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Earlier this month, I used Claude to port (parts of) an Emacs package into Rust, shrinking the execution time by a factor of 1000 or more (in one concrete case: from 90s to about 15ms). This is a variety of yak-shave that I do somewhat routinely, both professionally and in service of my personal computing environment. However, this time, Claude was able to execute substantially the entire project under my supervision without me writing almost-any lines of code, speeding up the project substantially compared to doing it by hand.
I worked at Stripe for about seven years, from 2012 to 2019. Over that time, I used and contributed to many generations of Stripe’s developer environment – the tools that engineers used daily to write and test code. I think Stripe did a pretty good job designing and building that developer experience, and since leaving, I’ve found myself repeatedly describing features of that environment to friends and colleagues. This post is an attempt to record the salient features of that environment as I remember it.
I was recently introduced to the paper “Seeing the Invisible: Perceptual-Cognitive Aspects of Expertise” by Gary Klein and Robert Hoffman. It’s excellent and I recommend you read it when you have a chance. Klein and Hoffman discuss the ability of experts to “see what is not there”: in addition to observing data and cues that are present in the environment, experts perceive implications of these cues, such as the absence of expected or “typical” information, the typicality or atypicality of observed data, and likely/possible past and future time trajectories of a system based on a point-in-time snapshot or limited duration of observation.
This December, the imp of the perverse struck me, and I decided to see how many days of Advent of Code I could do purely in compile-time C++ metaprogramming. As of this writing, I’ve done two days, and I’m not sure I’ll make it any further. However, that’s one more day than I planned to do as of yesterday, which is in turn further than I thought I’d make it after my first attempt.
More in technology
Another day, another opportunity to rate my 2025 Apple predictions! iPad Here’s what I predicted would happen with the base iPad this year: I fully expect to see the 11th gen iPad in 2025, and I think it will come with a jump to the A17 Pro or
Home file servers can be very useful for people who work across multiple devices and want easy access to their documents. And there are a lot of DIY build guides out there. But most of them are full-fledged NAS (network-attached storage) devices and they tend to rely on single-board computers. Those take a long time […] The post A lightweight file server running entirely on an Arduino Nano ESP32 appeared first on Arduino Blog.
This weekend, a small team in Latvia won an Oscar for a film they made using free software. That’s not just cool — it’s a sign of what’s coming. Sunday night was family movie night in my home. We picked a recent movie, FLOW. I’d heard good things about it and thought we’d enjoy it. What we didn’t know was that as we watched, the film won this year’s Academy Award as best animated feature. Afterwards, I saw this post from the movie’s director, Gints Zilbalodis: We established Dream Well Studio in Latvia for Flow. This room is the whole studio. Usually about 4-5 people were working at the same time including me. I was quite anxious about being in charge of a team, never having worked in any other studios before, but it worked out. pic.twitter.com/g39D6YxVWa — Gints Zilbalodis (@gintszilbalodis) January 26, 2025 Let that sink in: 4-5 people in a small room in Latvia led by a relatively inexperienced director used free software to make a movie that as of February 2025 had earned $20m and won an Oscar. I know it’s a bit more involved than that, but still – quite an accomplishment! But not unique. Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas produced her Grammy-winning debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in their home studio. And it’s not just cultural works such as movies and albums: small teams have built hugely successful products such as WhatsApp and Instagram. As computers and software get cheaper and more powerful, people can do more with less. And “more” here doesn’t mean just a bit better (pardon the pun) – it means among the world’s best. And as services and products continue migrating from the world of atoms to the world of bits, creators’ scope of action grows. This trend isn’t new. But with AI in the mix, things are about to go into overdrive. Zilbalodis and his collaborators could produce their film because someone else built Blender; they worked within its capabilities and constraints. But what if their vision exceeded what the software can do? Just a few years ago, the question likely wouldn’t even come up. Developing software calls for different abilities. Until recently, a small team had to choose: either make the movie or build the tools. AI changes that, since it enables small teams to “hire” virtual software developers. Of course, this principle extends beyond movies: anything that can be represented symbolically is in scope. And it’s not just creative abilities, such as writing, playing music, or drawing, but also more other business functions such as scheduling, legal consultations, financial transactions, etc. We’re not there yet. But if trends hold, we’ll soon see agent-driven systems do for other kinds of businesses what Blender did for Dream Well Studio. Have you dreamed of making a niche digital product to scratch an itch? That’s possible now. Soon, you’ll be able to build a business around it quickly, easily, and without needing lots of other humans in the mix. Many people have lost their jobs over the last three years. Those jobs likely won’t be replaced with AIs soon. But job markets aren’t on track to stability. If anything, they’re getting weirder. While it’s early days, AI promises some degree of resiliency. For people with entrepreneurial drive, it’s an exciting time: we can take ideas from vision to execution faster, cheaper, and at greater scale than ever. For others, it’ll be unsettling – or outright scary. We’re about to see a major shift in who can create, innovate, and compete in the market. The next big thing might not come from a giant company, but from a small team – or even an individual – using AI-powered tools. I expect an entrepreneurial surge driven by necessity and opportunity. How will you adapt?
Gary Marcus: Hot Take: GPT 4.5 Is a Nothing Burger Half a trillion dollars later, there is still no viable business model, profits are modest at best for everyone except Nvidia and some consulting forms, there’s still basically no moat, and still no GPT-5. Any reasonable person
If you hear the term “generative art” today, you probably subconsciously add “AI” to the beginning without even thinking about it. But generative art techniques existed long before modern AI came along — they even predate digital computing altogether. Despite that long history, generative art remains interesting as consumers attempt to identify patterns in the […] The post This vending machine draws generative art for just a euro appeared first on Arduino Blog.
