@Hannahdowney I think it was your question last night at @NSLondonMeetup about how we get Software Architects when there are no juniors left to pursue the career path. Part of the joy of my job has been training juniors and I think that is what sort of deflated me about AI for a while. But I’m coming out the other side. Maybe we train Software Architects differently. Building Architects don’t start as brickies and work their way up. I think CS degrees might have to change…

@marcoarment @twostraws @caseyliss I was at NSLondon tonight. Apple said that they are hiring Tech Evangelists FWIW. But I agree with Marco as well.

I’m off to NSLondon at Apple HQ in Battersea.

Before sending Apple any money this week, remember that Tim Cook attended a private screening of the Melania documentary at the White House later in the same day that Alex Pretti was murdered by this administration. He knew about it and went anyway.

@calicoding this is not ideal because you don’t own String but also because String has some interesting properties as it encodes unicode. i.e. 2 identical looking strings can be completely different. Which will absolutely come to bite you at some point.
If you are allowing arbitrary strings you are not in control in creating their ids. And comparing arbitrary length unicode Strings is not the most efficient thing to do. I think String is generally overkill for an ID.

@stroughtonsmith My MIL couldn’t find her inboxes the other day! It took me a while to find the hidden disclosure button for Favourites…

@simonbs Nice. I wondered if it used CloudKit…

@simonbs Out of interest what are you using for the backend?

@jasongorman Selective breeding would imply some intent to use a wider genepool to breed progeny that were improved in some trait though.

It’s like when before the browser address bar was merged with the search field, we all went to google.com and “searched “ for the website because it was easier than typing or mistyping a URL. So instead of going directly to a site, we all did this hop from google.com even though it was less efficient.

The real thing here is that people desperately want text-to-action. LLM’s are probably part of the solution but not the entire solution. It would be trivial to write a spreadsheet function that did this job 100% correctly but we are settling for a half-working thing because we are too lazy to start.

Leaving aside that he is tracking project status in a spreadsheet instead of an AI-coded tool, how have we got to the point where we are prompting an LLM do something like this? And it doesn’t do it right? Yet this is unquestionably taken as proof of how amazing AI is! This is the best example the creator of Claude Code could come up with FFS.

I listened to the Vergecast interview with the Claude Code guy. It was annoying that the interviewer was so all-in on AI that he never questioned some of the things being said. One example of using Claude he gives is that he has a spreadsheet that all his teams update with project status and he prompts Claude to check the spreadsheet for status updates and send reminders via Slack if people haven’t updated. Except it gets at least one name wrong!

@ctietze a

@zachwaugh same

Ulad Ramanenka's talk ("From Breaking Apps to Building One: My iOS Dev Journey") from our 2025.3 event at Monzo Bank is now live on YouTube! https://youtu.be/Ylexsh9pCNM

@simonbs You didn’t see Canada vs Sweden?

Here’s a conundrum. AI is making it possible for “anyone to code anything” yet Apple is enshitifying its iWork suite with upsells to Creator Studio. Surely, if I, an actual programmer, can now create my own Pages, Apple’s incentives would be to make theirs better and not worse. I don’t want ads in Pages so I can just make my own ad-free version. And open source it for everyone else. Right. Right?!

A handy guide for designers working at Apple

@rootnode @david_chisnall Even today Xcode adds a newline to the end of a file. I think most tokenisers of yore would have used fgets to read a file line by line.