I've spent the weekend using AI tools to make software, here's how it went

This week in 3-in-3:

Thing 1 - My Weekend in the World of AI Dev Tools
Thing 2 - AI of the week
Thing 3 - The Luxury of Time: What Will You Do with It?

Thing 1 - My Weekend in the World of AI Dev Tools

I've spent the weekend trying to use Cursor and Replit - two of the latest and greatest, and most hyped software development tools you can find.

It sounded like a good idea to revive some old projects and materialize some I had on the back burner.
So I tried adding features to 2 existing projects and coding another one from scratch.

I tried to use AI as much as possible and to write as little code as possible myself.

And...

It was an incredibly frustrating experience. I had to scrape all the things I tried adding to existing projects, and I think I just started to get some consistent results from Cursor late Sunday afternoon.

Between the Cursor crashes and AI making changes that were out of touch with the codebase, there wasn't much room for delight. Replit's deployment was smooth and the highlight of the experience. Replit's AI agent only supports Python Flask and vanilla JS at the moment, so that's why I didn't end up using it.

I think there's a learning curve for me as this is not the typical experience and there are plenty of people who had "I touched no code to create this and it was beautiful" experience.

I must be missing something. When it worked it indeed was magical. I'll figure it out.

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• xAI brought the Colossus cluster online in a record time (122 days) - Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world (100k H100s - for comparison, Grok 2 is trained on ~16k), and they intend to double it in a few months.
• Anthropic made Artifacts available for all Claude users

• Venice.ai is a permissionless alternative to the popular AI apps
  Permissionless? They use open-source models and don't store users’ text or image prompts on their servers. AND you can pay with crypto.
• Magic AI announced LTM-2-Mini. It's their first model with a 100 million token context window. That’s 10 million lines of code, or 750 novels.
• 1X introduced NEO - their next-gen humanoid robot, designed to help around the home

• Timbaland (yes, that Timbaland) got blown away by AI music generation
• Project Sid: the first simulations of 1000+ truly autonomous agents collaborating in a virtual world, with an emergent economy, culture, religion, and government
• SSI (SafeSuperIntelligence), Ilya's new company, raised $1B to build superintelligent agents - They'll use the cash to pay for computing power and top talent
• Replit announced Replit Agent in early access - AI that plans and autonomously builds an app you tell it (using Flask, PostgreSQL, and vanilla JS at the moment)

Thing 3 - The Luxury of Time: What Will You Do with It?

You will make no progress with your goals as long as you keep assuming that you still have time.

Life is shorter than you think, problems often pile up suddenly, you can waste decades being busy fixing short-term urgencies.

When you have the luxury of time, don't waste it.

- Orange Book

What do you wanna do once you have some time?

Cheers, Zvonimir