Week 98 — Life changing tortellini and trees
- On Wednesday Clare and I went out to see Silent Friend at the Palace Electric. But beforehand, we stopped off at the Ovolo Nishi for dinner. I’d been before, the food was pretty good — but I don’t remember it being this good. A plate of four butternut squash-filled tortellini landed on table. Each a delicious parcel of pumpkiny, buttery goodness. This dish alone is worth going out of your way for. The movie was also a meditative, cerebral masterpiece. Set across 3 different time periods, 3 seperate stories are told each with a single enduring ginkgo tree threading them together. The film offers up a handful of theories on how infants perceive reality, the vast difference in time perception when you are a plant / being whose life spans centuries, and the fascination we have as a species of studying plants. The dialogue could probably fit on a few A4 sheets, which means there is a lot of time for contemplation and taking in the absolutely stunning cinematography.
- I have been making some small changes to the macOS and iOS apps I have been working on to write this blog. Namely bringing in some very targeted writing suggestion prompts to help pick up common cliches, tautologies, and other simple writing faux pas to help identify things that could be rewritten.
- The work my team has been doing since Feb finally goes in to EAP this week! Which is massive. The scope of the work is much more than we would have usually been able to deliver. Claude definitely helped accelerate some of the mundane things but also helped plan and shape the more complex and service-specific pieces. I am still unsure what the longterm effects of leaning heavily on LLM generated code will be, but everyone and their dog is out there speculating, so we will see soon enough. One thing I am thinking about though, is prompt-debt. It can sometimes feel like we need to build some skills, or a workflow or a command to do something in a project. Or that we need to setup detailed and explicit context for a project to be successful with an LLM. Only for things to change and those prompts to become obsolete. One thing I am leaning towards is using the LLM coding agents how I would like to use them (without scaffolding a world of prompts), and trusting that the harness vendors will do all the scaffolding for me. In the same way I don’t care too much about how I write Ruby code (other than to be algorithmically cheap), and trust the core team to make using the basic building blocks efficient.
- Sebby has been making some incredible developmental leaps this week. He’s been pointing at himself and photos of himself and saying his name, he knows when the dogs are inside or outside and will say so, he recalled the Teddy Bear toss from last week’s hockey game (when asked “what did we do with the Teddy at the hockey?”), and he blew on the space heater on his room to cool it off when he realised it was hot (🥰). Ok that last one he has been doing with food, and other objects for a while, but cute to see it.
- Sebby, Clare and I went off to Under bakery this morning for some brunch (of an egg roll and a cardamom buns) and a coffee! The cardamom buns were delicious!! Sebby ate most of mine, but what I did have was great!! We then wandered down (via a quick play in the synthetic creek), to a second hand bookshop for a quick look, and then off to The Shed for a gander at more second hand things. Here we found a pair of pants for Sebby (who needed a change after splashing around), a new puzzle, and Sebby had a play with another kid (a few years older) over some matchbox cars. It was really cute observing him observe the other child and get in to the tub of cars to look for something cool 🥰☺️.