Seeing how much Claude Code and Codex do for me, though, is amazing and extremely worrying at the same time. My job is more than just CRUD, but seeing how far LLMs have gotten in the past 4 years worries me about where I’ll be in the next 4 years.

I think it’s finally time to get serious at learning to market and getting better at writing. If anyone can make a website, what do I really add? Maybe I know a bit about SEO, landing pages, and UI UX. But if I continue jacking off myself saying I’m a perfect jack of all trades, I’m probably gonna become irrelevant.

On the iPhone, there’s no way around that, because Chrome and Firefox are just Safari with different icons. On iOS, Apple doesn’t allow any browser other than their own, so if Safari is missing a feature, everyone is.

That’s what annoys me. The biggest technology company in the world should be the opposite of this.

Technology and software should bring us together and make things that were previously difficult or impossible much easier. Before phones and computers, it was impossible to communicate with someone at the other side of the world. Now, we can do it instantly for free, and we almost take it for granted.

So something went wrong somewhere. With all of our advancements, why is so much software still gated, locked down, and made worse on purpose?

One of my favorite examples of amazing software is the internet and web. Pretty much anyone can access it on any device. Despite the web’s problems with compatibility, for the most part, we can open the same website and have a similar experience on different devices.

Apple’s app store is sorta the opposite: you need an Apple device, and your app will ONLY run on apple’s software and hardware.

All of a sudden, technology creates a division. Don’t have the exact phone as your family? Great, communicating with them is slightly worse. Can’t run the same software as them. The solution is to switch away from your current device that is artificially brought down by software to another more expensive device that is also brought down by software.

I get that there are reasons: security, privacy, control over the experience, amongst other things I’m not smart enough to fully follow. The worst thing though, is that Apple is at the top because they’re closed. They locked everything down and it worked. They won.

There’s hope, though. Linux is still around, and so is the web, thankfully. Open things that nobody is forced to use, yet people use them anyway. So the closed path isn’t the only one that works.

We’re this advanced, we have all of this, and we still build barriers on purpose. We built the technology to connect everyone, but we built the walls and borders too.

Maybe it matters less than it used to. AI is making it faster and cheaper to build software, and you no longer need a big team. So the extra effort that walls like Safari force on us gets cheaper, and more people get to build and reach others in the first place. That’s great.

It goes both ways though, because more people using AI to do what they otherwise wouldn’t means fewer people complain, which means there’s less of a reason to open up the walled garden.

I don’t have the fix, and I’m not exactly innocent either. I’m writing this on a Mac, and I test everything on an iPhone. That’s what works for me and my career, so yeah, I’m standing inside the same walls I’m complaining about.

Maybe that’s the real problem. The walls are comfortable, even when you can see them. I’ll keep trying to build for max reach, but I won’t pretend I’m above it.

Related

I wish the app store was more open

One day I see a guy running 67 agents. The next, I see a man PIPing his wife for a lack of productivity — in public.

The result? None of them have shipped anything.

I understand jokes — and would often laugh at them.

My friends and I, we all make it a point to LinkedIn-speak-max all our posts, and it’s a fun exercise because it is a useful skill — it helps us improve our corporate speak.

But things have limits. It’s not making me confused — it’s actively making me want to delete LinkedIn forever.

Unfortunately, it is imperative that I maintain a strong digital presence, and LinkedIn is the only significant platform I can use to slide into recruiters’ DMs.

And that’s where it stops being just a funny feed problem. I know some of these people.

They are normal in real life. They do not talk like this at dinner. Nobody says “I’ve been reflecting deeply on execution velocity” while ordering fries.

But LinkedIn does something to people. Especially when they are looking for jobs. Especially when the economy is bad enough that being competent is apparently not enough, and now everyone also has to become a tiny thought leader with a ring light and a content calendar.

So yes, the posts are weird. Yes, they are clearly engineered for attention. But I also get it. The platform rewards this. Recruiters reward this. The market rewards this.

The slop is annoying, but the incentives are worse.

These posts are cringe, but the incentives are real.

