unfiltered

• I love designing and building UIs. Like love, love. It is work that combines product thinking, UX, systems, and visuals all at the same time and it tickles every part of my brain. There are easily five iterations to get to a satisfying outcome: original idea, wireframes, implementation, iterating through the trough of disillusionment, and then the transcendence.
• I’ve gotten to a good state with the Sunnyday Agent configuration page. Good for now at least; and I don’t use the word good lightly. There are still rough edges, and aspects of the page which are candidates for a teardown and redo in the near future as my understanding evolves. But at least everything feels and works well within the constraints it’s supposed to right now.
• That’s one of the great things about working with coding AI agents. They give me higher degrees of freedom in working and can express in higher fidelity. If I were to put it in an analogy, it’s akin to the transition from 2d to 3d. We gain a new dimension that brings it closer to the real thing.
• After working on agents for the last few months, I have a lot of thoughts about performance. All the benchmarks tend to flatten them down to a single dimension, and to be fair that’s what benchmarks are supposed to do. However, agent performance is a much more nuanced, especially because there is the what is not said gap between the lines of the instruction prompt. I will have more to say about that as I collect my thoughts.

A lot of the discourse these days conflates what’s possible with what’s good. That’s understandable. Possibilities are exciting; they let us do things we couldn’t before, start new projects, and feel squarely in the driver’s seat.

But because it is possible doesn’t mean that it is good. Too often, we just let things happen. Our judgement gets fatigued when it takes more effort to understand and decide if they are worth our time and attention. And then we let them slip. The word slop encodes that energy.

I’m not here to gatekeep possibilities. I love possibilities, but I also care that things are good. Good can be achieved when we—the people who are involved in and affected by new possibilities—spend time poring over them and iterating on them. Extending our care and exercising taste.

Now that we know that things are possible, let’s spend time making them good.