Andy Sterkowitz

yesterday i signed up again for claude max $200 plan and had it change the whole visual metaphor of the productivity app i’ve been working on intermittently over the past year: instead of a traditional UI with tables, lists, tools, etc, i told Fable to use a desktop OS metaphor instead for displaying the various built-in mini apps (tasks, chat, notes, etc). all with a functioning dock and animated wallpaper and multiple window support etc. fable was able to solve the problem but really i’m beyond the point of being impressed by an LLM doing some upfront task. everything worked, it “made no mistakes”, all tests passed (it even fixed old tests), but i was like ok whatever thanks. i blew past my $200 limit in 2 hours. and now i’m sitting here like, ok, now what? do i ship this? hear me be a whiny bitch for a second: that it was too easy killed the whole part of the journey of making an app where you become a new person through the creation process, and you earn such pride in your work which in the past gave you the energy and courage to ship things. and i’m like, i can ship this. i can try to make a buck. the app is done. but i just don’t feel a bond with the work. now if you were a somewhat savvy operator, the business type that would happily sell refrigerator coolant if you sensed an opportunity, AI will be a godsend for you. but i don’t wanna sell refrigerator coolant. and now because everything is so easy, i hardly ever feel like i’m solving a real problem anymore. it’s like how deep of a problem am i really solving if someone can one shot my app in 2 hours? i will say that in those 2 hours yesterday, i really enjoyed being back near the code. there’s nothing funner than making shit. it’s just that the new way of doing things kills a lot of the creative and spiritual juices you used to get before, that many times lead to commercially beneficial outcomes. now, i just don’t know what’s worth building anymore.

Our rejection email went viral on Reddit yesterday. People are shocked a company would tell a candidate exactly why they got rejected. We're shocked that's shocking. We asked for 3 sentences about a hard bug. We got four paragraphs about "holistic approaches to software craftsmanship." The take-home used temp1, temp2, temp3 as variable names. Our company name was misspelled twice in the paragraph about attention to detail. We told them all of that. Directly. And we told them the door is open if they come back with work that shows they wrote it and read it before sending. We review code the same way. Direct. Specific. No hand-waving. That's just how we build.

A lot of people see this and go “oh distribution is the problem.” That presumes that these apps all don’t suck. Who is gonna tell ‘em.

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

A DEVELOPER TAUGHT GIT WITH A BOX OF CHILDREN'S TOYS AND ENGINEERS WITH TEN YEARS IN SAY IT'S THE FIRST TIME THE THING EVER ACTUALLY MADE SENSE 90 minutes, one table, a pile of Tinkertoys. No wall of jargon -- he builds a real Git repo out of plastic rods right in front of you. -> The moment he snaps the first pieces together, Git stops being scary command-line magic and becomes what it really is: a chain of tiny objects pointing at each other. Branches, merges, rebase, the staging area -- every concept that's ever burned you at 2am -- he rebuilds with toys until a four year old could follow. He calls Git a two-trick pony. After this you'll see exactly why. Memorizing commands was never the skill -> holding the graph in your head is. And with an AI agent now committing and rebasing on your machine all day, that mental model is the only thing between you and a history you can't read. Scroll the comments and you'll see the same thing over and over: this is the talk that finally made Git click and made people the one their whole team comes to when it breaks. Bookmark & watch it today. It's the 1.5 hours that pays you back for the rest of your career ↓

your obsession with clean code is why your competitors shipped the ugly version that actually works while you’re still refactoring

I am slowly coming around to AI assisted programming. I am genuinely trying to codify every rule about programming that I have and using that + several stages to build out small changes. Not sure the productivity changes, but I think I can see a modest gain in speed. I am also trying to be concerned about every line produced, not just slop trebucheting code over the wall.

New item in my SOUL md tonight

This may be a dumb question but I’ll ask it here anyways: I can’t find a good way for my various AI chats to automatically sync its conversation history into a structured knowledge base. So that as I update various chats from time to time and refine context, my knowledge base automatically grows with this new info.

She’s broke with a 750k subscriber channel. She fell for the scam and now she’s stressed, and full of regret. A lot of YouTubers are not building real businesses . They are building prisons with thumbnails. She spent 6 years doing what everyone tells creators to do: just keep increasing quality, grow subscribers, build the brand, trust that the money will come later. Now she’s realizing the audience she built can’t support the life she wants, sponsors don’t value the demo enough, and the “success” everyone applauds doesn’t actually pay like success. That’s the scam. A big branded channel can make you look like you’ve won while quietly making you miserable and financially stuck. Subscribers are not a business. “High quality content bro” is not a business. Luckily she’s woken up and has decided to leave the 750k channel that every one was telling her to keep desperately holding on to. Now she’s actually building a business that will support her and her husband. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know about YTA which would get her out of her rut in less than 30 days. Don’t fall for the scam.