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ChatGPT Atlas
First thought, cool name. Second thought, so it begins. We have had AI browsers before - Dia, Comet, etc. But this one feels like the start of an era.
I find the memory feature to be most compelling. I browse a lot, and I’d love to be able to recall and use that information sometime in the future in new ways.
I’m ambivalent to the agent feature. The examples didn’t appeal to me. We have had the capability of Alexa ordering things for us, but I have never used that feature. I would probably like it for taking away mundane activities which I might do from time to time.
Not much info about their Apps SDK integration. Curious about that one.
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ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web
Anil Dash rips into ChatGPT Atlas after giving it a try. I still like the idea of memories, but all other points are 100% valid.
How do you make a “web browser” that doesn’t let you use the open web?
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App Recommendation: NetNewsWire
Continuing my series of app recommendations, the new one is NetNewsWire. It’s a free, open source software for RSS feeds.
After the death of Google Reader, there has been a surge in RSS services and apps. Many of the apps are great - Reeder and Unread to name a couple. I just like NetNewsWire more because it is and feels native, and it is fast.
Kagi News and NetNewsWire have become my primary source of daily news and interesting things to read. A simple trick I did to invest into these apps rather than Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. is to simply sign out from them and not install their apps.
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ChatGPT Atlas
First thought, cool name. Second thought, so it begins. We have had AI browsers before - Dia, Comet, etc. But this one feels like the start of an era.
I find the memory feature to be most compelling. I browse a lot, and I’d love to be able to recall and use that information sometime in the future in new ways.
I’m ambivalent to the agent feature. The examples didn’t appeal to me. We have had the capability of Alexa ordering things for us, but I have never used that feature. I would probably like it for taking away mundane activities which I might do from time to time.
Not much info about their Apps SDK integration. Curious about that one.
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App Recommendation: Bear
Apple Notes is free and pretty good. But I have always had an itch to find another note taking app, which I would like better. I explored many apps over a long time - Agenda, Craft, Notion, Joplin, etc. Ultimately, it was Bear that I loved best.
I have previously written about how I love software that is fast, native and has good UX. I have usually found that indie software developers do better in these respects than big companies. Indies stick to the core essence of the app, while the corporations either end up catering to enterprises or come up with a React-based implementation for wider platform support.
Just like Due and Things which I wrote about recently, Bear is an app that just works for me. It looks sleek and pretty, runs very fast, opinionated with its workflows, supports Markdown well, syncs well, works offline, feels native, and more. I love writing in this app. I have been using it for months now, and it has integrated well with my workflows.
It’s the only subscription-based productivity app that I use, and I find their pricing to be reasonable especially because it’s available on all the platforms I care about. It’s a true testament to a piece of software when you pay to use it and there are solid free alternatives available, don’t you think?
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App Recommendation: Things
Previously, I had written about my preference for Due as my reminder app.
When it comes to task management, Things is my go-to app. I love native apps, especially if they’re fast - both literally and with well-designed flows which take fewer steps. Things ticks all these boxes. That it sports a timeless look with subtle animations is a bonus.
One common complaint is read about Cultured Code, maker of Things, is that they are slow to add features. I couldn’t care less. It has everything I need, and I’d be happy if they just keep maintaining it.
To be honest, there have been periods when my usage of a Things has fallen off. It’s not because of the app, but because of how messy my schedule had become that I wouldn’t have time to use the app. But I always keep coming back to it since I’d inevitably miss something important eventually. I have learnt that the best thing I could do in such situations is to double down on using the app.
So, yeah, I am glad that there is Things. It has saved my day innumerable times at work.
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OpenAI Dev Day 2025
OpenAI Dev Day 2025 feels like a tipping point in AI getting more mainstream in media and people’s attention.
Over the last few years, I’m noticing a waning interest in the traditional hot products. I used to wait impatiently to catch Apple’s WWDC and their October product keynotes. This year, I could happily wait to read a summary the next day. It’s not just me. I don’t see as much chatter on the social media. Live-blogs don’t seem to have as much energy either.
I think it’s mostly because people are much more keen on wanting to know what’s next in the AI space. I’m seeing a live-blog for an AI keynote for the first time. Though the changes are coming at a fast pace, there’s just so much more that’s possible. ChatGPT is now a platform where you can “install” apps. Looks like we are just getting started!
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Apps as Home-cooked Meals
An app can be a home-cooked meal
Love Robin Sloan’s writing. And this one is especially great since he’s writing about building apps. There has never been a better time than now to build quick apps and scratch our own itch. I’m not a front-end or a mobile app developer. But I was able to use Cursor and build a simple UI app which helped me test out some ideas.
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Fast Software, the Best Software
I return to this Craig Mod’s essay now and then. Timeless and a must read for every software developer.
