Should transparency about your AI usage be a thing? With all the skepticism of and outright hostility to AI (with good reason), maybe we should disclose how our products use it. A posted AI Policy could be the new Privacy Policy. Here’s my app’s: hamstersoup.app/ai-policy…
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere – except your app, right? The good news is that it’s never been easier to integrate AI features. The bad news is depending on what kind of features you want to add and how many of your users will use them, it can be very expensive to do so if you plan to use models from vendors like Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI, or model providers like AWS Bedrock or…
A common problem most people experience using AI chatbots is a faulty memory, where fine details get lost the longer you continue a thread, and often the quick solution is to start a new chat. However, that also means starting from scratch and providing all the context you need to carry from chat to chat. Some tools allow custom instructions that let you prefix every new chat with important…
When creating something new throughout human history, there is always that moment where the idea touches the medium, and an abstract thought starts to become a tangible thing. A stick starts a line in the dirt. A pen starts a stroke on a page. A brush starts to stain a canvas. A bit starts to bite into a piece of wood. A chisel starts to reveal a masterpiece. In our modern software development…
I think I am building a business. That is an unexpected thing for me to say, because while I’ve always been in the process of building something ever since I was a teenager with a Commodore 64 (and often taking things apart to see what was inside them and how they worked, including that C64, but that’s another blog post), I’ve known all along that I’m not a businessperson…
There’s a really great interview out this week with Mustafa Suleyman that anyone interested in #AI and the direction of tech over the next years and decades should watch. One of his answers touched on “is artificial intelligence inevitable”. I believe so, because its foundation is mathematics, which is inherent to the universe. Maybe AI is inherent too. The first time I…
Big Brother season is back, and so is my superfan app, Hamster Soup . I rebuild this app every few years—not just for fans, but as my personal playground to explore new ideas, designs, and technologies. Last year that new technology was AI. In 2024 I built AI features on top of OpenAI’s cloud-based LLM APIs, but the plan was always to use built-in AI as much as possible. Since Apple only…
We need a sharper line between augmented engineering and vibe coding. A vibe coder is a creator, but not an engineer. An engineer studied and honed the skills to understand what #AI is doing. Both provide taste, the critical subjective human element necessary to create something good using AI.
In our first article on routing as an AI developer’s superpower , we introduced multiple strategies for domain classification that can be used by a Large Language Model (LLM) orchestrator to route a prompt to one of multiple large language models. When you’re working with a single LLM, domain classification is often unnecessary—unless you want to pre-process prompts for efficiency, cost…
Anyone else always adding newlines at the bottom of everything to feel comfortable when writing? Whether a git commit or a blog post, I’m often editing a published post immediately afterward to remove that extra space I forgot to cut. Does MarsEdit let you set margins? 😂 @danielpunkass
Since OpenAI released ChatGPT more than two years ago, Artificial Intelligence has advanced at an accelerating pace in capability, complexity, and quality. Equally dizzying is the number of options to harness AI–thousands of open-source LLaMA models plus powerful closed models from Anthropic, google, and OpenAI. Many teams pick a single “best” model at first, then periodically…
For the longest time I’ve put off adding support for Google Gemini in Aurora Toolkit , because Google’s API was more complicated than others based on OpenAI’s API design, and I wanted to move on to various feature ideas I had like implementing workflows and agents. I figured eventually I’d come back around to Gemini support when I needed it, or someone else would clone the…
People worried about #AI art and writing are often told don’t worry, AI won’t replace human creativity. But AI actually is creative - hallucination is a feature tweaked by settings like temperature. AI can’t reproduce human taste , a moving target that decides when something is actually good .
Over the summer of 2024, I conducted an experiment to see if I could use Artificial Intelligence to do in a month what took several in previous years, which is to rewrite my long-running Big Brother superfan app to incorporate the latest technologies. I’ve been shipping this app since the App Store opened and every 2-3 years would rewrite it from scratch, to use the latest frameworks and…
Finally catching up on the #Tesla #CyberCab presentation from eariler this week. As a ModelY owner, I know there’s no way this technology is coming “next year”, but it is totally realistic in the next decade. Why can’t we have innovative #Elon all the time, instead of toxic Dark MAGA “Leon”?
This weekend it occurred to me that I kept forgetting to test #AppleIntelligence for one thing that has always annoyed me about #Siri – that it could recognize compound requests but wouldn’t actually perform them. Happy to find out that the new Siri CAN turn off multiple lights in one request!
Logging into work this morning is going to feel like when Cooper and Dr. Brand sealed the airlock and entered the Endurance after Dr. Mann wrecked it. What a week this is gonna be 🤪
I’ve written at length about working with AI ( ChatGPT-4o to be precise), but I haven’t shown the process in action yet. This will give you a sense of how quickly you can go from idea for a feature to shipped code. But first, I want to rewind a week. Last Thursday night was the first eviction episode of the season on Big Brother 26 . Eviction episodes are game-changing and live, so…
Exactly one month ago, on June 27, I decided to try an experiment – could I rewrite my long term hobby app with AI? My app Hamster Soup is an app for superfans of the TV show Big Brother , which was set to begin around July 17. That gave me as much as three weeks to get something going, even if it wasn’t a complete release or very robust, in time for the show’s premiere. Initially, I thought I…
I’ve shipped 6 builds in 7 days of my new app since its release last Friday. Almost every night I add new features (and my 1st bug fix last night, that makes me sad 😔), but at work one of our apps just can’t get through review since months before I even got there in March. C’mon #Apple!
“Real artists ship.” When Steve Jobs said that phrase, he was talking about literal artists like Picasso and Matisse, but his point extended to anyone being creative. For someone developing their creative ideas, whether a painting, sketch, or software, Jobs felt the whole point was not to keep their creations to themselves, but to share them with others. Since June 27, I have conducted an AI…
12 days. 12 days, working an hour or two in the mornings and several over the weekend. That’s all it’s taken to build my app from scratch with the help of ChatGPT. When we got the iPad version dialed in just right a few minutes ago, I couldn’t believe it. A proper iPad app with the sidebar, too. (My app has always been iPad-able, but in that lazy, “just a blown up phone app” way.) While I thought…
'Hey how well do you know mobile app development, particularly for iOS using Swift?” That’s how my experiment started, andI’ve probably asked ChatGPT or a local LLM a version of this question a few dozen times or more, just to get an answer or an idea. This time around, I was considering an idea of guiding AI through development of a brand new version of my long-running mobile app. It’s been going…
For 15 years, I’ve had at least one app in the App Store – some version or another of Hamster Soup , my app for superfans of the TV show Big Brother (US). I’ve worked on a lot of apps – a few my own – but there’s always been a Hamster Soup out there. It was the original and first Big Brother fan app and spawned at least a few competitors, the best of which was Pocket Big Brother . I talked to its…
I saw a meme saying the Tesla Cybertruck is a Pontiac Aztek with Playstation 1 graphics, and now I can’t unsee it.