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.

Planning and Reflection: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Last week, I wrote about my end-of-year Journey Mapping ritual on the Faster Than 20 blog. Yesterday, I saw this kind tweet from David Daly about my post:

I don’t know David, but his tweet made me want to know more about his yearly reflection process. Fortunately, he documented it on his blog. It’s smart and well worth reading. A few things jumped out at me:

  • His reflection starts with a review of his previous year’s goals
  • In addition to his yearly review, he does daily, weekly, and monthly reviews, and he takes notes for all of them
  • His planning naturally follows from his reflection

Even though he’s allocating a significant amount of time for end-of-year reflection and planning, his whole process is both integrated and iterative. As he explains:

There are a few interesting side-effects of the review process. First, they let me see the big picture across timespan we don’t normally have the time to think about. Big change takes time and we are often focused on very small time spans. The second side-effect is it let’s me see my accomplishments more clearly. I had a very good 2019, accomplishing a lot of my goals and pushing many things forward. It’s nice to pause to see the forest for the trees periodically. It also makes it easier to keep pressing forward on the hard things when I can see that I’ve made progress on them or similar hard things in the past.

His process nicely reiterates some things that I constantly find myself harping on.

First, planning and review / reflection are two sides of the same coin. Trying to do one without the other doesn’t work.

Second, long-term complements short-term reflection and planning, and vice-versa. There’s a school of thought that wants to claim that you shouldn’t plan long-term because the world is too dynamic and uncertain, as if everyday learning somehow conflicts with long-term goals, which is a fallacy. As David writes, when you do both, it helps you see both the forest and the trees.

Twelve-by-Twelve: A Photography Exercise in Paying Attention

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I posted a blog post on Faster Than 20 today where I shared what I’ve learned so far from seven years of collaboration muscle-building experiments. I was trying to figure out what photo I could share with that post, and my sister suggested that I find a good photo of ants. It turns out I made a good photo of ants in Santa Fe in 2015, so I decided to use that.

Seeing that photo reminded me of the exercise that preceded it. I was in Santa Fe for a five-day National Geographic photography workshop in Santa Fe led by the amazing Lynn Johnson. That day, when we arrived at Ghost Ranch for a day of shooting, Lynn assigned each of us a 12-foot-by-12-foot plot, and said that we could take as many photos we wanted of whatever we wanted for the next hour, but that we had to stay within our squares.

We were surrounded by gorgeous landscapes, which turned out to distract more than help. You can only take so many landscape photos in a 12-by-12 square before exhausting all the possibilities. The real goldmine was right in front of all of us, but in order to see it, we had to slow down and pay attention to what was right in front of us.

It took me about 20 minutes before I realized there were several cow patties in my plot. Paying attention is hard, even when you’re trying!

I think about that exercise all the time. (I think about that workshop and the wonderful people I met there all the time. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.) I haven’t done it since. Maybe I should.

Celebrating What You Accomplish While Looking Forward to Improving

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Earlier this month, I wrote a blog post over on Faster Than 20 entitled, “Made of Love.” All I wanted to do was to tell a brief story of a remarkable moment I experienced at a meeting I was shadowing and how that moment made me feel. It turned out to be more complicated than that. I wrote a long, confessional draft that made me feel raw and vulnerable, I asked people I trusted for feedback, then I sat on that feedback for a while, before finally deciding to revise and publish the post.

I’m really glad I did. I got a ton of thoughtful, moving responses from friends and colleagues, which has me thinking and wanting to share a lot more.

For the most part, I’m thrilled about everything I cut and rewrote. However, there’s one tiny story that I wanted to share here, because it’s a bit of a North Star for me.

There’s an episode of the PBS cooking documentary, Mind of a Chef, that follows Magnus Nilsson — considered one of the best chefs in the world — through the process of conceiving and creating a dish with a young protege. (You can watch the episode on Netflix if you’re a subscriber. Oh, how I wish for more open access, so I could easily share video clips. Another blog post for another time.) It’s mesmerizing to watch, partially because of the beautiful setting (a frozen lake in the Swedish countryside), partially because of the creativity and skill of execution.

Two things jumped out at me in particular. First was the delight that Nilsson expressed throughout the process, including when he tasted the final product. He clearly was not satisfied by it, and he methodically walked through how he wanted to make it better. But he still seemed really happy about what he had done. Second was the the relationship between Nilsson and his protege. The latter seemed nervous (perhaps more because he was on camera than because of his mentor), but he also seemed… safe? Excited? It’s hard to describe exactly, but it felt productive and loving.

That’s the balance I personally want to strike for when I create something. I actually think I’m a lot more joyful about iterations than others see, but I definitely could let myself appreciate and celebrate more. More importantly, I can let others see this appreciation and joy. I definitely hold back because I don’t want me or others to get complacent, but I think I can strike a better balance.