What do you think? Is LinkedIn cringe, or are we all just being forced to humiliate ourselves professionally?

Comment below. I read every reply.

#‍LinkedIn #‍AI #‍PersonalBranding #‍JobSearch #‍FutureOfWork #‍OpenToWork

Would you like me to make the post shorter?

To be honest, I never really thought of scheduling and filter notifications as “smart” features. They’re just features that every sane AC should preferably have.

My first apartment in college had no central cooling, so the first thing I did was order a window AC unit from Best Buy. I didn’t look too much into it; I saw it came with the unit and one remote, figured it’d have the schedule and filter notifications, and just bought it.

Turns out it was an extremely “dumb” device without the “smart” app. Without the app, all the remote could do was turn the AC on, change the temperature, and turn it off. Scheduling, electricity usage, dust filter status, all of that lived behind their shitty app. I get the electricity usage thingy needing an app, but why would I want an app to do something the remote should already do?

So I set up the app. It was flawless … for exactly one day. The next day it randomly disconnected, and it kept doing that every day for the next 5 or so, until I just gave up on it.

Great, no AC scheduling for me.

And I think I know why it’s like this. A remote gives the company nothing. An app gives them my data, an account, my email, and a reason to annoy me with notifications I didn’t ask for. The AC was never really the product. I am. And the part that gets me is that I already paid for the hardware, full price, and somehow I’m still the thing being sold. The rest is just the word “smart” selling units: slap WiFi on the box, tick the marketing checkbox, and nobody cares if any of it actually makes my life easier.

You’ve seen the exact same move on the web. Reddit is a website and it works perfectly fine in a browser. But they do everything in their power to shove you into their app: blurring the page, popping up “open in app” banners, making the mobile site just annoying enough to give up. Not because the app is better for me, but because an app can track me in ways a browser tab could never dream of.

Here’s what I want from my home devices:

• a proper remote that can do the basic functions
• physical buttons by default; touchscreens are fine for some things, but physical buttons have failed me less
• a mobile app only if something genuinely needs one

I’m not anti-app (okay, maybe I am, a bit). An electricity usage monitor living only in the app is perfectly fine, and so are actual “smart” features, like turning the AC on when I’m heading home in the summer, or shutting it off when I leave. But my “smart” AC doesn’t even have those. It just took the basics and locked them behind a login.

I love technology. Be it work or play, I’m always thinking about it, and it’ll probably (hopefully) keep me from being homeless for the next many years. But if there’s one thing that scares and annoys me, it’s these so-called “smart” home devices. They work until they don’t, and when they don’t, I have no idea how to fix them.

I don’t think the internet and technology ever really solved the problem of connection. Like I guess we previously had books, and you’d publish them, sell them, and have people buy them (I have no idea how this works, tbh). I thought the internet sold us on a promise that you can reach people on the other side of the world through a laptop and some time.

That is definitely true, but are the people on the other side of the world even interested in what you have to say?

Technology is only making the easy parts easy and the hard parts harder. The internet solved distribution, not connection, IMO. Even before the internet, reach was never the bottleneck. You could get your book into the hands of everyone with enough money, but you can’t force them to read it and force them to like and share it.

So the amount of attention is still the same, but now we have way more people and things competing for that attention.

And it’s not even a fair fight for that attention. There’s definitely an aspect of the big corporations in here too. They essentially decide for us, and curate the content that captures most of our attention, even if it isn’t the best. I highly doubt that YouTube Shorts or AI-generated Instagram Reel slop would be anywhere as popular as they are today if the companies weren’t shoving them into our eyeballs every moment.

Still, I think it’s important to get your thoughts out there. The web is soon just gonna be bots collectively jerking off other bots. But whenever I see that one website that I can tell had a ton of tears and sweat poured in, I get a little happier knowing that not everyone wants to let go that easily. And that I’m not the only one shouting into the void.

When I was younger, I always thought that “things will be better when I grow up”. There are always gonna be problems in the world, but I thought that we as a society are working together, beyond borders, to make things better for all of us.

