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Code forces humans to be precise. That’s good—computers need precision. But it also forces humans to think like machines. For decades we tried to fix this by making programming more human-friendly. Higher-level languages. Visual interfaces. Each step helped, but we were still translating human thoughts into computer instructions. AI was supposed to change everything. Finally, plain English could be a programming language—one everyone already knows. No syntax. No rules. Just say what you want. The first wave of AI coding tools squandered this opportunity. They make flashy demos but produce garbage software. People call them “great for prototyping,” which means “don’t use this for anything real.” Many blame the AI models, saying we just need them to get smarter. This is wrong. Yes, better AI will make better guesses about what you mean. But when you’re building serious software, you don’t want guesses—even smart ones. You want to know exactly what you’re building. Current AI tools pretend writing software is like having a conversation. It’s not. It’s like writing laws. You’re using English, but you’re defining terms, establishing rules, and managing complex interactions between everything you’ve said. Try writing a tax code in chat messages. You can’t. Even simple tax codes are too complex to keep in your head. That’s why we use documents—they let us organize complexity, reference specific points, and track changes systematically. Chat reduces you to memory and hope. This is the core problem. You can’t build real software without being precise about what you want. Every successful programming tool in history reflects this truth. AI briefly fooled us into thinking we could just chat our way to working software. We can’t. You don’t program by chatting. You program by writing documents. When your intent is in a document instead of scattered across a chat log, English becomes a real programming language: You can see your whole system at once You can clarify and improve your intent You can track changes properly Teams can work on the system together Requirements become their own quality checks Changes start from clear specifications The first company to get this will own the next phase of AI development tools. They’ll build tools for real software instead of toys. They’ll make everything available today look like primitive experiments.
“I like to use sketches to validate ideas quickly, without a lot of investment in the wrong direction.” The Challenge The computing power that runs the world is hidden away in data centers that few people get to see. While many data centers are lights-out operations most of the time, people are still needed to update them, keep them running, and prevent and resolve outages. Those people need to know where their critical assets are in the labyrinth that is their global data center network. They need to know when areas get too hot, or get so cold and humid that condensation becomes a worry. In addition to data centers, large enterprises will also have smaller compute sites scattered across the nation or the world. Those sites are often physically unmanned with poor visibility into the health of critical systems. Operators need to know when potential issues arise and how to prioritize them. I help solve both of those problems. My Process Every design challenge starts with research. I put together extensive design research presentations with photos and video inside of real, working data centers. These included profiles of specific data center operators, personas/archetypes extracted from them, and detailed notes on pain points that customers face. Due to confidentiality concerns, heavily redacted and anonymized excerpts are available for eyes-only review upon request. Once the context and specific challenges are understood, it’s time to start rapidly prototyping solutions. I like to use sketches to validate ideas quickly, without a lot of investment in the wrong direction. Once I’ve put ideas in front of customers and gotten enough feedback to be confident in a direction, I produce specs for engineers to build the real thing. This frequently involves extensive annotation. In many cases the sketch is sufficient because the visual design of reusable elements has already been defined as part of a component library or as part of the product design guidelines. Of course, while sketches can convey functionality, if new elements are used for which I don’t already have a visual design specification, it’s important to provide fully realized mockups. Once the appropriate specifications are produced, I work extensively with software engineers. I write stories in JIRA, collaborate to find clever solutions to performance problems on Slack, and even contribute CSS here and there. Whatever I can do to ensure that the finished product is as good as our intentions.
In 2018 I worked with argodesign on an artificial intelligence client project, and Fast Company published an article on our work: This Is The World’s First Graphical AI Interface. For confidentiality reasons I can’t publicly go into more detail on the project than to link to that article. For the full case study, please contact me at hello@danieldelaney.net. AIGA Event During my time at argodesign we held an event with AIGA, the professional association for design, during which the team explained our point of view on artificial intelligence, and the way we approached designing interfaces for new technologies.
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Okay, I have to be doing something astronomically stupid, right? This should be working? I’m playing around with an App Clip and want to just run it on the device as a test, but no matter how I set things up nothing ever works. If you see what I’m doing wrong let me know and I’ll update this, and hopefully we can save someone else in the future a few hours of banging their head! Xcode App Clips require some setup in App Store Connect, so Apple provides a way when you’re just testing things to side step all that: App Clip Local Experiences I create a new sample project called IceCreamStore, which has the bundle ID com.christianselig.IceCreamStore. I then go to File > New > Target… > App Clip. I choose the Product Name “IceCreamClip”, and it automatically gets the bundle ID com.christianselig.IceCreamStore.Clip. I run both the main target and the app clip target on my iOS 18.6 phone and everything shows up perfectly, so let’s go onto actually configuring the Local Experience. Local Experience setup I go to Settings.app > Developer > App Clips Testing > Local Experiences > Register Local Experience, and then input the following details: URL Prefix: https://boop.com/beep/ Bundle ID: com.christianselig.IceCreamStore.Clip (note thne Apple guide above says to use the Clip’s bundle ID, but I have tried both) Title: Test1 Subtitle: Test2 Action: Open Upon saving, I then send myself a link to https://boop.com/beep/123 in iMessage, and upon tapping on it… nothing, it just tries to open that URL in Safari rather than in an App Clip (as it presumably should?). Same thing if I paste the URL into Safari’s address bar directly. Help What’s the deal here, what am I doing wrong? Is my App Store Connect account conspiring against me? I’ve tried on multiple iPhones on both iOS 18 and 26, and the incredible Matt Heaney (wrangler of App Clips) even kindly spent a bunch of time also pulling his hair out over this. We even tried to see if my devices were somehow banned from using App Clips, but nope, production apps using App Clips work fine! If you figure this out you would be my favorite person. 😛
Halloween is creeping up on us like some kind of impatient ghoul, which means that half the maker community is currently scrambling to throw together some spooky projects. Those projects become a lot more approachable when you start with something the already exists—anything, really. For example, Appalachian Forge Works began this Halloween vending machine project […] The post An old PC case becomes a Halloween vending machine appeared first on Arduino Blog.
