Hey friends,
I hope you are doing good! Some time ago, my uncle told me: “Tim, many years ago I used cocaine, once”. “How was it?” I asked. “It was that good that I will never do it again!”.
This story keeps on coming to my mind when I am experimenting with AI. Some time ago I've discovered Cursor, an code editor with a powerful built-in coding agent, fed by billions of lines of code harvested from Githubs public (and private?) repositories. I actually only wanted to write a simple application to display text on an image. But the process and a flood of dopamine tempted me to create a complex web app that looked like an early prototype of Figma. During these hours of "tripping" I've realized that the tool took over the control over the process: An LLM determined what I am building.
What the heck was going on here? I was high on AI.
Shortly after I've decided to make another experiment: It took me 30 minutes to craft out an elegant, simple version of the app with 50 lines of Processing code. The other vibe-coded app went straight to the trash.
One quote comes to my mind. It's 2000 years old:
Millipedes have countless feet and yet they are the slowest of all crawling creatures. (Dion Chrysostomos)
I hope you enjoy this newsletter. And I wish you a beautiful spring!
Many thanks to Kiana (@blaofilm) for the photo!