There are too many “us”s, and no one agrees on what “better” means. Everyone’s “problems” are different.

But still, every day I learn that certain people cannot be happy seeing other people happy.

There’s a lot of hate.

Maybe there always was hate, and it’s just being put on display with technology.

As I’m making more websites on my own, I’m slowly realizing that I no longer want to see the same UI everywhere. I used to absolutely love Shadcn UI because it let me initialize a new project almost instantly. But now I can’t stand the sameness of seeing un-customized Shadcn UI components all over the web.

I’m not a fan of where the open web is headed. Google seems to have declared war by shoving their AI-generated answers onto every search, and websites are being optimized for search engines, metrics, and the algorithms that aren’t on our side. That’s why I appreciate “old-web” looking websites, even if they have weird layouts and aren’t mobile responsive. When I come across them, I know they’re likely hand-coded, that they sound like a person wrote them, and that they aren’t competing for clicks. It’s like reading someone’s personal journal through a digital medium.

Bring back your view counter, and let me sign your guestbook!

• “best restaurants in san francisco reddit”
• “public bathrooms new bedford reddit”
• “is 25 an hour good intern salary reddit nyc”

I don’t really remember when I started suffixing “reddit” to everything, but I could, for the most part, tell that Reddit comments were from actual humans. Reddit does have bots, but the upvote/downvote system puts the “best” human answers higher up.

Over time, I sorta started to get annoyed by what was considered the “best” by the hive mind of Reddit (which sometimes includes me too). Whenever I do serious research on Reddit, as we all do, I see useful comments overshadowed by stupid jokes. I don’t think these jokes are bad, but it gets annoying to see them consistently voted higher than the “valuable” answers. I almost felt bad seeing well-thought out comments get less upvotes than a “I’d also do this man’s dead wife” joke.

Anyways, enough Reddit rant. When I Google search something, I’m not doing it with the intention of seeing the Gemini answer, but it’s often the first thing I see, and I am lazy. I’ll admit, I often take it as face value and don’t try to confirm the facts, even though I know that it’s often inaccurate.

I don’t like what’s happening here, with Gemini stealing the views from these websites. But some of these websites really do suck. I hate landing on a website buried in ads. And those news sites that make you read an entire unrelated backstory just to keep you scrolling and racking up accidental ad clicks are the worst.

Unfortunately, I do see myself leaning towards ChatGPT for more everyday searches with specific or technical answers. I still get on Reddit for opinion-based things.

It’s the perfect mark for “main” pages, like my home page. So that’s the rule now: anything important gets the ✱. If I make collection pages down the line, like blog posts by tag, they’ll get one too.

Something to note: the font I’m using (Inter) renders it more like a light asterisk. It looks much heavier, and nicer, in JetBrains Mono: ✱.

The best solution was to wait until the library opens and go there. I could have also gone to a restaurant, bought something, and then used their bathroom. But then I’d have to spend money.

I don’t think this has to be said, but every city should have free public bathrooms. Not having public bathrooms isn’t gonna magically remove the demand. Instead, it’ll just unload that demand on places you don’t want it to be. Anecdotal, but I see an alarming amount of shit on the sidewalks and streets in most American cities I visit. And yellow snow too. I doubt it’s because of the dogs.

This is another case where I feel that an environment built for humans has ended up hostile towards humans.

I work in tech, which probably explains why half of this is about software and AI.

What do I write about?

No real theme. Cities, tech, AI, the occasional movie, and whatever everyday thing happened to interest or annoy me that week. If a thought doesn’t fit anywhere else, it ends up here.

When do I post?

Whenever something annoys me, or when I’ve got a thought I want to shout into the void but can’t really tell anyone I know, because, let’s be honest, they probably won’t care. No strict schedule.

What does the name mean?

I chose Blackbird Watch because the .com was available.

Want to say something?

You can email me at hello@blackbirdwatch.com. I read everything, even if I don’t reply. There’s also an RSS feed if you’d rather just follow along.

