I’ve spent the last few weeks building across a few different AI coding tools, and I stopped paying much attention to the model underneath. You spend enough time around AI and you start to believe the model is the part that matters, since it’s what everyone talks about and all the benchmarking is against. But build across enough tools in a short stretch and a different picture shows up. The model is closer to an interchangeable component, and the setup wrapped around it is what decides success. ...

The first time I used Kiro was at the AWS Summit in London earlier this year. It was a hands-on workshop, so on the rails run through to show what the tool could do. Everyone was converging on the same idea at that point, that the spec was what mattered, and it all felt a bit contrived from Kiro just formalising it. The first time I used Kiro was in a guided workshop at AWS Summit London. ...

I have been building locally with AI over the past year and I wanted to start moving what I had truly online. Taking something from prototype to hosted is normal work in my day to day. Doing it with no platform team behind me is a different story, because everything that machine had been covering for was suddenly mine to build. Your machine in every case, is the boundary. On your own laptop you’re the whole system whether you meant to be or not, it’s your logins, network and various local dependencies. Point a public URL at the same code and it’s doubtful to work (well safely). In a company a separate team is usually overseeing the security model and the various components. ...

Something appeared on my screen while I was in Codex the other day and I didn’t know what it was. A little animated creature, off to the side, and I don’t know which keys I pressed to bring it up. I clicked it, which made it change to voice mode and so now I couldn’t get rid of it and it was listening to me. In the end I opened ChatGPT in another window and asked how to get rid of the pet that OpenAI’s coding tool had just put on my desktop. ...

Somebody asked me at training how I keep my notes, and I told them I nearly paid for an app back in May and then went and built a simple system myself instead. I’d been keeping notes for about two years by then. First in BJJ Notes app, which I started using in Canada in my first year. I just stayed on the free tier because I wasn’t going to run a subscription to store a paragraph about where I should have my knees. At that point everything went into Google Keep and so it sat in with the shopping and other stray thoughts. Neither of them worked and it wasn’t really the apps’ fault. ...

I had assumed AI adoption was still on its way up and would keep going for a while yet. Ofcom reckons 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% in 2024, which means a bit under half don’t, and I had those people down as not having got round to it yet. Pew’s American figures from February say otherwise. Among people who don’t use chatbots, 60% give lack of interest as a major reason and only 29% say not knowing how, and around seven in ten say they’re unlikely to start within the year. That isn’t a queue waiting to be shown, it’s a decision most of them have already made, and I had it the wrong way round. ...

I was on site during a Windows 10 migration about eight years ago, and the group I’d cut over the previous day started coming to me with the same problem. They were opening files they’d opened the day before, and now some threw an error about a missing font and refused to open at all. Others opened with chunks of text gone, or the formatting pushed out of shape. The characters in those files were never damaged. Every letter was sitting there in the PDF and the file itself was fine, which is why the same documents opened without complaint on a machine that hadn’t been touched yet. What was missing was what turns those characters into shapes on a screen. ...

I was listening to the Era Vulgaris album before a Queens of the Stone Age gig, and it put me back in Birmingham between finishing secondary school and starting university. The technology I had then was a 17-inch gaming laptop running Vista, and I chose it over a desktop because I wanted something I could take with me. (A possible error given how heavy it was) It came to the US with me for my second year of university in 2008, and once I’d bought some cheap speakers it was the entire setup for the year, because the screen was big enough that I didn’t need anything else. Before that I’d never had my own machine at all, I shared a PC with my brother. ...

Back in May I wrote about asking ChatGPT and Claude where to put my circulator fan in my study. Last week the question was less relaxed and burning. The UK broke its June temperature record three days running, my study is a small room with the sun aimed straight at it, and I went back to both models to see if they could help. What came back read well and annoyingly didn’t work. Both kept telling me to aim the air just above my head, which puts the column over you, and when I said it wasn’t working they’d tell me to nudge it up a little more and that I was nearly there, pointing me the whole time at a placement that wasn’t going to achieve what they calculated. ...