Elliot Smith

50%+ of the advice out today around how to use AI to build stuff either assumes you have a roadmap from pre-AI days or you are starting from zero. Hardly any holds up against "what should we actually build next?" Building a flashy MVP is fun but wont get you long term growth.

This is worth a watch www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXC7... "If you use AI heavily in a simple way, you will become average" I feel like some people see "you will become average" and take that as inevitable. Other people see "in a simple way" and take it as a challenge. I know who I'd back.

We've still got Hollywood even though there's youtube. Giving people tools + access to make and distribute stuff isn't zero sum. Software is going to be fine unless your whole advantage was 'other people can't code but I/we can'. In which case you were cooked anyway.

The only moat left is hardware. By that I mean a physical moat. Dig a trench around your business and fill it with water or spikes. AI is not good at swimming.

If you are not familiar with design and doing UI stuff with agents go buy Refactoring UI. It will tell you all the words to tell your agents to correct their crazy default behaviors. Not affiliated in any way other than I bought it and liked it. refactoringui.com#get-refactor...

A lot of people on the internet are going to try convince you that the thing they're doing to avoid their work is the real work. It's not. You can out-produce the average person by avoiding spirals and moving forward step by step. www.elliotcsmith.com/outpacing-th...

I feel these two things would combine well: medium.com/better-human... julian.digital/2023/07/06/m... I was going through old bookmarks and opening any that seemed worth another look.

If the amount of engineering you’re doing went way down because the amount of code you’re writing went way down, that’s a you problem not an AI/tools problem. All the stuff you’re supposed to do that isn’t typing code is still meant to happen. You’re still responsible for that.

This is going to be a very niche comment but sometimes making games in ECS engines feels like if someone asked "what if we made games using SQL as the language"

Want taste? Eat your slop. www.elliotcsmith.com/want-taste-e...

I want to see more deeply crazy products now that more people make software. I don't care about your dime a dozen B2B SaaS or todo app. Give me your TempleOS. Go as deep as you can then go deeper. That's where I think the magic will be.

Now that desktop @firefox.com has tab groups can I please have a magic tab group for 'tabs open on my phone'. It is still way too many clicks to get to them via 'Tabs on other devices' and I want to close them on desktop and have them gone on phone.

Even in this age of magic machines that will write a million words a day, it's amazing how many back and forth meetings and decisions really come down to "well did someone write that down"

"Just do better" Having to add this to stop Claude just littering pointless comments everywhere is dumb as hell. It's in the CLAUDE file already but apparently it was "in a flow state" so it forgot. Are people just giving up on trying to control this?

It’s pretty great to see so many people rediscovering the fun of building little hardware things now that agents make it so much simpler. I wonder if this will have the side effect of more chat about being able to put any software on your own devices again.

Just in case, like me, you sometimes forget. You can just do things. www.elliotcsmith.com/you-can-just...

Claude told me to have a good weekend and I don’t know how I feel about it. Especially because that’s was work Claude and I’ll be talking to home Claude shortly. I kind of wish AI didn’t try do people stuff. Just do the code stuff mate.

This is the same advice I give to people slapping AI as a label on everything. If it wasn’t useful without the words AI it’s not going to survive post the hype.

Anyone know if the hedonic treadmill syncs to strava?

One odd thing working with Claude and Django is seeing it skip all the built in tools to add apps etc and hand roll them all. It does a good enough job at it but feels like danger zone for getting out of sync when new features come out.

Finished reading Babel yesterday. What a slog. I feel it was about twice as long as it needed to be. It had interesting characters and an interesting premise but someone failed to make me feel either had depth even after 1200 or so pages.

See this is why its important that copyright lasts for at least 3,000 years post publication. All these profits lost to the Homer estate.

I know that the internet has mixed feelings about AI and game development but it’s been a big speed boost on silly little hobby games. That being said it’s not without its oddities and Claude is clearly not being optimised for these kind of workflows. www.elliotcsmith.com/quick-though...

Resurfaced without comment

I’m seeing more and more folks realise that “speed to write the code” was rarely the only thing holding back success. www.elliotcsmith.com/all-the-othe...

Yeah I dunno if 3000 days apart counts as 14 years together…

Actual photo of father and son trying to work out lifetime rules.

This is tragic, the fall of Bitwarden: blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-re...

More like bring me the Verizon

This is the long term end goal of age verification. Replies to your most terrible takes with a literal expected expiry date.

Has anyone tried jules.google and can provide some parallels or pro/con info compared to Claude Code or Codex?

I was thinking about this recently. I think 'taste' is a complete distraction if you're optimizing for "make a good product that customers like". It doubles down on what's in vogue amongst the podcasts rather than what is actually solving problems for users. www.elliotcsmith.com/build-taste-...

I'm sorry.

Welcome to 2026. This year we realise some people did have a bottle next on code output and are helped by AI and others had bottle necks elsewhere and were not. These two groups will fight each other to the death on the internet. Also petrol is expensive.

What if, instead of data centers we just sent every household a GPU and two sticks of DDR5 RAM.

Be AGI, make no mistake. Use zero tokens.

Testing a post via N8N :)

"your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'" feels like a very confusing way to say "nothing to push but there might be stuff if you pull" I've been using git long enough that I am kind of blind to that message but it does seem poorly worded.

Check out the alt-text on this image

sloppelganger was right there guys.

My (least) favorite of this one is the pattern of letter-number-letter. Except E15 - Eyjafjallajökull can stay