Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖

Tech geek and product person. Passionate about software. Driven to make the world a better place.

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

Here's a page listing all my side projects. https://t.co/f30FyvPPIz

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

Gratuitous excess for personal homepage, but A) it's really cool and B) is now completely affordable with AI

[Felix Rieseberg @felixrieseberg]

I remade my homepage with Opus 5.5 and pushed it hard. We made music & movies, drew textures, modeled things in Blender: https://t.co/WOGPQVm6Fq

I'm really happy with the result!

[Cameron Moll @cameronmoll]

Two things I'm sensing I need to prepare my team for in the coming months:

(a) Headless software
(b) Deterministic vs. Probabilistic UI

What does the role of Designer look like when (a) users are interacting with your product via agents only, (b) UI is generated on the fly?

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

Yep. I think we've reached the tipping point and AI coding is now just the default.

I wish the conversation could move on to more concerning topics. Like how we ensure access to coding is democratised and open to all in this new world.

[Jay Le @jayledev]

DHH is probably one of the top software artisans of the past decade. Hearing him speak with this much conviction and transparency about one of the most polarizing topics in software right now, writing code by hand vs. with AI, is something pretty much every software engineer should hear a few times.

Especially those still on the wrong side of history.

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

Currently enjoying Instinct AI. But whilst it can log in and check my HMRC tax position, it gets denied by the Sainsbury's bot detection. We're so close to perfection 😭

[@levelsio @levelsio]

This week I decided to just permanently switch to running Claude Code on the server mostly on bypass permissions mode:

c() { IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions "$@"; }

And for the first time in my life I think I've actually managed to outrun my todo list

What happened is I simply blasted through my to do list of features I had to build and bugs I had to fix

I've never shipped so fast and Claude Code almost made no mistakes, and when it did it they were tiny that weren't fatal (important because I'm mostly working on the server in production now)

Before I was always known to ship fast (also because I always work alone) but while I shipped new things would always build up on my features/bug board (my users can submit them there)

But this is the first week where I've been fast enough to outrun them

The board is actually empty!

As other people have written on here the real bottleneck is becoming myself and my creativity, not how fast I can ship. Because I think I ship faster now than I can come up with new ideas, or maybe my brain will adjust to this new speed (probably)

Also I feel another limit is becoming my own mental context window, as in how many things, features, bugs, projects, I can keep in my mind in parallel while building on all of them. It's a lot and I haven't reached that limit yet but I feel I might be close

I also noticed that you start going really fast the more you let it just go loose, before I was slow because I didn't trust it and I was scared it would destroy my code, now I just let it go. As @karpathy wrote, things feel like they've changed a lot around December last year when models became good enough to really code with and I feel the same

When I see other friends code with Claude Code I often notice they're slow because they still check everything, which is good of course, but I feel the better way would be to create some tests and just let it run freely and see if it can pass those

For me the tests are mostly just me checking out if the new feature on the site works or not, and in 99% cases it just does, and then I ask it to improve it further

Because I run Claude Code on the server in production, I don't have to wait for deployment anymore (although that took only 3 seconds anyway before, that still adds up), now it's wait for it to be done coding, I refresh the site and I test it, that feedback loop is how I work and it's made me WAY faster

Anyway here's what I did this week and the majority of these things were requested by people on the bug board, I'd say this is about 10x my normal output:

📸 Photo AI
- Built new image viewer and mobile image viewer
- Added batch remix, multi-photo import, filtering by model in gallery
- Security overhaul: phased out insecure ?hash= login, migrated to session tokens
- Fixed Google login loop, multi-model selection, talking scripts
- Added custom audio upload for talking videos
- Created dynamic model selector from server endpoint

🏡 Interior AI
- Revived [ Add furniture ] feature (started 6 months ago, image models now good enough)
- Added custom style upload for redesigns
- Built own Gaussian Splat viewer for 3D
- Made /remove_bg endpoint for furniture backgrounds
- Migrated 3D walkthrough to new World Labs API
- Added .skp file support, paint color masking, empty room button

