I'm very late with this week's weekly update because I got sucked down the AI rabbit hole again. A friend of mine is a boilerman, and he's been badgering our coder friend about an app that could use voice transcription to create invoices for a long time. A couple of weeks ago, when I was waxing rhetorical about AI, he asked me. I thought: sure. I was freshly inflated after vibe coding my Obsidian plugin and reckoned I could knock it out in a day or two, especially since I'd figured out Claude Code, meaning I'd no longer be shuttling code back and forth between Visual Studio Code and Claude.
How naïve I was.
I can't remember when I started, but I remember the plan: I'll write in the mornings and continue my explorations in AI in the afternoon. That lasted until about Thursday, when I couldn't help it: I had the fever. I coded all day, stopping only when I ran out of my Claude credits and had to take a break until they reset. Friday night, I dreamed of coding, woke up at 4, and, unable to get back to sleep, ended up coding again. Going to bed last night, I was sure I had 15 minutes left — do this, then run the EAS build command, and I'd have myself a finished app. Only at six o'clock this evening did I finish.
I feel as if released from a spell. But what a beautiful spell. I think it's just as well I didn't become a coder. It would chew me up and spit me out.
Still, I can't get over the results: it's a beautiful little app (if you have Android, you can check it out here — I'll put a demo up at some point, I'm sure, but no visuals for now). What would have taken me months between learning coding and figuring out dependencies and the ins and outs of building an app, I, an illiterate, coded in the space of a few days. It's staggering. I'm on the sceptical side of the AI hype (at least when it comes to AGI and ASI), but the past few weeks of checking in with how the field has progressed in the last year have been staggering.
Anyway, that is today's big news story.
CJ the X's Talk in Dublin
In other news, I ventured to this nation's capital on Monday to see CJ the X's talk in Dublin (our podcast with PF Jung in Toronto will be posted here some day soon), and that was another jaw-dropping experience this week. The surreality of seeing a room full of people here to see someone I know speak. There was a sort of delicious dissonance in it.
As expected, CJ was electric. He's a born rhetorician, and the talk balanced depth and entertainment beautifully. It was well worth the trip to Dublin. A couple of drinks afterwards and many laughs and good chat all the better. He was headed to Liverpool for the next stop of his speaking tour, while I headed back to Limerick with a sore head the next morning.
While at the gig, I had the pleasure of meeting one of our community! It's the first time this has ever happened, so it was quite the delightful surprise, I have to say. And I see Tom has now joined the Patreon community. What a joy! It was bound to happen eventually, and it brought a big smile to my face when it did.
This week I'm taking a break from AI development and getting back to pure writing. I'm going to reflect on some of these experiences at the frontiers and continue to dig into the axiomatic grounds of belief systems as I'm trying to piece together the dynamics of belief.