LLMs and me

I've always had a problem of wanting to do to many things and having too many interests. Of course the advice and sensible thing to do is to realise what you can and can't achieve and concentrate on one thing or a small number at most. Ideally you find your passion and go all in for a while.

I've never been very good at doing that, to my detriment. I would overthink things, get put off by the steep initial investment doing something in say, a new language needs. Get a book, decide which framework is the best etc. I'd get bogged down and something new would come along. but that idea would remain, like the grit in an oyster but one never destined to have its shot at becoming a pearl.

That was, until these new tools came along.

There's a lot to debate about the LLM revolution but one thing they've definitely done is to allow me to finally start addressing my mental backlog of projects and things to build. For prototyping and learning these things are incredible. That initial friction I'd stall on (yet another "Hello, World!" section of an introduction) just gets removed. I've personally used Cursor and more lately Claude Code and haven't had this much fun on a computer since hacking on the C64 back in the eighties. I'm sure Codex and the others are just as good.

From silly little bots in a new language (presidencyprogress.bsky.social) to what might actually be useful apps, I've started chipping away at stuff that's been on my mind for well, years in some cases. Will they ever be used by anyone other than me? Unlikely. Are they perfect? No (but these aren't production systems I'm building here). But would they have ever been created were it not for these new tools? Also a resounding no.

There are some things I want to handcraft myself, painstakingly chipping away at a block of marble to reveal the statue underneath. But there are other things that I want to be thrown into existence so I can look at them and gauge their value, techniques I want to try and understand, thought experiments to run.

Best of all, clearing these things out of my head seems to have opened the floodgates for new stuff to muscle its way in.