I've been coding pretty intently on something in my off hours (I'm excited to share more once it takes shape). Like the carpenters I watch on YouTube working almost exclusively with hand tools, this is very much a labor of love, so I'm being very deliberate with when, where and why I use AI. I've very sparingly offloaded the soulless, non-creative, non-gratifying code to Claude in the same way the carpenters I watch will occasionally use a power drill when they need 32 precise holes. What I haven't accounted for was, as I've been working on this, my daughter taking a keen interest in watching me code. She's enjoyed watching me iterate, refine, expand - and she's asked with a lot of curiosity about design-thinking that goes into building something from the ground up - or, more precisely, as things have gone from generic to specific. To simplify the principles, I related things to grammar: Describing our weekend to a friend we can quickly and succinctly en...

I'm afraid we're losing our fingerprints. I love using, experimenting and making myself more efficient with AI. And I love being creative with AI - but only where AI is in the early stages of creativity, part of the brainstorming, refinement, and iterations. The final result, I try to make fully my own. (Admittedly, in the early and still novel days, I was regularly generating images and just using them as-is but this was before developing a more discerning eye for AI. Since then, I use AI as a launching pad not as the final product.) What worries me though, is how much I'm seeing AI get used right out of the box in our everyday lives. Posters on community bulletin boards. Homework assignments from elementary schools. User groups promoting meet ups.  What used to be a rich tapestry of people's individual tastes - from the poorly designed posters with clashing colors and excessive use of Comic Sans, to hand-drawn photocopies, to really well made amateur designs - is now ...

I've been writing some form of my blog for more than 25 years now - I think I started before it was even called 'blogging.' I'm that old. In 2026, when you have that much writing readily available on the internet, there's really only one thing left to do: Feed it to your favorite LLM, ask it to deeply analyze your writing, build memories for storage, and instruct that, hence forth, it should respond in your own voice. Why... why would I upload my thoughts to the machine overlords? I had a theory: A lot of my posts tend to be exploratory or pursuasive ideas, and (as observed by GPT) "favor metaphors, are often a bit playful, and grounded in shared experience rather than top-down instruction; warmth over authoritative;" and I think I write this way because it's also how I best receive and process information. I like a story, real-world examples, a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor and flexibility over rigidity. If GPT could explain things to me the...

5 years ago, I wanted to help the engineers on my team stretch their coding skills by presenting them with an entirely new set of challenges than the typical tedium that can come with building business applications day in and day out. Having built so many games over my own career, one unique element I've always enjoyed is building out the game's AI. After building the core engine, collision detection, and all that - building the AI was always a fun, and very different, challenge. I'd have to think it through: if I was a player, playing this character - what would my own in-game approach be? To be fair, what elements could my AI player see and interact with, and what would they not see, how could I scale my strategy to different difficulty levels. Expressing your strategy in code requires a different line of thinking. It may not directly translate to writing better business or consumer applications, but it stretches your computational thinking and problem solving. Plus it...

Can I be so bold as to create my own business acronym? What an apropos way to start this, because the acronym I want to create applies to that very question. Let me re-start by, somewhat apologetically, confessing that I'm one of those distracting types who gets an idea, feels really passionate about it, thinks it will change the world and will offer it up for consideration. Over the years, I've learned to balance out the negative qualities that come with it: I try to focus on nuance, rather than chase novelty; I started keeping more ideas to myself and doing more to vet my own solutions before offering them. While I'm a work-in-progress, I will admit I do love sitting in a meeting where there all problems and no solutions. The gears that start spinning at full speed in my brain can cause such a strong buzzing that people will look at their phones, thinking they're getting a call. One danger I learned long ago about getting so passionate about a new idea is that it can ...

It's always interesting to pit Gemini vs GPT using the same prompt and source data. There's never a clear winner - and it really points to how important the precision and quality of the prompt is.  Google's Gemini definitly wins on this one. It's really strong, but not great (zooming in, you can see the edges and there was overall quality loss) - however the speed of the update was impressve (<20 seconds!).

Will input change with AI? Speech detection with AI is remarkable and, in particular, the whisper-mode lets people speak comfortably in public. Folks are using it for everything from writing emails, creating presentations, and even writing code. But does that mean the death of my beloved keyboard? I like being as hands-free as the next driver (well, maybe not all drivers...) but right now it seems voice is meant to fill the gap when I can't use a keyboard, it's not the default.  There's the obvious social issue of talking outloud to a device. Whisper-mode and earbuds solves the privacy issue, but even then I've only found voice-input to be useful when I'm being conversational (researching, brainstorming, learning) or directional (send a short msg, asking for music to be played, requesting directions). It's a different story when I'm writing, editing, iterating, refining. It's hard to edit on the fly with spoken instructions. While reading is linear, writ...