Thing is, I’m choosing to keep them in because I want to reduce friction and make it as easy as possible to write and get my thoughts out there. Past me would have tried to make every post perfect by sending drafts to three friends and my entire family. Sounds good in practice, but it just leads to a pile of unpublished writing. Also, I don’t have three friends.

Anyway, back to the point. AI has made it way too easy to create a website, create a post, and publish it to the internet with one click. As someone who reads a lot on the internet, I can kinda tell when something was written with AI. It’s a little hard to point out exactly what it is, but there are many established AI-writing patterns, like “it’s not X, it’s Y”, or writing long sentences that tell you nothing. The moment I realize this, mind just turns off, and I find it really hard to continue reading.

Occasionally, I see a typo in a blog post or article and realize, “great! I’m not longer in enemy territory”.

In a few years, will it be our flaws that let us prove who we are? Typos are one example, but I do think that maybe the inability to complete a puzzle or Captcha will end up proving our humanity. I guess the flaw with this is that it’s easy to tell your LLM something like “include a typo somewhere”.

References

Signs of AI writing - Wikipedia

Initially, we may think it’s the poorer family that’s the parasite. They slowly make their way into the rich house one by one, until all of them practically live there too. They’re leeching off the rich, so they’re the parasite, right?

But obviously that’s not actually the case. It’s the rich family that is the true parasite, even if unknowingly. They can’t drive themselves, can’t clean their own house, can’t raise their own kids. Every comfort in that beautiful home relies on the labor of people they barely notice and constantly complain about.

The poor do the living while the rich just hover above it, clean and oblivious. It’s an obvious metaphor to capitalism: the ones who look respectable, who look like the rightful owners, are the ones surviving entirely off the people beneath them, without a second thought.

I’ve been seeing this a lot lately, and it’s hard to ignore once you see it.

Take small creators online. It might be easy to call them the parasites as they leech off YouTube’s reach, Google’s traffic, the platforms’ marketing. They’d be nothing without these platforms.

But really, YouTube has nothing without the people uploading to it. Google’s whole empire is other people’s words. The platform is the rich family, and the creators are the ones doing the actual living.

With AI answers, Google and the rest don’t even bother sending you to the creator anymore. They scrape the work, summarize it at the top of the page, and keep the click for themselves. The leech stopped returning even the scraps.

And now here I am, asking Claude, “Are the title and description okay for SEO?”

Be warned: my thoughts are pretty unstructured, and you will likely see syntax errors and typos.

Notes

AI has made simple software development so easy, and I’m worried for my job
What’s going on with LinkedIn?
Software should be more open
What if we all spoke in bullet lists only?
Am I shouting into the void?
I am not happy with the current state of things
A lot of smart home devices are dumb
The heavy asterisk (✱)
I think I’m nostalgic for the web I never experienced
LLM or web search?
Trying to find a public bathroom at New Bedford, MA
Should we keep typos in our writing?
The actual Parasite
No, I really don’t want to use your shitty app
The movie Obsession was great
Productivity masturbation
Doomprompting
Whiteboard masturbation
Naming is hard, and will only get harder
This much context switching can’t be good for us
I wish the app store was more open
We need more traffic calming
I love living in a walkable city
It’s getting harder to plan things out

Meta

About
Guestbook
Subscribe

Doomprompting is when you keep prompting an LLM over and over, hoping you’ll strike gold. You tweak a word, hit send, get something close-ish, hate it, send it again. You’re doing a bad job at explaining what you want and hoping the model guesses for you.

The thing is, you usually do have something in mind, but you just have writer’s block, or can’t express it well, so you try to outsource your thinking. You turn the LLM into a third-party thinker and hope it returns something better than the mush in your head.

But you can’t make something out of nothing.

I’ll call it the law of conservation of tokens or something: you can’t pull more out than you put in. If you never specified the thing, no amount of regenerating is going to generate it.

