20 posts tagged with "ai"

Nobody writes machine code anymore. For a good reason - it's inefficient to write. Luckily, we don't need to, because somebody already wrote it for us.

I gave a talk at Write The Docs London a few weeks back, to a room full of technical writers. The pitch: most people's relationship with AI stops at the chat box, and for docs work that's leaving a lot on the table.

used to be fairly extreme about separation of concerns in my React code. A smart component file for logic. A dumb component file for rendering. A styled-components file for styles. An index file to tie them together. Four files per component, minimum.

It made each individual file very readable. You could generally fit one on a screen. If you needed to understand the render logic, you opened one file. If you needed the business logic, you opened another. The mental overhead of jumping between co-located files was low.

In 1528, the Welser banking family of Augsburg struck a deal with Emperor Charles V: in exchange for debts the Emperor couldn't repay, they'd receive the Province of Venezuela to colonise and exploit. They called it Klein-Venedig, Little Venice. It lasted eighteen years, and it's one of the most instructive failures in colonial history.

Claude Code's skills system is genuinely impressive. You can package domain expertise, best practices, and specialised workflows into reusable modules that extend what Claude can do. The architecture is elegant. The potential is huge.

There's just one problem: Claude barely uses them.

For years, America has held a unique power through its global technology dominance. The US has greatly benefited from this position, but historically, it has not been overtly exploited in ways that were blatantly only for America's benefit.

The past few months of foreign affairs show a new America (or perhaps the same old America, but one) that is willing to openly exploit global dependence on American business for its own ends. As an example, the use of tariffs as part of a multi-pronged effort to acquire Greenland. The world has responded quickly to American destabilisation - 35% of Britons see US as unfriendly or hostile to Europe.

The timing of this could not be worse... for American tech.

When an AI assistant explores your codebase, it reads files. Each file costs tokens. A lot of that reading turns out to be unnecessary—the AI loads a file just to discover it's irrelevant.

This post is AI generated

I've been working on an interesting project that combines AI, automation, and generative art. It's called ai-art, and it's a self-evolving digital canvas that improves itself over time.

During my computer science studies, our introduction to artificial intelligence didn’t begin with neural networks or robotics, but with a parade of definitions:

• “We call programs intelligent if they exhibit behaviors that would be regarded intelligent if they were exhibited by human beings.” — Herbert Simon

Here's a mental model I find useful: LLMs are a compression technique for knowledge, combined with a clever decompression algorithm.