Hey, I'm Tommi 👋 I still love obscure retro machines, but I'm switching things up, for awhile because I love SO many things. I'm learning AI coding and workflows "in public" as the kids say these days. I grew up writing HTML, CSS, PHP, and Python but it's been quite a few years since I did it seriously... But things have changed drastically, in some ways, so I'm practicing new skills here that are going to help me share the retro tech that I love better and level up my day job. Some of it will look silly. But I like to have fun. Here's what's on 📺 ! ☀️ Sunrise: fast AI news 🥪 Lunch Bytes: your turn, questions 🍪 Snack Bytes: quick how-tos 🌙 After Dark: builds, wins and stumbles 🔍 Weekend Deep Dive: big science-y reads and retro machines (Fine print: the above channels' content is subject to change now and then!) Pull up a chair. What should I build first?

As promised, here's the angel project before I scrapped a lot of it! I let a room full of Cursor agents iterate on their own, unsupervised, and this is what came back. Each iteration made the next thing worse. It was gloriously atrocious! Lesson learned: smaller steps, and I check every change myself. (Again, this was on purpose.) I already dug into this myself and cut out a lot of mess and started rewiring some things on my own. As I get time this week, I'll see what Cursor can do with my help.

I just discovered something that Grok Bot can do and it’s absolutely stupid! (In a GOOD way). I’m beside myself. I’m testing it now and if it works, I’m going to lose it. Going to go run a lap around the office now because I am shook. I sound like an influencer, omg. I just.. no. Sorry! MORE SOON

I built a Grok @Bot for homeschool! Not to teach my kid. That's MY job. It's my assistant. I gave it specific sources, had it double-check and cite everything, then I went behind it and verified it myself. As a test, I had it build a week of workbooks. It did really well. And I am confident that it will be an absolute legend throughout the year. Would you use AI to help prep schoolwork, or is that a line you wouldn't cross?

Spooky season is definitely here; I got a donut shaped like a ghost this morning! Aaaand forgot to take a photo of it before it went into my face. Tommi forgot, Tommi needed tokens to keep functioning! Maybe they will have more later

You are NOT alone

I went looking for political bias in Grokipedia. And boy, howdy! I actually found more than that. I spent a week following Grokipedia's citations back to their sources. Some of them led to... Grok. Some of them led to "trust me, bro". Am I saying "the other guy" doesn't have its own problems? Absolutely not! More news on that later this week, after I edit my article! Would you trust an encyclopedia that cites itself?

Elon, send me a share or two, so I can get some tires. I’m a kid at heart, does that count?

How I start a project with AI right now: Write a plan about what I want, all by myself Hand it to an agent Go do something else (drink coffee, probably) Come back and fix it

Yall go follow one of the coolest people on this app 🩷

When something breaks, do YOU fix it yourself or ask AI to fix it?

So, question. The last time I wrote code for realsies at work, the workflow was DEFINITELY different. I spent my time writing code. So, if you spend much less time writing out a plan/prompts and you’re waiting on your Cursor agents (or insert brand name here) to do stuff, what are you doing with the rest of your time? Is this why X usage is at an all-time high? Everyone is just trolling on here while they wait on their code to be written? Are you just “vibing” while it’s “coding?” Is that how the kids use it?

Lesson from the weekend: Do NOT let AI agents write a ton of code without supervision. (I did that on purpose) I let AI agents plan most of a fun 3d project, and then I let them iterate unsupervised and they built an absolute disaster. It was like strapping skates and paint brushes onto cats. This week I'm starting over with way more control!

The Internet said I needed cat ears

Took the child with me to run some errands and he requested that we listen to Tool. I’m not doing too badly at this parenting thing.

I know I'm posting a lot about AI, but AI tech bros everywhere are going to be so mad at me after I finish this long-form article, I think

If you could hand ONE chore to an AI bot tonight, what would it be? 🧺 Laundry planning? (Can I have a Tesla bot that does chores?) 🛒 Groceries? 📧 Email? (Do we even check our email?) 🧾 Bills? (LOL) I picked one and it worked better than I expected. Results tonight 👀