this is me alex!

I keep trying to take shortcuts - that’s one of the main things AI can help with, after all. And one place I keep trying and failing is writing. Like with this essay. I tried by first doing a voice note and having it turn the voice note into an essay and I just…didn’t like it. It didn’t feel like me, even if the prompt I gave was “sound like me.” ...

So I just got off a call with someone interested in learning all the claude code stuff. It was fun and cool and i muttered a lot, laughed too loud, and was generally anxious about sounding smart or making myself look like anything other than an idiot. Healthy stuff! But, and, yet, the one thing i kept saying as an answer to this kind friend’s questions was simply this: just ask claude Not sure how to install something on github? Just ask claude. ...

lets see if this works!

ok so here’s what happened. I’ve been vibe coding for like a year. I have a captioning tool that’s 70% done. a game. a blog system. all of them “almost there.” none of them shipped. so I made myself a little system. one project at a time. everything else is dormant. write it down. actually write it down. and it worked. I shipped a zine in one day that had been sitting untouched for weeks. ...

asking myself this as I read about a man named Lish. Gordon Lish. Editor of Raymond Carver. Friend of Don Delillio. I learned about him as a quick aside mentioned here in this YT video on White Noise which sent me googling and found me here at this ’expose’ in the nytimes in 1998 about how Lish edited Carver’s early works quite a lot, it seemed, and perhaps enough to say that he was the guy who wrote them? ...

I just came up with this in my last post - testing your email provider to make sure emails send good and I gotta say, i like it. Basically its a way of adding stuff that GPT said without having to rewrite it in my voice or have it be that weird amalgamation between the two. Feels like a big unlock honestly.

the feeling The feeling was stepping out of my back office, hearing a baby wailing, and realizing that that baby was not our baby — it was a neighbor’s baby. That someone else was dealing with this bullshit. Not because I want other people to deal with it, but simply because I don’t want to deal with it. And even that’s not true. It’s more that I’m just glad to be in a world where I’m not the only one who feels that. ...

I hate that terminology but it isn’t wrong. Explore mode is when you just wanna rummage around your ideas and everything is great and possible and expansive. Divergence is another term for it. This leads to that which leads to those and so on. But eventually one must say ’enough’ and stop. One must converge. Take what is there and do something with it. Package it for the marketplace? Create something worth consuming? Something that has a point? ...