Look, Ma! AI Can Program!

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend, William Neil, recently wrote an app. Rather, he convinced AI to write an app for him. And he recorded himself doing it!

If you’re technical, you might enjoy watching it. Or, if you find recordings of machines generating machine-y looking things soothing like ASMR.

William chose one of my collaboration workouts as the subject of his app. I host a monthly series of workouts called Staying Strategic as part of my Collaboration Gym. The first two workouts is something called Question Dumping — literally dumping whatever questions or top-of-mind for you at the moment, then doing a little organizing and answering. Participants do their work in Google Docs, and I prompt and coach them along the way.

William did the program earlier this year, and he asked me if I had ever thought of creating an app version of my workouts. As a matter of fact, I’ve often thought about this. So, he built one!

We had an hour-long conversation where I walked him through how I thought it should work, then he spent at least another hour refining the requirements using ChatGPT as a kind of secretary while he went on a walk (as he describes in the video). Building / testing / debugging an iteration of the app took about an hour total.

I haven’t done any serious coding in decades. I also haven’t played with coding using AI, although I’ve had some interesting conversations with friends, and I’ve been following musings from Jon Udell, Les Orchard, and Harper Reed. (I also enjoy Mike Hoye’s general commentary and critiques.) So it was fun to have William walk me through the process, and I’m so glad he recorded this and shared it with the wider world.

It’s a simple, non-production quality app. I think an experienced engineer could also build it in about an hour, with other potential benefits, such as higher code quality. It also would have cost at least an order of magnitude more. Maybe the benefits outweigh the costs in the long run. I wonder about things like maintainability and how easy it is for LLMs to refactor a codebase with minimal human intervention. And, I’m also conscious of the Bitter Lesson.

Now about that app…

For many years now, even before GPT-3, my friend, James Cham, has talked about the potential of AI replacing overpriced strategy consultants. If you look at the mechanics of what most traditional strategy consultants do, this is a no-brainer. But the dirty little secret of Big Consulting is that they’re rarely hired for said mechanics.

So I don’t think that AI will replace Big Consulting (although it may drive the cost down). But I do think that many groups legitimately want to align their people around good strategy. This is why I created Staying Strategic, which is an evolution of something I’ve been tinkering with for my whole career. And I think that AI could not only help scale workouts like Staying Strategic, but it could enable new and interesting possibilities. The fact that AI could help create the tools that would enable AI to help us be more strategic is just meta icing on the cake.

Good Energy Addendum

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last week, I published a blog post entitled, ”Good Energy” on Faster Than 20. I try to reconcile what’s going on in this country with what I’ve been doing professionally the past few years. I tie it all together by describing my volunteer work doing habitat restoration at Skyline Gardens in the Berkeley hills.

It’s long and very personal. I thought about posting it here instead, but it felt important to share on my work website. My work is ultimately about social impact, and I want my professional community to know what I’m thinking about, what I’m doing about it, and why.

It’s my first post there since 2021, a record gap. Traditionally, my blog has been a place where I think out loud. Over the past four years, I continued to reflect in my private journal, but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t feel like being “public.” Some of it was feeling like the world is too noisy right now and wanting to shut out that noise so that I could stew in my own thoughts. Some of it was feeling like the Internet is not a safe place right now. Most of it was just not having the energy to write coherently.

When I started this essay, I felt like I had forgotten how to write. Writing has always been a tortuous experience for me, full of dread and self-loathing. I always felt like I had the muscles to do the work, it just was that the task was heavy and hard. This time around, I felt like I didn’t have the muscles. It was an interesting process trying to rebuild these at the same time as I was trying to use them.

The piece is called, “Good Energy,” but I might have more accurately titled it, “Try to Make the Bad Energy Good,” because that is what it felt like I was doing. Several friends reached out after reading the piece, and in our ensuing conversations, it felt like we were repeating that process together. Times are hard. It’s human to be feeling bad energy, but it doesn’t serve us, and the muscles required to shift that energy are as important as any of the other muscles I mentioned in the post. The most unexpected gift of writing this is that it’s continuing to help me exercise these muscles. Hopefully it helps others too.

I want to mention two folks who didn’t quite make it into the piece. The first is Kathy Kramer, the founder of Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour here in the East Bay. Everybody interested in native plants in the East Bay (and undoubtedly beyond) knows Kathy, because she has been a force for the past 30 years. The tour was an invaluable resource for me when I was just starting to learn, and it was where I first came across Glen Schneider. Kathy also organized the walk that Glen led, which set me down my Skyline Gardens path. Her impact has been stunning, and in many ways, she is a classic case study in not skipping steps, which I talk about in my post.