🎒 Nomads
- Launched weekly AI-generated newsletter from chat
- Built profile edit modal, moved profile editing from /settings to profile page
- Added TikTok/YouTube links, status bar, server-side API tracking
- Added hundreds of new profile tags and traits
- Fixed timezone filters, broken links, user avatars

🗺️ Hoodmaps
- Revived write mode (before was only read for last few years because db was rekt)
- Built heatmap mode using sentiment-scored tags (50K+ tags)
- Fixed root cause: tags not entering DB due to wrong PRAGMA (should be WAL)
- Added good/bad area detection with admin grid controls
- Set up Claude Code Telegram bot for live changes
- Enabled CF cache, fixed health check, fixed Brussels

📕 MAKE book
- Built auto ePub/PDF generator cron worker
- Added dynamic generation with personal customer watermarks
- Added image compression for file size

💾 Pieter .com
- Added Wikipedia text-only reader for Kindle
- Exploring Windows 3.11 emulator using v86 (to replace Em-DOSBox)
- Added product recommendations on homepage
- Installed Wall Street Raider (1986)

👩‍💻 Remote OK
- Installed Chatbase AI customer support bot
- Added "report not remote" link on job posts

🏨 Hotelist (3 todos)
- Fixed hotel URLs and city range bugs
- Added iron amenity

[Nic Cruz Patane @niccruzpatane]

Filming a LiDAR sensor from a Volvo EX90 up close will damage your camera

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

@ianfnelson 51 seconds 💪 but oops the letter was already open

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

Decided to speedrun my car tax renewal (knowing how good the online service is) 1 min 26 seconds from opening the letter to completing the transaction 👍

[Ali 👨‍💻🌿🦖 @al1ra]

@ianfnelson Disaster. 1 minute 54 seconds this year. I googled "car tax" instead of "pay car tax" 🤦‍♂️
Then I selected Visa instead of Visa Debit (again)!
Cicrle back in March 2023 👍

[Shane Gu @shaneguML]

An art exhibit in Japan where a chained robot dog will try attacking you

Feel the AGI (safety)

[DHH @dhh]

This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We're in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight.

[gaut @0xgaut]

dudes building with cursor

[Jason Smith - 上官杰文 @ShangguanJiewen]

My wife is getting her driver's license in Beijing. After she passed the first two tests she is now doing one day of virtual reality driving before she begins driving a real car tomorrow.

This is her school:

[killian @hellokillian]

i showed a fully local, computer-controlling AI a sticky note with my wifi password. it got online.

[Killian Lynch @Killianlynchh]

The DBA who suggested multicloud coming into work Monday

[👩‍💻 Paige Bailey @DynamicWebPaige]

🔫 Badass! A team at the @MistralAI hackathon in SF trained the 7B open-source model to play DOOM, based on an ASCII representation of the current frame in the game. 🤯 @ID_AA_Carmack

[Carl Vellotti 🥞 @carlvellotti]

How a blind person uses an iPhone.

Absolutely insane accessibility. There's a lot to learn here.

[Lewis 🇺🇸 @ctjlewis]

if you don’t do frontend and want a feel for how complicated the most basic shit is, watch this 15 minute video of Ryan explaining how to make focus/drag state work correctly for this basic “todo list” UI.

[Marcel Pociot 🧪 @marcelpociot]

GitHub Copilot Workspace just got announced 🤯

You can give Copilot Workspace an issue and it will automatically propose a solution/plan to execute. Copilot Workspace has the full context of both the issue - including all comments - and of your codebase.
https://t.co/VMNvgn37Up

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

PM deciding how much of the backlog they’re going to commit to this quarter’s roadmap

[Mckay Wrigley @mckaywrigley]

You can give ChatGPT a picture of your team’s whiteboarding session and have it write the code for you.

This is absolutely insane.