Taking inspiration from my buddy Paul's talk, I decided this week that I needed to commit to finishing my patio project.

For those who forgot, I started redoing my patio last summer, but sort of lost steam + got bad anxiety about doing things to my house, so it's sat dormant. A giant sand pit, a daily reminder that I can't finish anything.

The last couple of nights, I've pulled up a patio chair in the sand and imagined what this place can look like. I mean, the hard stuff is pretty much done. I have all the pavers. The retaining wall is complete. Now I just need to clean the sand again, level it, and set the pavers.

I was having a hard time imagining what a good paver layout would look like since I have two different colors, so I vibe coded a little tool to help me visualize what different patterns might look like.

A few weeks ago, my friend Kelly sent out a survey collecting data points for her Minnebar talk. One question on this survey was: "Think of a piece of code you've written that you're proud of. In a sentence or two, what made it good?"

After a lot of reflection, here was my response:

In middle school, I learned how to write TI-BASIC, and I used it to program small apps to help me with math homework. Simple apps that helped me remember things like the Pythagorean theorem.

What made these apps good was sharing them with my friends and seeing them use them for their own homework and tests. I've heard some even used my Pythagorean theorem app in college.

To me, "good code" is mostly unimportant. What's important is unblocking others from being stuck on the semantics (e.g. memorizing a mathematical equation), allowing them to focus their energy on solving a bigger problem.

I was thinking about my Pythagorean theorem app this evening while staring at my patio, and it dawned on me that I have a device in my pocket at all times which Claude claims is somewhere between 200,000× and over 1,000,000,000× more powerful than that humble TI-83+ Silver Edition.

There are a lot of people who have a lot of opinions about artificial intelligence. I find validity in all of them: it's bad for the environment, it's being crammed down our throats, it's trained on stolen data, using these tools fly in the face of hard-earned engineering skills, etc. etc.

Me? My general stance on all technology is "what can this thing do?"

I want to make things. Useful things. Cool things. Fun things.

You know what's fun?

Having an idea for a single page app at 7pm, then hanging out with your family watching Survivor 50 until about 9:45pm, then jumping into a few Claude Code sessions to whip together the idea in about two hours.

If you visit junk.timbornholdt.com/vibes, you'll see a pretty weird looking landing page of random pages.

I have four tools on there right now:

1. A visualizer for my patio (better seen on desktop)
2. A syllabus guide to the lo-fi genre
3. A page designed to encourage me to try new-to-me PS2 games
4. Based off albums that I was into last month (need to update now), a page that gives me more detailed listening notes when exploring similar albums

The coolest part? This is all tied into Github Actions. If I want to make another page like this, I load Claude on my iPhone, tell it what app I want it to build, then let it commit that code to my vibes repo, which automatically gets rsyncd to my junk VPS.

I now have the ability to start out on a walk, come up with a random tool I need built, tell Claude to Ralph Wiggum loop itself until it accomplishes the vision, then see the results for myself right on my phone.

It took me two hours to make this happen. Most of it was spent deploying and securing a brand new VPS.

The future is kinda dope.

I hope all of this will help me finish that damn patio.

(PS: Look at how terrible that SVG logo is that it generated lmao I love it so much)

Great blog post exploring how techniques for dealing with OCD can be broadly applied to all the feelings we feel.

We can either make our internal world foreign, or we can adjust the alarm. This is what mindfulness is, mechanistically. It’s the phone-free walk, sitting with the awkward silence, dealing with boredom standing in line. It’s wrestling with the blank page instead of having AI fill it for you.

It’s accumulating enough small moments where you don’t reach for the fix. Enough reps that your brain learns the default: not every feeling needs a response. True toughness is being able to sit with the feeling and decide: is this alarm real and worth responding to, or should I let this crazy thought or feeling just float on by.

This is the work I've been doing for several years now. It's painful, being able to trust in not only yourself but your communities and support systems.

But on the other side of it, there's a world where you can load Reddit in a private browser tab, scroll for 5 minutes, laugh at the absolute absurdity of the world we find ourselves in, close it down, and get back to building stuff that matters.

Maya is living the dream here. I could listen to her nerd out about React components for hours.