The first time I met Kathy, she welcomed me warmly and took time to get to know me. At subsequent events, she always went out of her way to say hello, even when surrounded by a crowd of others. When you are in a roomful of strangers, and you don’t feel like you belong, and someone important in the community comes up to you and greets you as if you were an old friend, it means something. It also makes you want to get more involved. It is no wonder that Kathy has been such a catalyzer in this community for so long.

The second is my friend, Joe Mathews. Joe is a long-time journalist and a leading scholar in democracy. He was our storyteller for the Delta Dialogues, which I mentioned in the piece. Yesterday, after a conversation with another friend, I went searching for something in my archives, and I inadvertently came across a column that Joe had written earlier this year during the Eaton wildfires in Southern California.

It’s a beautiful, harsh piece, more raw emotionally than I’m used to in Joe’s writings. It felt very much in line with what I’ve been feeling for a long time now and some of what I was trying to express in my post. He talks about the writer, Zane Grey, who lived in Altadena and whose lifestyle had not quite aligned with his exhortations:

In his hypocrisy and self-centeredness, Grey was like today’s prosperous Californians—moralizing to the world about living responsibly and respecting nature and seeking justice, while denying themselves nothing, and certainly not a nice hillside home with a view.

When our friends’ homes burn up, or slide down the hill, we tell ourselves that this is the price we must occasionally pay, the hardship we must temporarily endure, for all the beauty and bounty of everyday life. And in this age of climate change, we make resolutions—to retreat from the fire, to be more responsible, to live differently, to accept limits.

But do we really intend to keep any of our promises? Do we really believe ourselves?

We know the honest answer. But we never dare say it out loud.

Except when we gaze at the homes and businesses burned in Altadena. Or watch a row of billionaires’ beach homes burn on TV. Or drive down Mariposa in Altadena and find that the Eaton fire has destroyed the Zane Grey Estate, a well-preserved architectural treasure.

Then, only then, do we blurt out the truth.

“Unbelievable,” we say.

Of course, it’s not the scenes of destruction that are unbelievable.

We are unbelievable.

…

As Jim Lassiter, the main character in Grey’s greatest novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, says: “You dream or you’re driven mad.”

But we can only defend ourselves with dreams for so long. Eventually, the nightmares awaken us.

Maybe you’ll think I’ve been driven mad, but I believe the biggest nightmares, the disasters that shake us, are not a California curse.

Rather, they might be our state’s greatest gift. Because they rouse us from the distractions of our dreams. They make us look away from the arresting beauty of this place, and compel us to see one another, and even talk to our neighbors.

When we awake to the nightmare, we are at our most connected. We are at our most generous and human. We consider reality head-on and make new plans. We are, however fleetingly, believable.

Sunsets Are Special, Even Though They’re Not

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I have a colleague who makes it a point to watch every sunrise and sunset. I am in awe of her, but I’m also simultaneously troubled and resigned by how Herculean this feat feels, especially as an early riser who lives in a moderate climate. How hard is it to stop what you’re doing for 10-15 minutes at the beginning and end of each day and to look outside and enjoy the show that nature offers us every day?

Plenty hard.

It’s Fogust here in the Outer Richmond neighborhood in San Francisco. Sunsets and sunrises have been hard to come by. But yesterday afternoon, the skies cleared, and by evening, it was glorious. I haven’t been walking much recently, but I’ve lived in this neighborhood long enough to know that, when there’s a reprieve in the summertime dreariness, you take advantage.

At Eagles Point Overlook at the start of the trail at Lands End, there was a scattering of people taking it all in, clearly waiting for the sun to set. I wondered whether any of those folks were like my colleague, ritualistically waiting for nature to call it a day, or whether they, like me, had decided that this Monday evening was too beautiful to waste inside. I ambled along slowly, stopping often to photograph the rays of golden light wafting through the trees or to watch flocks and flocks of pelicans gliding along the Bay toward the ocean.

For the past month, the whales have been putting on a show along the coast, and I had hoped to take a peek just in case. But about two-thirds of the way there, I felt the sunset calling to me, and I decided to take a detour down the long set of stairs to Mile Rock Beach to watch nature’s clock wind down. There would be no whales there, although if I were lucky, I might catch a sea lion bobbing in the waves, checking out all the strange bipeds congregating on the shore.

I didn’t see any sea lions, but the pelicans kept coming. I felt grateful for how reliably these prehistoric birds flew along these shores in their graceful lines and V-formations, and I thought about how this wasn’t the case not so long ago. These wonderful birds never failed to mesmerize me.

