It's very easy to get into the flow building something and throw out my plans to step back and reflect or write one of these updates. But there is always one more thing. I recently read the book "Meditations for Mortals" by Oliver Burkeman. So much of it resonated with me (my Kindle says I highlighted 10% of the book) and I'll probably quote from it more than once in these updates. There's a section on limiting focused work to 3-4 hours a day, which includes this:

The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instill: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished. This is the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his book The End of Burnout. The monks’ daily work period ends at 12.40 p.m. (and no prizes for guessing when it begins: about three hours earlier). Malesic writes: I asked Father Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defense attorney, what you do when the 12.40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. ‘You get over it,’ he replied.

I'm getting over it.

Flavorful

After a couple months of letting this project sit (or "marinate" as I like to say), I took another crack at it. One nagging problem with the various prototypes I'd built so far was that they weren't any fun. What would it mean to make a "fun" cooking app? So much cooking content is consumed for fun, browsing through a cookbook, YouTube, even a farmers market to admire the goods without really planning to cook anything. I landed on the idea of a turn based game, played with an AI chef, centered around daily cooking challenges. Elevate instant ramen! Dinner in five ingredients! Transform leftovers! A playable version came together in about a week, and I think it is on the road to fun. It's preloaded with 30 challenges, and since I don't remember what's on what day I look forward to checking each morning (right after I finish Connections). If you are reading this, email me and I'll let you try it out.

Things MCP

I thought I was done with this project, but I ended up releasing v0.2.0 earlier this week. I wrote more about the why and the what behind that decision on the project page, or jump straight to the repo if you are a Things user and want to take it for a spin. It has 96 stars on Github as of this writing. It gives me a nice warm feeling to see something that I started on a little whim of curiosity has turned into something that a few others are finding useful.

WPA Guide to NYC

I'd been getting some pestering emails from this site's host that I needed to upgrade one of the backend tools it uses before September 1st. That change took all of a couple minutes, but while I had the "hood up" I decided to make some UI and design improvements to the site. The workflow for visually oriented development tasks that I like is to ask Claude.ai (the web interface) to mock up the UI as an artifact, and iterate on colors, layout, etc. Then I hand off the results of that to Claude Code to actually implement. I tried having Claude.ai generate a "spec", but it actually worked better to just give Claude Code the raw HTML/JS from the mockup. Check out the new look at wpaguide.com.

I know so much more about building web apps today than I did nearly two years ago when I launched this. Now I can say that it is not implemented in a very efficient way at all. I have a plan to fix that now, but it was something to leave undone yesterday (I'm getting over it).

Weather Report UX

I haven't worked on this since making the Groundhog Day inspired DJ weather report (which I've been checking daily), but I think I have an idea for how to move it forward again soon. I'm starting to notice common threads in these various projects. All of them, in one way or another, take some information and make it available in a new context where it's useful. I'm sure we'll revisit this theme soon in these updates.

Links

Restoring computer-based art at the Guggenheim - return of the <blink> tag (guggenheim.org)

I don't get it, we had all those meetings (The New Yorker)

Simple hook so Claude Code can tell you when it's waiting on you - I'd like to do something like this with a red/yellow/green "tower light" (ernesto-jimenez)

AI Model Pricing Comparison - One table for comparing model pricing and capabilities

AI UI metaphors: HUDs vs copilots (Geoffrey Litt)

Anthropic guide to building multi-agent systems - very practical (anthropic.com)

Flounder Mode - profile of Kevin Kelly (joincolossus.com)

Good demos are important - curiosity is the main force for how we pull ideas from the future into the present (Sharif Shameem (x))

Ira Glass on "the gap" between taste and output (YouTube)

Learn in public - make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning (swyx.io)

Scrappy - make little apps for you and your friends (pontus.granstrom.me)