My buddy Paul gave a talk at Minnebar ostensibly about how he's able to take a 3d scan of a room and throw it into Blender to visualize how a furniture piece will look in a room.

It ended up being a love letter to creativity and learning.

I've known Paul for more than two decades now. Every time I see him, he's either recently completed or is midway on some insanely cool idea. It's annoyingly inspiring. I'm getting lunch with him in a couple days and I am 70% sure he's gonna say something like "yeah, I got irritated and decided to dig an underground bunker."

Just... just watch this talk. And if it blows your mind like it did mine, hire the man to make your house cool!

Also, for my own future notes, here's Paul's pithy checklist for how to approach projects:

1. Start small
2. Have a goal
3. Lower your expectations

In the wee hours of the night last April, someone stopped at roughly 20 street intersections across Silicon Valley and launched an unprecedented cyberattack that would eventually spread to multiple states, embarrassing local officials and prompting them to question their security practices. Authorities suspect the unknown culprit took advantage of weak and publicly available default passwords to wirelessly upload custom recordings that played whenever a pedestrian pressed a crosswalk button.

Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from “forcefully” being inserted “into every facet of your conscious experience.” At another, he celebrated “undermining democracy.” At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as “actually really sweet and tender and loving,” while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being “so alone.”

It's almost like... maybe we should give our civic employees enough budget and time to implement the bare minimum basic things you need to do when deploying infrastructure like this?

But yes, continue the layoffs and cutting taxes, everybody.

When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.

For me, from this boredom—this blankness of mind as I walk past sometimes fields and sometimes giant gambling pachinko parlors—words flow. I can’t stop them. My mind begins writing about what we see and refuses to shut up. That gap created by a lack of artificial stimulation is filled—thanks to the magic plasticity of our brains—with words and more words. Without Candy Crush, an inverted event horizon spawns, and out shoots: thoughts. I dictate as I walk.

During the peak of mobile app madness, iOS and Android developers would often find themselves cornered by friends, relatives, and random people at parties.

“I’ve got a great idea for an app…”

More often than not, this dreaded sentence would be followed by a hard sell when the developer didn’t display adequate enthusiasm. If the developer didn’t act fast and feign the exact right level of approval — enough to communicate they ‘got’ the idea but not so much that they’d be asked to build it — the idea guy would advance onto hashing out NDAs, equity allocations, and asking when coding can start.

Recently, I’ve noticed the AI era is a bit different. The balance of power has shifted. Builders need domain experts as much as domain experts need builders.

You can no longer simply copy an app model with a few improvements or obsess over user feedback as you sharpen your prototype towards product-market fit.

To build a differentiated AI product you need training data and examples curated by a domain expert.

I don't think the role of a software engineer is going to go away, but I do think personally, I'm not gonna cut it anymore as "just a software engineer."

The real value is in pairing someone who knows how these AI systems work with someone who knows how to get deep with a real world problem.

The modern advertising apparatus exists to bypass rational thought and trigger emotional responses that lead to purchasing decisions. A sophisticated machine designed to short-circuit your agency, normalized to the point of invisibility.

“But it's free speech!”

Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

Been thinking about this article for months now.

My mortgage was recently purchased by Rocket Mortgage¹. As a result, I now receive mail from them several times a month.

Each envelope looks identical, but the contents are either (a) urgent information related to my mortgage, or (b) an advertisement to take out a HELOC through Rocket Mortgage. Therefore, I have no choice but to at least open every single envelope to see what it is.

Your blog is a radio station.

Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.

Reminds me of the blog post I recently shared about how a good blog post is actually a complex search query.

This whole article is the encouragement I know I'll need to be brought back to at some point. Some great passages from Brian Eno in here:

One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle:

"It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it all for?/ What’s the bloody point?/ I haven’t done anything I like and I don’t have a clue what to do next/ I’m a completely empty shell.” This lasts two days or so… Then I suddenly notice — apropos of something very minor, like the way a plane crosses the sky, or the smell of trees, or the light in the early evening, or remembering one of my brother’s jokes — that I am thoroughly enjoying myself and completely, utterly glad to be alive. Not one of the questions I asked myself has been answered. Instead, like all good philosophical questions, they’ve just ceased to matter."

(Hat tip to my buddy Scott for the link!)