Being chronically late to meetings sucks. Not only is it very rude, but you’re signalling that you don’t value your coworkers’ time. However, I’ve picked up a technique that works unreasonably well within a team.1 If you are late to the first meeting of the day three times within a quarter, then you will have to make pancakes for the whole team. Let’s say that you have a daily stand-up taking place at 10:00. Arriving at 10:00:59: completely OK. Arriving at 10:01:00: You’re one step closer to making pancakes! Keep in mind that you may hit some obstacles when implementing this rule, so feel free to adjust it. When proposing this idea in my current team, I learned that the office does not offer pancake-making facilities. The pancakes can be substituted for other types of cake or bringing in something else, as long as the team gives prior approval of that modification. The pancake strikes can also be pooled together and spent with your teammates if they wish to do so. If you’re struggling with your team being late to your daily meeting(s), then go ahead and add this rule to the working agreement. You do have a working agreement set up, right? Right? And a free security tech tip to close out: if you see an unlocked work laptop at the office, open your internal chat application of choice on it and try posting to a public channel that you’ll be bringing cake/beers/candy to the office. Works wonders for enforcing the habit of locking your laptop up when leaving the desk! to be fair, the sample size is two, but it has worked out really well in both! ↩︎
In the worlds of programming and robotics, turtles are entities — either virtual or physical robots— that follow commands to move around a 2D plane. Those are usually very simple commands, such as “move forward 10 units” or “rotate 90 degrees clockwise,” and they help people learn some programming fundamentals (like Logo in the ’80s!) […] The post Turtle bots, Gestalt principles, and emergent art appeared first on Arduino Blog.
It was probably going to happen sooner or later, but Microsoft has officially released the source code for 6502 BASIC. The specific revision is very Commodore-centric: it's the 1977 "8K" BASIC variant "1.1," which Commodore users know better as BASIC V2.0, the same BASIC used in the early PET and with later spot changes from Commodore (including removing Bill Gates' famous Easter egg) in the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. I put "8K" in quotes because the 40-bit Microsoft Binary Format version, which is most familiar as the native floating point format for most 8-bit BASICs derived from Microsoft's and all Commodore BASICs from the PET on up, actually starts at 9K in size. In the C64, because there is RAM and I/O between the BASIC ROM and the Kernal ROM, there is an extra JMP at the end of the BASIC ROM to continue to the routine in the lowest portions of the Kernal ROM. The jump doesn't exist in the VIC-20 where the ROM is contiguous and as a result everything past that point is shifted by three bytes on the C64, the length of the instruction. This is, of course, the same BASIC that Gates wanted a percentage of but Jack Tramiel famously refused to budge on the $25,000 one-time fee, claiming "I'm already married." Gates yielded to Tramiel, as most people did then, but I suspect the slight was never forgotten. Not until the 128 did Microsoft officially appear in the credits for Commodore BASIC, and then likely only as a way to push its bona fides as a low-end business computer. Microsoft's source release also includes changes from Commodore's own John Feagans, who rewrote the garbage collection routine, and was the original developer of the Commodore Kernal and later Magic Desk. The source code is all in one big file (typical for the time) and supports six machine models, the first most likely a vapourware 6502 system never finished by Canadian company Semi-Tech Microelectronics (STM) better known for the CP/M-based Pied Piper, then the Apple II, the Commodore (in this case PET 2001), the Ohio Scientific (OSI) Challenger, the Commodore/MOS KIM-1, and most intriguingly a PDP-10-based simulator written by Paul Allen. The source code, in fact, was cross-assembled on a PDP-10 using MACRO-10, and when assembled for the PDP-10 emulator it actually emits a PDP-10 executable that traps on every instruction into the simulator linked with it — an interesting way of effectively accomplishing threaded code. A similar setup was used for their 8080 emulator. Unfortunately, I don't believe Allen's code has been released anywhere, though I'd love to be proven wrong if people know otherwise. Note that they presently don't even mention the STM port in the Github README, possibly because no one was sure what it did. While MACRO-10 source for 6502 BASIC has circulated before and been analysed in detail, most notably by Michael Steil, this is nevertheless the first official release where it is truly open-source under the MIT license and Microsoft should be commended for doing so. This also makes it much easier to pull a BASIC up for your own 6502 homebrew system — there's nothing like the original.
