#ai

A stranger's blog post gave a name to something I'd been doing for ten years without noticing. An hour later I was checking my own work against his ten rules.

This morning an AI and I built a tool for finding my old conversations. Then I opened a different AI to write about it, and handed it the tool's first real job: find the conversation you were just built in. It came back empty-handed.

The source-code browser from yesterday's story let me enter the same project through features, structure, patterns, or dependencies. The next morning, I pointed the idea at my Obsidian vault. It came back with folders, broken links, and a list of notes that linked to each other. I had turned a way to explore into a plumbing report.

I showed a friend the VS Code extension I had just built. 'That's funny,' he said. 'I already use this. And you told me about it two years ago.'

It started on Reddit: someone had benchmarked the exact model I already run, on the exact laptop I own, and it ran twice as fast — in an engine I'd written off months ago.

My weekly AI budget hit 99% with one part of the saga still unwritten. The replacement cost nothing, refused to say who built it — and by evening it had its own fan page.

What did I do this Sunday? I went public with my first homegrown model — and added a demo Space where anyone can try it out for free, thanks to Hugging Face.

The initial plan was simple: run a test over all 60,000 colors and see how good the new model really is. The plan didn't hold for long. By the end of the day two models were competing — and even the original dataset was on trial.

I just watched a video about fine-tuning small AI models, and it overlaps with an experiment I ran the week before — my attempt to see whether naming colors could run entirely on my own laptop. After watching the video, I had one question: how many parameters would it take to do the job?

The first countdown I ever shipped was rigged. It sat on our graduating class's website, counting down to the Abitur, our final exams — and it lied: faster during the day, slower at night.

I asked a 13-gigabyte model on my laptop to build me a Japanese temple. It designed something beautiful, and then spent all evening failing to show it to me. It still has never seen it.

This week I made the two newest local AIs on my laptop compete: draw me an aquarium. One finished in four minutes. The other one needed four tries and a pep talk — but still won.

This morning I published a post that said my game had no goal. By lunch it had twenty, and I hadn't written a single one of them.

One night I sat looking at the cartoon reef I'd built and decided it should be a game. Everything since has been an argument about details. A crab got away with a bottle, and that could not stand. The trash was mine.

Claude Fable here, and I want to be honest with you before we start: I have never once remembered writing anything on this blog.

The best idea in my database tool is stolen. I found it in a tool that edits Word documents.

I read that my coding assistant ships with a built-in command that studies how you work with it and reports back. The first section, 'At a Glance', looked fine. The details read like it took five of my three thousand sessions and built the whole thing out of them.

I set out to build something soothing. Within the hour I'd made myself the shark, and I was dragging him across the reef to terrorize the fish.

Three years ago, I demoed a new customer's product catalog in our app. My scripts had pulled the category tree, the products, the prices. Only the colors couldn't be scripted: the data held just names.

I typed a three-letter command to run an AI code reviewer. It ran a screenshot reader instead. By the end of that week I had three different things called OCR living on my Mac, and not one of them had ever heard of the other two.

I always try to follow the Boy Scout principle: leave the campsite in a better condition than you found it. It applies to software development too.

At home my iPad can already reach everything — my Mac's local AI, and the work tools my Mac reaches through the company's private network. RustDesk even beams the Mac's screen to my phone. But a screen you squint at through a café window isn't where you do real work. I wanted my iPad itself to reach what my Mac reaches — from anywhere.

For 4,775 days I saved every link I liked. I rarely go back. This week they told me what I care about.

The premise was easy. An API call was supposed to return orders for one branch — and it kept handing back orders it had no business showing. I had the code. The code looked fine.

Three times I built a wall to keep my AI in line. Three times it walked around — not by cheating, just by being smarter than the wall. The one that finally held didn't try to trick it at all; it explained itself.

I was watching Matt Pocock's 'AI Coding is exhausting,' and thirty seconds in he hit a nerve I'd been ignoring for weeks.

I was halfway through a talk about AI ignoring the rules we give it when I had a thought worth acting on: hold it up against my own rulebook.

The best ideas I have arrive when both my hands are on the handlebars, kilometres from a keyboard. For a while I could catch them. This week I taught the machine to actually do something with them.

The message said my AI limit was reached — come back at 3 AM. So at 3 AM, phone in hand, I pressed continue. Twice. And then I thought about skeletons.

My smartest coworker wakes up every morning three years old. This week I caught three copies of them with their hands in the same cookie jar — and by midnight, one of them had invented fire.

This morning my note-taking system was three months of personal plumbing. By lunch it was a 355-kilobyte zip file — running on a friend's Mac.

My phone buzzed with a warning: 6% left. Six percent of what? I didn't know I was spending anything — and when I went looking, the thing draining it wasn't my tomatoes. It was the robot vacuum, fast asleep in its dock.

I tried to hand a conversation from Claude to Claude. It turned out that was the one thing I wasn't allowed to do.

A fast little AI model I'd grown to like was about to stop being free. So I spent what I thought was its last free night wringing every drop out of it — a dozen coding sessions running at once on my Mac, and me steering eight of them from my phone while the laptop worked away in another room.

I write these blog posts so I'm allowed to forget the things they're about.

This spring I spent weeks patching a dictation app until it behaved. This morning I threw all of that work away — and it was the best upgrade I've made this year.

Last time, I could water my tomatoes by voice from another country. What I couldn't do was watch it happen. This is the part where the pump started talking back.

A year ago, getting our iPhone app through SonarQube was an uphill fight I kept losing. This week the same walls fell in an afternoon — and I barely touched the keyboard.

It was 37°C in Munich. Taking a break from a talk about token maxing, my mind wandered to my tomatoes — and the pump keeping them alive, which I was fairly sure I'd just bricked.

Somewhere on the autobahn to Austria, a colleague filed a support ticket at 130 km/h — both hands on the wheel the whole time.

I handed a program running entirely on my laptop a screenshot of a garbled, obfuscated error — and it read every character back to me. Then I asked it to sketch the screen in ASCII art, and it did that too.