AI Made Me Rethink How Good Decisions Get Made What if the biggest impact of AI isn’t on implementation, but on judgment? open.substack.com/pub/shaps/…

RetroCalc is a fun calculator with an LCD display, soft buttons, and one very important feature: it helps you write words upside down. Why? I wanted to share with my kids, one of my favourite old pastimes: typing numbers, flipping the calculator upside down, and discovering words hiding in plain sight. I could not find one using a proper LCD-style font, so I made one. They loved it. Its a personal, silly side project with my kids, made to show them that writing code, games, and apps can be playful. Also, calculators should let you discover that 5318008 is not the only joke in the drawer 😉 It is still a working calculator, obviously. It does sums, handles the usual operators, and then quietly encourages nonsense when nobody is looking. Sharing for those of you who also want to be 12 years old again. github.com/shaps80/RetroCalc

When AI can write software an order of magnitude faster, its tempting to be revolutionary instead of evolutionary. #agentic #softwareengineering shaps.substack.com/p/innovat…

🤣 Thankfully my kids are 6 and 9, so its relevant for me.

Can't wait to try this! As always great work from Natalie!

Desperately looking for a new iOS role. Contract or full time. If you are looking or know someone looking please get in touch. #iosdev #swiftlang #mobile #ios

Mojo 🔥 1.0 is in beta! Beta 1 marks the first step towards finalizing 1.0 later this year, which will bring a new level of language stability. The beta lands safe closures with a new capturing syntax, conditional trait conformance, and major variadic improvements. Plus, Mojo has its own home at mojolang.org.

What I can do with my experience and amazing tooling has no limits. AI isn’t the tool that enabled this for me. My experience and perseverance was all I ever needed and it’s true now more than ever. If you’re looking for an engineering mindset that’s not limited by tooling, get in touch. I can help you transform your team, tooling and hopefully your mindset. Open to full time or consultancy roles.

The Vampire Effect — anyone else feel the energy drain after coding-by-prompt day in, day out? There is real value in using AI for engineering work. I’m not questioning that. But over the past few months, I’ve had a lot of conversations with engineers who are starting to describe similar side effects. It starts simply enough. The first few prompts of the day can feel almost magical. You get that hit of excitement when something works. You’ve built something that might previously have taken days or weeks. Maybe something you couldn’t have built alone. Then the second phase begins. Now you have to review it. Not just check whether the code compiles, but understand the assumptions, the trade-offs, the edge cases, the architecture, the tests, the things it changed that you didn’t expect it to change. You’re getting “so much” done, but you’re also carrying more context, more diffs, and more uncertainty. As the day goes on, the context window fills up. The agent starts drifting. The back-and-forth turns from exciting to frustrating. By the end of the day, you can feel more drained than if you had written the code yourself. I think part of it is that the sense of achievement changes. You did create something. Maybe more than you thought possible. But the work can feel less like building and more like supervising, correcting, validating, and absorbing complexity. That’s a very different cognitive load. I don’t think this is just an individual productivity issue. I think it’s becoming a team design issue. How do we structure engineering work so AI helps us move faster without quietly draining attention, ownership, and judgement? I’m still finding my way through it. Curious how others are handling this. Are you changing your workflow, your review habits, or your team norms around AI-assisted development?

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While considering what I want to do next, I've been cognisant of the fact that I'm slightly less excited about the idea of jumping into another role where I'm solving many of the same problems – just with newer tools. I've always thrived when applying broader thinking and working on problems and solutions that are beyond me and working with incredibly skilled teams that help me grow and learn and are equally excited by this endeavour. Technology that will either be foundational or play a larger role in the future is particularly interesting to me right now. I'd love to hear more about projects others are working on and anyone who resonates with what I'm saying. Doesn't have to be a role, if you just want to share what you're doing, I'm keen to hear about it. I want to feel inspired and in the meantime I'll be plugging away and exploring my own ideas as well.

There’s so many exciting things going on across the industry right now but I have to say I’m personally most excited about companies that are working on foundations and infrastructure. This is definitely the focus I’m personally looking for in my next role.

Anyone got an invitation to the Notepad.exe application? Please share! notepadexe.com Looks interesting. Keen to try.

/cc @benjitaylor

My favourite response yet from ChatGPT. I provided context that I have extensive engineering experience just not in game dev 😂 Basically it just called out Unity devs lol. #unity3d #GodotEngine #swiftlang

I love gaming with my 8 year old son, lots of fun with "It takes two" lately. Switch 2's coming tho and some games he's just too young for and I've realised I didn't previously use the friends feature all that much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So... anyone on Switch or PS5? Send me a DM 😬