This bit me recently while trying to name a new product. The domain I wanted was taken, so I asked Claude for alternatives. It gave me a list of similar, equally bad and weird names. I tried rolling again, this time with some more context. Obviously, I got more weird names. I don’t blame Claude because it really had no idea what I wanted, so it was no better than your phone’s autocorrect, just guessing.

I notice this happens way less when I’m coding though. Not because code is easier, but because of how I’ve set things up: my AGENTS.md tells the agent to grill me before it writes anything, to interview me until we actually share an understanding of the goal. The forced back-and-forth drags the spec out of my head.

It’s not unusual for it to ask me 30+ questions for a simple stupid game I hope to make.

With naming a product, writing a sentence, picking a direction: there’s no interviewer there. It’s just me and a blank box, and if I don’t know what I want, the loop has nothing to converge on.

Like sure, I could have it grill me, but it often makes less sense. I have no idea if I want my product name to be more “calm and informative” than “energetic and playful”.

Even when I do know what I want, I still get stuck if I can’t put it into words. Sometimes switching from Claude Code to Codex helps, but not always.

When the task is spec-able, asking the LLM to “interview me” before implementing helps a lot. It’s gonna ask you a ton of questions, but it’s better to spend the time planning and building the right thing than building the wrong thing and attempting to fix it. The catch is that this only works when the answers exist in your head somewhere. For the fuzzy stuff, no interviewer can pull out a preference you don’t have yet.

Back to the question: is doomprompting worse than doomscrolling?

I think it’s sneakier. Doomscrolling announces itself more. You know you’re wasting time, the guilt shows up eventually after you realize you’ve been sitting on the toilet for 45 minutes. Doomprompting hides inside real work. You’re typing, you’re getting output that looks like progress, so you likely don’t realize what’s up. You can burn an hour this way and feel busy the whole time.

But it’s not all bad, kind of like video games versus reels. Both can eat your night, but at least a game stimulates your brain a little, and maybe you’re playing with friends. Doomprompting is similar: even when you spiral, you might still walk away with something, a shipped feature, or a pattern you picked up. Doomscrolling leaves you with nothing.

When I catch myself in the loop, the fix is never another prompt. I really need to get my mind off things, and maybe go for a walk. This worked long before LLMs showed up, it’s just easy to forget now that there’s always a slot machine ready for another spin.

Because in the end, you can’t make something out of nothing. The LLM will happily try to fill that gap, and it’ll hand you something that looks good enough every time, that’s the trap. The work it’s pretending to do for you is the deciding, and that was always yours.

Related

This much context switching can’t be good for us

But it’s just sooo convenient: I can walk 5 minutes to a grocery store, or maybe 15 minutes to a gym, or 20 minutes to a movie theater.

I definitely am very lucky and privileged though, because a lot of people live in “un-walkable” cities, but not by choice. The thing I find sad is that so much of my country has been made unwalkable in the name of progress, and I still find it weird that a human-build urban environment is actively hostile to humans. Any guesses for which country this is?

The US has a few cities that are amazing in terms of walkability: NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, etc, but I find it really sad that we are, in most standards, considered the “top” country, yet very few of our cities can be navigated car-free.

My main problem is that the web, on iOS devices, is constantly lobotomized by Apple. It makes sense, because they earn money by developers getting their apps on the app store ($99 per year), and they also take a 30% cut of all in-app purchases.

Obviously Apple can do what they want because they created an amazing ecosystem that works great on their devices. But 15 years later, the app store is almost like its own “internet”, and a single corporation gets to choose what gets in.

If you don’t want to pay Apple the $99 to get your app on the app store, your only other option is to make a “progressive web app” (PWA). I really hate the term “PWA” because it’s an ugly acronym that means nothing to users; “web-apps” is a much nicer sounding name. To create a PWA, you need to add a few things to your website that let a user add it to their home screen. If done correctly, when the user launches the PWA that they added to their homescreen, it opens up just like a native app.

But the problem is, have you or anyone you know ever “added a website to your homescreen”? No one knows how to do it because Apple has buried it behind 3 or 4 menus on Safari. On top of that, tons of native features like haptics can’t be used.

