As I get sucked deeper into AI & algorithms around me, my brain wants to counteract with art, photography, literature, and other slower media forms. To add some soul to this newsletter, I'm going to play around with adding a visual note to every issue.

No main story today, just a bunch of little updates, experiments, and interesting stuff I came across the past few weeks.

• Short post on the blog: I want to try lower level languages more than ever.

• A quote from Jason Liu, following up on my thoughts about using voice input: "Voice input gets more of my actual thinking into Codex. The benefit is not speed. It is that the agent gets the unedited version of my thinking."

• Claude Code is not making your product better was an interesting read. "claude code helps anyone and their mom build a camry competitor. it doesn’t help the artisans at ferrari make faster ferraris"

• Peter Steinberger tweeted about Svelte! I've been seeing "Svelte is better for agents" thoughts popping up now and then. I still love React for its composition and abstractions, but every time I need to fall back to useEffect part of me dies inside. I love how much Svelte looks like it's really built for the web.

• Coding agents are so good for activation energy. I started building another personal website with Hugo last week for my photography work (it's not done yet). Not that there’s anything in there that I couldn’t do before, but the barrier to entry to whip something up is so low now. Being able to quickly prototype and spend my time on the fun refinements makes me want to make things again.

• I've been revisiting Sanding UI by Jim Nielsen. "One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done." This happens more naturally when I'm building things for myself instead of others.

• In the same vein, I’m also picking up open source contributions again. Last week I contributed a little feature to Inertia to register one-off event listeners. Once again, the barrier to entry is lower than ever.

• I even wrote my first package in ages! Piper is a PHP pipe-operator friendly alternative to Laravel collections. I wrote about its background & usage on the Spatie blog.

• I finally gave Amp a shot and it filled all expectations. I threw it a hard problem that Codex & Claude couldn't solve on their own. Amp came with its own creative solution, with a great step by step thought process. It's not cheap, but a good tool to have in my pocket.

• Still wading through You and your research. This week's excerpt is a big one. "Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition apparently. And I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, "creativity comes out of your subconscious." Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention — you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free."

• My blog discovery of the week is Unsung, a blog on software craft & quality. This deep dive into some of Photoshop interactions was a great read.

• I finished Mistborn book 5 this week. I started back in November and was only planning to read one book, but couldn't let go.

That's all for this week. See you around!

— Seb