Essays
Founders and product managers fail at customer development, even when they're consistently talking to users. But this is less from conducting too few interviews and more from a missing feedback loop. The art of posing the right question is counterintuitive and cognitively taxing, so founders can’t analyze
Agent
🤖This is a prompt for a customer development AI coach. You can easily write your own or try out mine for free as a subscriber. Read about why you'd want to use an AI coach for customer development. Role and Objective You are the world's best
Essays
"You don’t `learn` from a chatbot. You consume...They’re spewing slop and people are gobbling it up." No. You’re holding it wrong. You can definitely learn from LLMs. It has to be with critical thinking.
lab notes
It's been almost three months since the last lab note, and I lament that I didn't document the process and the shifts that were happening with my work. But then again, I was busy writing code and talking to potential users. Back at #073, I was
Essays
what does the word "algebraic" mean when used in the context of programming langs? - a random tweet I'd wondered the same thing about "Algebraic Effects", and was excited to find a talk on YouTube titled What's Algebraic About Algebraic Effects and
Essays
I’m not near a level where it’s 10k LOC per day, but the volume of commits is noticeably higher w/ Claude/Codex now. Back in Feb/Mar when Claude Code came out, I was writing an implementation of DBSP (incremental computation with some mathy stuff) and I couldn’
Essays
While the world has moved on from Elm, I still think about its simplicity a lot and how that was achieved, and what gaps there were in its design. The gaping weakness I'll talk about today was also the result of its strength. Elm apps have a single
Essays
Lately, I've been experimenting with a different system eval stack than what you might normally hear about: Obsidian and Claude Code. Typically, Obsidian is used as a personal note taking app/knowledge base and Claude Code is used as a coding agent. I'm misusing both to
Essays
Since coding agents came on the scene, a subset of programmers panic about AI replacing their jobs, but I think they're panicking about the wrong thing. The fear seems focused on the mechanical aspects—will AI write better functions than me? Will it debug faster? Will it remember
Essays
I bounced off of Cursor a couple of months ago. It was good having code in context in the sidebar, a leg up from cutting and pasting, but I found its agent UI confusing and it made odd edits. In addition, when I left it open for a week, it’
Essays
Having been a fan of functional programming and following the breadcrumbs of reactive systems, it's not surprising that I'm a fan of Elm, and had experience building different systems in it. It's too bad that enthusiasm for Elm didn't last until vibe
lab notes
I ended up deciding on SolidJs. For one, I spent way too much time deliberating on a choice that wouldn't matter as much at the end of the day. But I think I wanted to give functional programming a good shake, since it's aligned with my