Dan Shapiro's Blog

I’ve been working with teams on applying Dark Factory principles to build software with AI. There are a few tools to do this, but my favorite is trycycle.ai. It’s just a skill.…

Companies are now producing Dark Factories – engines that turn specs into shipping software. The implementations can be complex and sometimes involve Mad Max metaphors. But they don’t have to be like…

A few months ago, I walked into Justin McCarthy’s office at StrongDM and noticed something wrong with his colleague Jay’s monitor. He had a Google Spreadsheet open. Columns, rows, formatting – it…

Day over day, year over year, AI is driving down the cost of writing code. Economists have a word for what happens when stuff keeps getting cheaper: deflation. And you do things…

I’ve been impressed with AI Studio’s Apps for prototyping. https://aistudio.google.com/apps So I decided to give it the ultimate challenge: I pasted in XKCD 1425, and nothing else. I’ll let you be the…

My wife pointed out that most of my shirts predate the pandemic, and it was time to shop for something new. This is not something I enjoy. So, like most things I…

Tuesday, 9:40am, Seattle. Whatsapp buzzed. Harper sent a link – a new project from Steve Yegge that makes AI agents more effective. Worth a try. I opened Codex CLI* in Powershell and…

Something new is possible. Four weeks ago, I braved the gaggle of Waymos nosing around the Presidio to check out Connected Stack. I plopped next to my buddy James Cham, notorious partner…

June 2023. ChatGPT was six months old. We’d launched our first AI feature, Magic Canvas, three months before. I was meeting with our friends at Joann Fabric (may they rest in polyester)…