Still, the slowness feels indicative of unseen rot on the inside of the machine. The slowness is like an off smell. I don’t trust the application as much as I would if it didn’t slow down on such a small text file. 5,000 words is nothing. Faith is tested: It makes me wonder how good the sync capabilities are. It makes me wonder if the application will lose data. Speed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand. Speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality. If an application slows down on simple tasks, then it can mean the engineers aren’t obsessive detail sticklers. Not always, but it can mean disastrous other issues lurk. I want all my craftspeople to stickle. I don’t think Ulysses is badly made, but I am less confident in it than if it handled input and interface speed with more grace. Speed would make me trust it more.
But why is slow bad? Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow. When the nerds upon Nerd Hill fight to the death over Vi and Emacs, it’s partly because they have such a strong affinity for the flow of the application and its meldiness. They have invested. The Tool Is Good, so they feel. Not breaking flow is an axiom of great tools.
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Why NetNewsWire Is Not a Web App
Pretty solid reasoning by Brent Simmons. Not everything needs to be a web app.
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App Recommendation: Due
If there’s one app that I’d lost terribly if ever I move to Android, it’s Due.
Due is the one reminder app that has stuck with me over the last decade, and it’s paid for itself more than 100x by making sure I don’t miss important things in my life.
What makes the app tick for me is twofold:
- Its use of recurring (aka nagging) reminders until I either mark it as done or snooze it.
- Its UX makes it easy to add a reminder quickly. The lack of friction sounds like a minor thing, but I find using other reminder apps to be tedious after using Due.
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Kagi News
Kagi News is going to be my source of news henceforth.
Their philosophy is to comb through many sources and publish one news digest per day. You get to choose the categories you want. You should be able to get through all of the updates in 5-10 minutes. Perfect.
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Mac Utilities I Like
Want to call out a couple of free macOS menu bar apps that I use regularly and appreciate greatly. I love their simplicity and being native.
Both are made by an indie developer named Sindre Sorhus. He makes many more cool apps, give them a try.
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Koya Bound
Really cool UX for travel writing (when viewed on a bigger screen than phone) - Koya Bound
As you scroll the page, you go past photos with location pin overlaid on a contour map. Gives a nice sense of time and distance.
I have always admired Craig Mod’s writing, photography and project ideas, this is the first time I’m getting a peek at his design chops.
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Steve Jobs on computers as agents
Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late ’80s, early ’90s.
— Steve Jobs, 1984 interview with Access Magazine
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Cursor
We just had a 2-day hackathon at my workplace. Our team built an impressive LLM based agent that does an initial triage of product issues (e.g. based on alerts). We had done some prep work before the main hackathon, but most of the coding was actually done during the two days. There were more than 100 commits across 7 developers. Very productive.
Cursor played a huge role in achieving this. So many parts of this system would have been a full fledged project of their own in earlier hackathons where we didn’t have this kind of GenAI assistance. For example, we decided to build a visualiser to show events as a timeline, so that the demo is more impactful. It then took us 1.5 hours to build this, with all features such as zoom, filtering, JSON upload and parsing, search, event interactions (tooltip, click for more info), etc. With Cursor, it was like each developer had their own “10x developer” assistant at their disposal. It took us this hackathon to realise that we could and should be using Cursor/Copilot much more. Having to work from scratch, and with unknown technology, forced our hand but in a good way.
The “10x developer” assistant is unreliable and gets confused though. When I asked Cursor to build the visualisation tool in a blank project, it was able to do it in one shot. However, to implement the same as part of the earlier UI (built on the first day), I had to direct and coax it incrementally - otherwise it did a really shoddy job. I attribute much of this to the nascent nature of this technology. Perhaps next year, it can be effective even when adding to existing codebase.
It was fun to see the vibe coding in practice. Like I mentioned in my earlier post on this subject, the elephant in the room was how it can cannibalise the need for software developers over time.
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Vibe Coding
There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Up until a few months ago, I would have just laughed at this. Now this gives me pause. I have begun seeing enough examples at work where people, if not completely “vibe coding”, have been getting 80% of their work done by LLMs. This is not yet true for changes made to our core services because of inherent complexity and scope. How long is the “not yet” going to remain valid for? There is so much work in the software industry, where vibe coding can competently accomplish things today.
This brings up parallels to how the textile industry automation obliterated the traditional craftsmen’s livelihood in the UK in 19th century. The scary thing about LLMs is that they can be trained and applied in most industries eventually. It’s all happening in the knowledge industry now, but the next step is most certainly advanced robotics (humanoid or otherwise) and automation of manual labour in all forms. With the continuous and fast-paced improvements in LLMs, the computers could simply iterate and program the robots. We might soon be living in Asimov’s world.
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