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10 things learned from AI code assistants

Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned.

Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training data. Much like a 3D printer, doing production-level work takes far more effort. Creating durable production code, managing a complex project, or crafting something truly novel still requires experience, patience, and skill beyond what today’s AI agents can provide on their own.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

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  • 10 things learned from AI code assistants

    Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned. Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training…

  • The guilt of the inbox

    A really great essay delving into a design pattern that needs to be reevaluated for possible alternatives. The original inbox was a wooden tray on a real desk. Papers arrived there because a person walked them over. The obligation was physics: it took up space, it had mass, someone had expended effort. You could see…

  • Cows using tools

    A cow using a stick to scratch an itch. For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined…

  • A fully autonomous umbrella

  • Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers

    The saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” In Florida, Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers. About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments. “That reminds me of…

  • Bluesky sports starter packs

    One of the more interesting features of Bluesky is the concept of starter packs, where people can create a list of accounts for a certain topic. Since sports are the last bastion of real time reaction culture, it would be natural for communities within sports to play out commentary in real time. Denny Carter collated…

  • Cryptocurrencies are dying

    Cryptocurrencies are dying as joke coins and pump and dump schemes burn out. With that in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) says the crypto reaper has been unusually busy lately. Looking at its own records from as far back as 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens had been placed on the…

  • Spray-On Powder That Seals Life-Threatening Wounds

    Pretty cool, a powder that stops bleeding: KAIST scientists have created a fast-acting, stable powder hemostat that stops bleeding in one second and could significantly improve survival in combat and emergency medicine. Severe blood loss remains the primary cause of death from combat injuries. To address this challenge, a research team at KAIST that included…

  • John Mellencamp’s exclusive Indiana Stadium box

    John Mellencamp supported Indiana football long before their recent championship rise, donating funds during “the down years.” In return, the school built an exclusive shack on top of the stadium just for him. Not that Mellencamp always minded. What he got in exchange for his support was not a championship run but a curious sort…

  • Intrusive, needy software

    With the ubiquity of Internet connections and cheap storage and data costs, software applications have become intrusive, almost needy in how they interact with users. So the problem isn’t that software ever teaches, asks, or informs. The problem is that once a company builds the machinery to do it, that machinery becomes cheap to reuse,…