different, but our kids hug us because we always hugged them. That’s the secret.

I’m not going to shut up about AI because I’m right and the nay-sayers are wrong. This tool has such a potential to help. Its costs should obviously be considered, but carefully compared to the benefits it provides.

What if somebody offered you a tool that could make everything you ever wanted to achieve in life easier? Or expand everything you ever wanted to achieve to another, previously unimagined level? That’s AI. You either see the potential or you don’t. But if you do, it changes everything.

Most of the pushback I received from my “what if AI helps me project lots of progress to other people” suggests that I’m talented enough to get the job done without AI. Yes, but AI accelerates it. People who already bring utility or delight to the world are the ones who can best leverage AI.

My life has been jam-packed with unexpected twists and turns. My kids are delighted when they learn about some new aspect of me. I recommend living an interesting enough life that your kids never run out of opportunities to be surprised by what you’ve done.

Growing up, I never thought I looked like my dad, but I bet people who knew him well think that I do now.

My oldest alma mater. After I dropped out of high school at 15, I found a way to go straight to the local community college. Since then I’ve graduated with BAs from UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State, but Cabrillo will always be special to me.

Something I haven’t heard a lot of discussion about, and maybe I’m just not tuned in to the right channels, is whether AI use can be justified by the amount of benefit it projects. When I use AI to accelerate adding a feature to my app, I am improving the lives of, at a minimum, thousands of people.

As somebody who has stuck his neck out to defend AI’s power usage based, in part, on uncertainty about whether it will prove to be a net gain or net loss, I will say that I STRONGLY disagree with OpenAI’s Sam Altman comparing the energy costs of human brains (essentially) to that of AI machines.

THIS entitled traveler is feeling pretty glad that he just arrived home tonight.

I convinced my 14yo to start investing in “the whole stock market” about a month ago. He put a good chunk of his savings into Vanguard’s VTI, and watched it steadily lose value. I’m proud of him for being disappointed but steadfast in his resolve to ride it out. The market has always risen.

Today I’ve released updates to Black Ink on every supported platform. redsweater.com/blog/4258…

I was born in 1975. I’m 50 years old. Jesse Jackson taught me that a Black person might be president, and Barack Obama taught me that one would. Links on the chain.

So @[email protected] racked up such a big bill from OpenAI that he has to go work there to pay it off? :p