Ai | warpedvisions.org

Stop treating AI like magic; it's Autoconf on steroids

Remember autoconf? If you were building software in the late ’90s or early 2000s, you probably have scars. You’d write some configuration rules, run the tool, and out popped a perfectly functional makefile. It felt like magic, until it didn’t. The moment autoconf broke, you were debugging generated shell scripts that stretched for thousands of lines. The abstraction that seemed so elegant suddenly became opaque hell. You needed to understand not just what you wanted, but how the magic worked, where it could fail, and why. ...

When technology gets boring, innovation begins

I was debugging a power issue with my thermostat last week when it hit me: I had no idea how many batteries were in my house. Not approximately. Not even close. Twenty years ago, I knew exactly where every battery lived; the TV remote, the kitchen clock, maybe a flashlight. Today? They’re everywhere and nowhere. In sensors, in remotes, in devices I’ve forgotten I own. They’ve crossed the threshold from technology to invisible infrastructure. ...

After the prompt: how AI disappears into everything

I’ve been thinking about the current AI moment, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re about to hit a wall. Not a failure wall, more like the wall Web 1.0 hit right before everything changed. Remember when every startup was “webr.com” and the height of innovation was animated GIFs? We’re in the AI equivalent of that era right now. Just as Web 2.0 wasn’t really about AJAX or rounded corners, AI 2.0 won’t be about better chatbots. We’re about to witness a fundamental shift in how AI gets built, deployed, and integrated into our daily tools. And honestly? It can’t come soon enough. ...

The signal-to-noise problem: why breaking work down for LLMs is harder than it looks

Last week, I was reviewing an outline I worked on with an LLM agent for a technical article. It looked solid: comprehensive sections, logical flow, all the boxes checked. But something was off. On a hunch, I removed a section that was good (but didn’t quite fit) entirely. The result? Not only did the article flow better, but when I ran it through quality scoring, they all rated the shortened version higher. The very tools that helped created the meandering narrative recognized the improved signal when it was removed. ...

The physics hidden in your codebase

Evolution has a weird obsession with crabs. At least five times, nature has taken some random crustacean and said, “you know what would work better? A crab.” But it’s not just crabs, evolution continues to reinvent the wheel. Trees evolved independently more than 40 times. Many different types of eyes appeared in dozens of unrelated lineages. Flight emerged in insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats, each independently. ...