Weekly Tinkering by Junod.dev for Jan 14

I took last week off, and while I thought I’d spend a lot of time with AI, I spent more time with my basement and trash piles. Thanks to all the new friends who bought my old stuff, I’m also tinkering around with a new M4 Mac Mini.

I’ve also spent a lot of time reading about and thinking about the people of California. Seeing clips of the destruction is heart breaking, so many lives have been uprooted and lost so many memories. It’s hard to fathom.

Things to read/watch

I’m super bullish on AI assisted coding. Really, AI assisted knowlege working. I watched a lot of Sourcegraph’s Virtual AI Summit, it’s time well spent. One of the quotes was AI assisted coding amplifies the abilities of the coder. It makes a mediocore engineer, SUPER mediocore, while it makes an excellent engineer, SUPER excellent. This post by Addy Osmani dives deeper into that thinking, and worth a read.
- The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding
Cole Medin is one of my favorite AI youtubers. In this video he sets the table for 2025 with good insights on how to approach your AI learning in 2025.
- How to DOMINATE in AI in 2025

Things to try

I use fal a lot for image generation. I want to learn more about comfy ui, and other node based asset generation pipelines. Fal makes it easy with hosted flows.
- Workflows Blog Post
Having just gotten an M4 Mac Mini, I’m excited to do some local inference. I’m going to be spending a lot of time with Ollama, a tool for running models locally.
- Ollama

Things I’m tinkering with

I am using the “Work with me on {said task} in {said folder} and create md files to document our progress” pattern a lot. It works for many different contexts, including code (although I don’t code with this pattern). The place I use it most is in the Claude desktop app with the Filesystem MCP. I also have the exa and brave MCP for search.
Aider conventions are e way to guide Aider, similar to the clinerules I’ve mentioned in the past. I’ve been playing with using AI to generate convention files off of AI generated requirements.
- Aider Conventions

I hope you enjoyed this first post. Please let me know if you have any feedback, and thank you for making it to the end.