Folks had gathered here too, waiting as the sky changed colors and the waves softly crashed onto the sand. I watched a group of friends amble up a large rock as the sun began to disappear. They watched in wonder, then marked the moment with some selfies.

Beyond the pelicans and a pair of oystercatchers foraging for their supper, the only other animals I saw were these other humans who had been drawn, like me, to watch this quiet spectacle. I enjoyed it. How primal it is to watch the sun go down. How easy and sad it is that we suppress this instinct.

Minority Report-Style Marketing by Warby Parker

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last weekend, I was walking around Berkeley with my partner, when she asked if we could pop into the Warby Parker store to look at glasses. I said sure. I mostly stood in a corner looking at my phone while she tried on some frames. Then we left.

Later that evening, I received this email:

I was shocked to see this. How did Warby Parker know I was there? And was this form of tracking legal?

I have never been in a Warby Parker retail store before. I certainly didn’t explicitly give any identifying information. I’m sure I’ve been on their website before, but I have never signed up for their newsletter, nor created an account. I know there are ways to surmise your email address via the web by cross-referencing cookies with opt-in marketing data. I also know that it’s possible for physical stores to passively track your mobile phone. So I can guess how this all might have happened technically. But I’m surprised that a well-known brand like Warby Parker is engaging in such sketchy practices.

I poked around the Internet to see if I could find other documented instances of this at Warby Parker or any other retail store, but I couldn’t really find anything. If you know of anything like this, I’d love to hear more.

Memory and Truth(iness)

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

My friend, Yangsze Choo, recently came out with her third book, The Fox Wife. It’s a murder mystery set in early 20th century northern China, and it’s got some mystical elements as well. It’s entertaining and immersive, and it’s been racking up awards.

Last month, she gave a talk in San Francisco about the book, and someone in the audience asked about her writing process. She explained that there are two kinds of writers: Those who outline, and those who just write. She is apparently one of the latter.

I am astounded by folks who write novel-length works this way. Her revelation reminded me of something I read 30 years ago about Victor Hugo and his thousand page plus classic, Les Misérables. Victor Hugo was normally a consummate reviser, except for when he wrote Les Misérables. He was so passionate about the political statement he was making, he ended up writing the massive tome cover-to-cover over the course of 20 years. This feat seemed so extraordinary to me that I’ve remembered it clearly for three decades and have thought about it many times.

Too bad I remembered this incorrectly.

Yangsze’s talk and my (what-I-thought-was-correct) memory of what Victor Hugo had done had inspired me to blog about a tension I often see in my work between planning and “going with the flow.” Under normal circumstances, I might have just mentioned the connection and let my thoughts flow from there without doing any additional work. However, I’m generally anal about sourcing, and I’ve also found writing difficult recently, so I decided to see if I could find my original source.

First, I searched the Internet. Nothing, not even a different source repeating the claim. I thought for a moment about where I could have read this. It was definitely in high school, and I didn’t have access to exotic sources back in the day, so it had to be something relatively accessible. Then I pounded my forehead. Of course! It was in the foreword of my copy of Les Misérables!

Fortunately, I still have my original tattered copy on my bookshelf, so I picked it up and started re-reading the foreword, which was written by Lee Fahnestock, one of the translators. According to Fahnestock, Hugo started writing this novel in 1845, then stopped after three years, only to pick it up again a dozen years later.

In 1860 he finally returned to Les Misérables, the book he had never expected to complete, and wrote through to the end. Then, in a move quite uncharacteristic of this writer who preferred to move forward rather than revise, he went back to insert many sections that brought the book into line with his liberalized views and perspectives gained offshore.

I’m not sure if I mis-remembered or mis-read this. Most likely the latter.

I’m realizing that I’m quite fond of reading the front-matter in books. Maybe it’s because, upon actually completing the book, writers understand more clearly what they want to say. Maybe it’s because I start many more books than I actually finish. In any case, I recently started reading Marc Hamer’s, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature, who writes in his Prologue:

I wonder about truth and what it is as I chase it around and play with it. Recollections rarely come in chronological order. Memory wanders in the darkness, and the harder I try to remember, the more it seems to dissolve in front of me and take a different direction. As soon as I start to examine a story with anything more intense than a sidelong glance, it shifts in reaction to the scrutiny, reconstructs itself and then changes again, like looking into a kaleidoscope: the colours are identical, their patterns slightly different every time, their detail constantly changes yet the picture remains true to itself