Apple’s review process may improve safety and trust, but IMO, that does not justify making web apps second-class citizens. If I were in control, A user would be able to install a web app from Safari with a clear, first-class flow, and that app should have access to privacy-gated APIs similar to native apps. Only when permission is granted, obviously!

Related

Software should be more open

I guess I’m just nostalgic to a time when I could call my friends when I’m bored, then meet at a park within 15 minutes. This was back in middle and high school though, when we were essentially jobless. But now, everyone has their own shit.

But I hate how difficult it is to plan things now. Say I wanna go see a movie. I message my group chat. Half of us just don’t want to see the movie. A quarter never see the message, or don’t reply. Then there’s 2 left, and the next time you are free at the same time is 3 weeks from now, when the movie already leaves cinemas.

I like naming things because it lets me think of the app I’m creating as more than just a “document” on my computer. I guess, when I name something, I’m more likely to actually work harder on it and “treat it well”.

But all the good names are taken. Or rather, all the good .com domains are taken. If the name you thought of is a word or even two words, expect for it to be taken. Or expect to pay a ton of money just for the name.

I do wonder, how bad is it to not have yourproductname.com and instead have something like yourproductname.io or yourproductname.app?

Great, let’s go to that link, pay for the ticket, and be done with it.

The link asked us to download an app called “Paytix” or some shit.

Why would someone have to download an app to pay a parking ticket? How often do you get parking tickets that you want to reserve space on your homescreen, just for paying parking tickets??

What should have been a 2 minute task of opening a website and paying ended up becoming a 10 minute annoyance of downloading an app, waiting for it to download, signing in, manually typing credit card information …

Let me ask you: what have you gotten done with this productive set up? You’re giving the same energy as programmers who make a blog and only blog about how they made their blog. It’s like you’re trapped in your own pyramid scheme.

Please, just start writing. Don’t build a structure from scratch or use someone else’s. Start writing and let your structure evolve with time and content. Don’t worry about making a “wrong” structure. Worst case, your AI tools can help you refactor.

Always remember: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Because I wasn’t there.

Related

Whiteboard masturbation

There was only one jump scare, and I think we all knew it was coming. But it still scared me. 10/10.

I was surprised that the entire movie had a budget of <1M, and it was shot in a month!

What would have made the movie even better is if the couple next to me would have shut up.

Well not exactly “working” actively, but more like prompting, reviewing, and testing. LLMs have been amazing in letting us work on so many things at once. What previously would take me around a month of learning, experimenting, and failing now takes me an evening perhaps. In the past week, I got an app on the App Store, and I haven’t written Swift in the past 6 years or so.

But I don’t think this context switching is great for me. Sometimes at night, I get stuck in a “reels loop” when I can’t sleep: I surf between TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube in the hopes of finding something entertaining to watch and fall off asleep to. But these apps are built in a way, that if I don’t realize it, I’d end up spending the entire night on them.

Am I doing the same thing, but with my AI tools and side projects now?

PS: It’s kind of funny. Right after typing this out, I accidentally put in a wrong prompt that was meant for another project. That really messed up my flow state.

Related

Doomprompting

In a lot of cities, there’s a city-wide speed limit of 25 mph, and that’s great, but it means nothing without proper law enforcement. Since the COVID lockdowns, traffic enforcement has been … non-existent in many cities.

So, traffic calming is what we need. IMO, speed bumps are probably the best because they physically slow cars down. Paint and all is cool, but it’s doesn’t physically stop anyone. The problem with speed bumps is that they often need to be removed for snow plow machines.

Another traffic calming method I’m seeing is curb extensions, or “neckdowns”. Basically, making roads narrower at places like pedestrian crossings. One of my least favorite experiences is attempting to cross a road, only to have a driver cut you off because they are turning right on red. Neckdowns should hopefully make the road at the intersection narrower, so drivers slow down and look around more carefully.

Also, stop utilizing the word utilize. You aren’t ChatGPT, and you will never be as smart. Just use use like a normal person.

Related

Productivity masturbation