Stormtrooper VLOG #3: Cold Duty on Hoth – with TK-42Greg YouTube video by Artificial Cheese

Pretty great!

youtu.be/DhLc9dLtmIo?...

In the past year we've had both kids with serious issues staying multiple nights in the hospital and a few extra trips to the ER on top of that just for fun. Trying to remind myself there are some pretty good reasons for the slower progress on ... like literally everything else in my life.

Nobody picks up a guitar and expects to get able to play a whole song without every practicing.

And yet, most people freak out when they try learning a new business skill, expecting to instantly be good on your first go.

Amazing to think how many good things we don't have because of this.

"What if I accidentally by strawberries and there's a moldy one at the bottom?!?"

pretty sure that's it.

My guess is people will say "evals" but then nobody actually does them. 😅

☕️ Spending a few hours on a presentation covering DoD CyberSecurity alphabet soup so I can head off a bunch of bad takes on sales calls or status meetings. I'll thank myself later.

What are all my friends spending their time on today?

Find myself in the surprising position of having a job, as in working as a W2, for the last 5 years. Did not see that one coming. And then on top of that I love my job. WTF. Though that's probably the only combination of those two things that would work.

I would love to hear how other people are thinking about this.

As product manager of a SaaS pondering the impact of LLMs on our business I ask myself:

1. What does it mean for our business model if devs are 10x faster?

2. What would I do differently if I was building FORGE today?

3. What problems do our customers have where LLMs can give them super powers?

Procrastinating a workout in 2025:

I need to lift weights… oh! but before I can do that I really should track my numbers so I should quickly vibe code a little weight lifting tracking app and THEN I can finally get to lifting weights.

AI CEOs: We'll have programmers in a box that you can rent for cheap by the end of the year! A new country of geniuses in a data center in a few years!

Apple: We'll have an LLM version of Siri by 2027.

This is all on a non-trivial react app that is over five years old with an active user base.

And I'm not even a full time dev anymore.

My mood swings aside, in the last quarter I have used AI to:

1. Port our RoR design system
2. Lookbook to Storybook
3. JS to TS
4. Bootstrap to Tailwind
5. Use the new design system

Last night I bumped test coverage from 60% to 75% with my latest AI automation while watching Star Trek.

A post in my feed this morning, "Vitest is so much better than Jest!"

For a second I had that JS ecosystem FOMO, "Damn, already so invested in Jest"

Then I self-soothed, "I can write a little AI automation to port to the new hotness."

Then I had sinking feeling of doom about AI taking my job.

Invented by Beth out of frustration as she would listen to me try to explain what I did for a living to people “He has a fake internet job”. 😆

Also true that most of my big flops in the past can be traced to a lack of effectual thinking. 😅

Oh man. I completely forgot about Ska.

I just blew $10k hiring a consultant to do this type of work for me because I didn’t know he was full of shit and he accomplished nothing. Looking forward to learning the basics here so I can at least know what I don’t know!

This also hints at something that’s maybe not obvious because of the stories we tend to prefer to tell but is at least anecdotally true in circles I run in: most successful entrepreneurs are already highly skilled in the problem domain they start their business in.

I feel like I should have merit badges for all the social networks I've been through, like: "You just had to be there for the Twitter 2013 tour man, was wild."

I still remember tossing Oliver a ball in your backyard when he was like two years old and he crushed it with his bat. That kid’s got some athletic abilities! Congrats to him and his team!

Fuck that guy.

Hey friend! 👋

And they can remind us of old text boxes we used to like!

It is amazing isn't it? I think the way products are designed around LLMs right now this is inevitable though. There are so many interesting design problems to solve here. How do you put a human in the loop for outputs that have consequences? How should LLMs express uncertainty (can they even??)?

I turned off Twitter a few years ago and never wanted to turn it back on but I miss some old friends and I'm so excited to reconnect!

Maybe the real Twitter was the friends we made along the way

same!

Hey dude!