Products, Games, Books and Links

• Like many other folks I know, I spent a lot of time in March playing Slay the Spire 2. It's still in early access but already feels like it's improved on the original. A statement I don't make lightly.
• I also spent some time playing a bit of the new Pokemon Pokopia. It was a fun Animal Crossing style game in the world of Pokemon. I got about 80% of the way through the main story line before getting a little distracted with other things.
• I finished the second and third book in the Library Trilogy by Mark Lawrence. I enjoyed them both, particularly watching the story become more complex as the trilogy developed. If you're a fan of light fantasy novels I'd recommend this one.
• https://sive.rs/socials - This got me thinking about my own writing and presence on social media. I spend a lot of time wondering whether I should post more thing or just ignore social platforms. I certainly don't have the following of Derek Sivers but there is something in his message about sharing things you've made.
• https://astral.sh/blog/openai - If you don't write a lot of Python you might not know who Astral are. If you do then you've likely switched over to uv as your package manager and may well use some of their other developer tooling as well. I saw this news and have mixed feelings somewhere between apprehensive and disappointed. I worry about major parts of any developer ecosystem being merged into a big company. Doubly so because OpenAI have gone out of their way to try and do less things, meaning they either want the people (likely, they're smart folks) and the tools will slow or they really want to own python tooling for some yet unknown reason. Either case lowers my bet that uv and it's siblings are around in three years.
• https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing - This piece is a great example of when web pages really hit their stride in storytelling. The effects, visuals an subtle things (like the watch showing your local time) help build an interesting and engaging piece. The topic itself, the endless torrent of connected devices, is also timely and was an interesting read in contrast to the next link.
• https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated - This piece is a rare combination of well written, fun and likely predictive. It's in a way that you see in really good Science Fiction. The story itself is simple, a guy lives in an AI heavy future and spends his time helping people with their myriad of AI generated products. Working, both personally and professionally, with a lot of folks using AI at the moment this one felt close to home.

Things I'm Working on

• I've got a new Django project on the go. Not ready to share that one just yet but it's been a lot of fun. I write about it below as the project coded 95% with Claude.
• I'm also working on a number of news aggregating tools to help with some things at work. Being in Logistics right now is certainly interesting and having tools that can find and summarise useful updates is proving useful to our commercial team.

In Case you missed it (my posts)

• https://www.elliotcsmith.com/some-thoughts-after-shipping-a-project-95-written-by-claude/ - The Django project mentioned above. I ran this one as an experiment of 'AI take the wheel'.
• https://www.elliotcsmith.com/product-teams-vs-feature-teams-in-an-ai-world/ - The SVPG article came up recently and I was thinking about how the rise in AI equipped teams of Engineers and non-Engineers was changing the pressure and dynamics of teams.
• https://www.elliotcsmith.com/build-saas-with-strong-opinions/ - One thing I think AI has become very good at is the 'software that kind of pleases everyone'. It can get you to 60% very quickly. Previous generations of SaaS were all about maximal configuration to serve as many customers as possible. I think as time goes on, that kind of low hanging fruit will be less and less defensible and what customers will pay for is your strong opinions on best practice. Assuming your opinions are correct.
• https://www.elliotcsmith.com/what-do-ai-based-layoffs-say-about-tam/ - If your team is 10x more effective and you choose cut resources, that's somewhat of an admission that you didn't have 10x within your grasp to begin with.
• https://www.elliotcsmith.com/are-they-software-companies-or-do-they-just-have-software-problems/ - Many of today's best tech companies are arguably only tech companies because they need to be. People aren't seeking the technology, they want a service delivered by technology. Those services and the resources behind them are the real moats in these companies. For this reason, many of the tech companies people say are one prompt away from death are a lot more stable than they appear.