A Book, An Album, A Thought

Third Edition

Once again, I’m comin’ atchya with three awesome things.

Book: Good Inside

Dr. Becky’s Good Inside is a modern parenting bible. The advice within is equal doses of well-studied psychology and common sense compassion. She prioritizes connection with kiddos above all else, which I found refreshing.

She always returns to the mantra of your kid being “a good kid that’s having a hard time”, trusting their inherent goodness. If you’ve got kids, or are thinking about having kids, I highly suggest this one.

I plan on reading it at least once a year.

Album: Superb by Surprise Chef

Surprise Chef describes their music as cinematic soul. Their Latest Album "Superb" is a perfect example of that. It’s instrumental jazz, full of funk with sprinkles of delightful weirdness abound.

The standout thing that keeps me coming back to this album is the clean guitar riffs that define their compositions. The guitar is the warp that holds the weft of keys, clarinet, synths, drums and bass into a coherent, well woven tapestry.

If I listen to their music on a run, I can almost see scenes of a movie unfolding before me. These are the types of tunes that get my creative juices flowing!

I’ve started following their record label College of Knowledge and there isn’t a bad album in the bunch. If you dig this, you might also like Karate Boogaloo and the Pro-Teens.

Thought: AI is Complicated

People are having Chat GPT write their school papers, design their logos and generate memes. It’s lazy slop, mostly.

My Spotify Discover Weekly this week included a single by this FAKE BAND called The Velvet Sundown. It’s generic, soulless rubbish. They went from zero to almost 500,000 monthly listeners this month though.

I dislike how AI is being used to fill in for real human creativity. I want AI to do boring things so I can make more art, not to do the art and leave me to file my taxes.

I write because I love expressing myself through a creative craft. I’ve used AI image generation to make images for this newsletter. I’d never outsource the joys of wordsmithery to a robot. It matters that these words are my words from my brain to your eyes. Or at least to your inbox.

Yet, a subtlety that I don’t hear many folks talking about is using AI to be more productive at work. I write code for a living, so I’ve spent the last few months configuring Cursor to deeply understand our team’s project. I literally write code ten times as fast with Cursor. I can’t imagine working without it now.

Just a few years ago my workflow would be:

1. Start writing code

2. Get Stuck

3. Google It

4. Find an answer in StackOverflow or Github

5. Copy/Paste/Rework it

6. Start over at Step 1

Now my workflow is now:

1. Cursor suggests code as I’m writing. It’s almost magical!

2. OR In a quick chat, Cursor proposes a solution, writes tests or runs commands

When things don’t work, I improve the rules that power those prompts and add those changes to our shared code. When things do work, our team reviews the code and ships it.

My job is now as much about guiding Cursor as it is about writing code. It’s about enabling my whole team to write code ten times as fast. For coding, AI is optimizing a slow and broken system. Like all new waves of technology, we’ll either adapt or get left behind.

While AI is reading the docs and thinking, I’ll go harvest lettuce from the garden.

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Check out the rest of the B.A.T. Series for more suggestions!