Mark Johnson

Designer, developer, teacher. Co-founder @Pathwright. Probably working on something new ꩜

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

@ericweinstein This is clearly written, visualized, & voiced by AI (Claude obviously wrote script + html/css slides).

[David AttenBruh @AlHendiify]

We are in a peculiar era

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

Are only the "pitchfork vendors" currently making $$ on AI? Counter examples?

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Levie’s Law of AI Psychosis:

The farther away you are from the actual work the more confident you are that humans are no longer needed

I like it

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

No one sings around a player piano.

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

It appears many are not aware that you can just write HTML in markdown if you want...

[Thariq @trq212]

https://t.co/MXt5XS4xBX

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

@Shpigford Software is manifest philosophy. Any opinionated software tends to create a cult-like user base.

[kepano @kepano]

Weird isn't just visual. Weird is whatever strays from the norm. Weird is relative to the current state of the world.

You can have weird principles. They should be things people can legitimately disagree with.

You have to remember Obsidian was very weird when it launched six years ago. Local files, malleability, backlinks, graph, even Markdown syntax... these were not as widely understood and accepted as they are today.

That's why I spent so much time writing essays like "File over app" to try and explain our choices. The goal was to describe why our weird ideas should be normal, and it worked!

Now the world has somewhat caught up and accepted those choices, so it's time to find the next frontier of weirdness.

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

P.S. if you've ever done any kind of serious user-centered UX work, which button is the correct choice is immediately obvious.

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

Alarming how many "rational" people will willingly choose an option that would wipe out half the human race. The difference between logic and wisdom on display.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

same.

[sunil pai @threepointone]

really glad I got my ai psychosis phase out of the way as quickly as I did

can't unsee it people around me now, dunno how to help them except to just wait it out

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

Encouraging to see high-craft engineering amongst all the slop.

[Tobias Renström @tbsrnstrm]

Almost 16 months in the making, I'm finally at a point where I'm calling this good to go on the App Store. It's been my privilege to share the journey with you all, here's to the cool things still to come. Spatial is now available at https://t.co/ckC0Kq1oqH

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

most things tech enthusiasts are doing with AI is YAGNI

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

My main issue with agentic AI work is that it bypasses the natural unfolding that comes from struggling through problems step by step. In my experience, the incremental struggle is what leads to better designs, breakthroughs, and products with "soul"; something noticably absent in AI-produced work.

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

"Getting everything I ask for and nothing I want"

mostly same.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

Alright interns, we need to have some real talk here

I am tired of vibing on stream. I dont really like vibe coding unless its a tool i have no desire to build (how i manage things on my stream / how i write my youtube videos are great examples of things i would never build but i have). I dont like vibing the things i care about. I hate the code it generates, i hate the feeling of getting everything i ask for and nothing i want. I hate the subtle offness around vibe coded things. It is just driving me nuts. So for the next while i am going to be done vibing on stream.

I genuinely have been trying my hardest to make this work and i cannot quite put a finger on why i hate it, but i do. And i just feel so horribly guilty and wrong because i am not getting the results of "everyone else on twitter."

How am i, someone who prides themselves on making youtube videos that i think are actually good for people. To make videos that help people laugh at the silliness of tech or learn something new. But here i am not able to keep up with all these people claiming the sky is literally coming down. I just feel horrible and guilty about it.

Now i know the world is changing fast, and i want to be able to understand that change super well, be able to talk about it, be able to give really accurate opinions about it so for the last 3 months i have vibe coded an absurd amount of things. But now... i am just tired of it.

I dont want this any more. I want to be a tradcoder.

I dont know why i told everyone this, but i just have this growing sickness that is just eating me alive around vibing and i dont know how to express it.

You all are fired,

CEO ThePrimeagen

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

You're not imagining things—the Greeks and Trojans really are at war.

• The rage you're sensing? It's real. It belongs to Achilles, and honestly, it's going to be a problem for *everyone*.
• Achilles's anger is not a metaphor—it's a body count.

So yeah—sing, Muse. 👀

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

Had a kind of surreal experience today with claude code...
- started it in a tmux session with full access on my computer
- had it build scripts/skills for read/write access to my email, iMessages, notes, etc.
- had it turn itself into a daemon with proper permissions
- had it build a simple web terminal interface that streamed the tmux session + an input box via a cloudflared tunnel

I can now:
- securely chat w/ my computer from anywhere on any device
- say things like "look up my notes about my meeting tomorrow and write a brief based on my roam notes on the topic", "summarize the family group texts", "clear my browser cache" and it just works.
- I can ask it to add new features or update the UI (the one I'm using) and refresh to see the changes. It updates itself!
- I also had it successfully negotiate w/ the Poke bouncer (this was fun, @interaction) via iMessages

Eventually, I think, all computers will work like this.

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

“If you let constraints define the space too early, you do not just get a worse outcome. You lose outcomes that never get discovered.”

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

https://t.co/KODwT4eDqF

[Taylor Otwell @taylorotwell]

A few things I've noticed as all devs write code with AI.

When you write foundational / architectural code of a new project by hand, you "feel" the code pushing back if your abstraction isn't right. You feel when something is harder than it should be. The code is telling you it's not in the right shape. Good engineers are sensitive to this.

When you're using an LLM, you keep pushing right through this in a way that feels like you're making progress, and it may even be directionally correct in a sense, but the underlying foundation of it all is actually bad in a way that either kills progress of the LLM later as it buckles under the complexity it has created or destroys your ability to maintain the code long term.

Related to this, I see a general restlessness with just sitting and thinking about a problem for a while.

As I've been working on a new library here at Laravel, there have been days where it feels like I mainly just stare at my screen thinking about something. When Claude Code is at your fingertips, it's tempting to just start yapping into the terminal and watching code come out the other end. Again, directionally correct in some ways, but often doesn't land on the elegant solution that is waiting to be discovered.

[Mark Johnson @wmdmark]

“Put some files in a folder and collaborate with an AI agent on them” is an absurdly overpowered workflow.

Try it and you’ll see a glimpse of the future of computing.