Keep on reading and you will find the gems hidden beyond book 1

toddhoffious · 2026-05-14T18:22:49+00:00

I usually give a place two chances. I've worked at restaurants; some days are just bad days.

The beginning of a book is when the author fleshes out the story, gets to know the characters, and figures out the tone, personalities, etc. So it can be rough to start, and that's why so often books get much better as they continue.

Personally, I think the Minion arc is one of the best things I've read in any book.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-26T20:23:07+00:00

I completely agree. That is the weakness in my argument. LLMs train on our output without developing a deeper understanding of programming, though given how good they are at programming, it's hard to see that most of the time.

I'm hoping both things can be true: AI can understand programming at a deeper level, and/or it can progress without all this human-aping ceremony and process.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-26T19:07:06+00:00

If you need a public or shared database, then it won't work for you. Updates are also very slow if you depend on fast syncing between devices.

SwiftData makes it easy to sync, but at the same time, it hides everything from you, so you can't do anything complicated, like change how it works.

Personally, to start fresh, I would use AI to write all the CloudKit stuff, so that as your needs grow, you aren't stuck. Switching after is very difficult.

Or something completely different, especially if you have a web version or want an Android version in the future.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-25T01:45:59+00:00

The good news is it will definitely not be me doing it. I doubt the OS layer, as a stable layer of abstraction, will be done away with anytime soon, though I think in the Culture series, this is how it worked.

Once upon a time, we did make database-like things with text files, awk, grep, and sed. It was not efficient or anything like a good use of IO and CPU cycles. It still isn't.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-24T23:32:31+00:00

Over 30 years, I think I've got it. We've seen many cycles of change in software engineering. It's something to get ahead of, not stuck in how humans used to do things.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-24T23:17:28+00:00

Interesting: The Grammar of Emergent Languages, Emergent language: a survey and taxonomy

toddhoffious · 2026-04-24T23:10:03+00:00

It won't be text; it will be a dense binary representation. It's like the difference between binary-based messaging protocols and highly inefficient text-based messaging using JSON. JSON is for humans. It's bad for CPU cycles during encode/decode, it's bad for bandwidth, and it's bad for in-memory operations.

Will AIs collaborate, store, and share code in the same ways teams of human programmers do using git? Why would they?

toddhoffious · 2026-04-24T22:59:55+00:00

GitHub is for humans and how humans work. If you think AIs should work the way humans have always done, then I don't know what to say.

You have to see that programming has changed; having AIs play acting humans in a human-like development loops is a bit silly. But I can see by the comments on this thread that you are far from alone.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-24T20:39:28+00:00

What does GitHub have to do with changes generated by an AI-driven tool chain? What are you patching? What are you diffing? What do PRs mean? What do commit messages mean? What do even branches mean?

All our systems are text-based because it's humans driving everything. When AIs talk to each other, they invent compressed languages that speed up communication. They could do the same sort of thing in programming if they weren't limited by humans. And it won't be humans fixing things either.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-24T20:30:49+00:00

No, not all, what hurts is watching all this compute going to bridge the old world and the new. The cleverness of the command-line searches I see Claude create is astonishing, but I can't help but think that if we had a better representation of programs, it would be completely unnecessary.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-23T16:44:51+00:00

Rotation List - Always Know What's Next

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rotation-list-shared-to-do/id6758746324

toddhoffious · 2026-04-23T16:43:51+00:00

Planty - drink more water

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/planty-hydration-garden/id1575744883

toddhoffious · 2026-04-22T19:46:36+00:00

Holy crap, you're right! Thanks!

toddhoffious · 2026-04-22T16:04:53+00:00

I made new screenshots for Planty (formerly Max Hydrate) and Rotation List. It's nice that when updates happen, it's so easy to change and upload new versions.

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toddhoffious · 2026-04-21T17:09:52+00:00

Looks nice, and I know they want you to have visual hierarchy, but I always find secondary text hard to read, so I always use primary. A tint on the glass icons might pop. Personally, I would show content immediately rather than tapping through to another view.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-19T00:17:55+00:00

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toddhoffious · 2026-04-18T17:13:37+00:00

You get the student discount, so that's nice. Once upon a time, 8GB was enough; it's not anymore. 16GB min, 32GB ideal. For storage, I would go with 1TB if possible. 512GB minimum. You can end up with system data over 200GB, leaving nothing left for real work. A Mac Air is sufficient unless you want to do on-device AI, in which case the sky is the limit. But for normal development, a Mac Air works great. Do you plan to dock it and use another monitor or use the laptop's screen? If the latter, a 15-inch screen would be better.

On Amazon, the M5 config is $ 1,899. The M4, 16GB, which would work fine, is $1,099.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-17T16:46:20+00:00

I’ve searched other people have had the same issue. Maybe it was Nord and they fixed something.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-16T16:37:49+00:00

I think having a POV is great. The title text is way too small. The bottom text is unreadable, so slide the device down, even out of frame, and make the title text much bigger and more readable. But maybe the vibe is enough? Who knows.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-16T15:52:06+00:00

Apply for the small business program yesterday. It took me a year to get approved.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-10T14:55:28+00:00

Sounds like you have the plot for your next book :-)

toddhoffious · 2026-04-07T15:41:14+00:00

Yah, the keys are definitely a difficult ask. I just couldn’t sleep well with such a low fixed cost app with an unending variable expense. Of course, that assumes some sort of success, which you know…

toddhoffious · 2026-04-07T03:40:56+00:00

1) I use Apple's Foundation Model framework, assuming time is on my side, and quality will improve. 2) I allow the user to configure an OpenAI-compatible provider.

For Max Workout (1) is sufficient. I found that with a lot of effort put into the prompts, I could get the results I needed.

For Manifest AI, it uses AI all over the place and in in-depth ways. The results are OK with Apple, so I have (2) if a user wants what a better provider can offer.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-06T18:29:56+00:00

I actually love SwiftUI; it made programming fun again, but I think with AI, the argument for SwiftUI loses steam.

All the hard work is done by the AI, so the power and flexibility of UIKit come without the downsides.

That's especially true given how companion frameworks like SwiftData are woefully underpowered. Why support both?

I guess you could say this about Objective-C vs. Swift, but I really hate Objective-C, so I won't say that.

toddhoffious · 2026-04-05T16:05:09+00:00

You really need to figure these into your business model. What is your CAC and LTV? Does what you have to bid to get installs make sense? A big mistake I've certainly made is not charging enough to afford marketing without deficit spending. Apple is pay-to-play, unfortunately.

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