v7: be weird

📍 Brighton, 🇬🇧 

🥃 TL;DR

• Got a new sticker

• AI bubble: likely to pop but not catastrophically

• Postgres is hot in AI space

• AI becoming more accessible and local-first

• Replit's lesson: 11 years overnight success

• Stay curious and weird!

This week’s top news is that I’ve got myself a new sticker for my work laptop.

Now let’s talk about AI (what else if not this?)

AI is looking like a bubble just like every other overhyped tech. Nothing unusual here. But I don’t think it’s a bad bubble. Just like any bubble, it will pop sooner or later, but the result of that would be a slightly lower expectations, imo. Nothing too damaging.

That’s why going all in on AI isn’t that risky. And everyone’s doing it!

The other week Databricks bought Neon (already talked about that)

Snowflake saw that and decided to buy their own Postgres as well.

And all of that is because of AI! Postgres is now associated with AI. Why, tho?? You may ask.

Mainly because of pgvector and pgml

But also because of scalability and performance, flexible data types, and it’s open source, who doesn’t like that?

Today, AI, I think, is developing in the right direction, and by that I mean AI is becoming more accessible, smaller and quicker. e.g. now you can run proper on your devices, no need for $200 bill (as they put it)! 🤯

AI-powered development is becoming more mainstream, more easier to work with. As much as it makes me feel like an “advanced level, proper dev” while setting up an MCP servers, it’s still an effort. I don’t think I constantly wanna do that.

Now I don’t have to! Cursor is making that easier. In their 1.0 release they did one click MCP install, how great is that?

So we can focus on products and development rather than being like someone who uses Vim and spends countless hours setting up the environment rather that actually working.

Didn’t stop me from reserving a name for myself at 👇️ 

You never know if you ever gonna switch to vim. That way I’ll be prepared to tell everyone about it. 😄

Still waiting for @ICodeInRustBTW.com email service. I’d use that heavily. 💯 

Back to my original thought: AI allows us to shine.

Have you heard the Replit story? For almost 11 years (!!) the founder was doing this product as a pet project without any major wins, and without getting any traction.

He was still going, still doing it. Now they’re on top of the hype. In fact, they ARE the hype, they’re leading that hype!

So if I ever start my own thing, my own little billion dollar idea startup - it would be in the AI space. It’s gotta be something good tho. I don’t want it to be another helper agent that books travel for you.

For now I’ll be focusing on two things:

1. Staying curious, and

2. Staying weird.

Because weird is the new normal.

And one of the best ways to be weird is to be yourself. We’re all weird in our own special way. And that’s awesome!

And I think I wanna make this issue’s key takeaway!

PS Oh and RE that future startup of mine, I know what I’m gonna have on my front-end! 💅

Remember how I was saying in my previous issues that I was looking for an easy to work with web front-end framework? The one that isn’t over-engineered, using browser API, easy to work with?

Well, it seems that Remix is becoming that! They’re even dropping React in favour of Preact, which essentially is the same thing ecosystem-wise, but better API-wise. I think it’s a great move! Now it’s just an announcement, so looking forward to an actual release/drop! 🔥

🎓️ Top Learning Materials of the Week

No matter what developments we get in AI, one things stays consistent in this space: prompting.

Prompting went from overhyped role aka Prompt Engineer to an essential skill that no matter what is important to have. So here are a couple of guides from the companies leading the AI hype

And here’re a couple of guides on AI Agents. They’re becoming more and more popular and mainstream. This is also becoming a “need to know” kind of skill

Moreover, Weights & Biases, the company that started as a main platform to provide analytics for LLM training, is getting good courses. Check this one out on building AI Agents 👇

⚒️ Tools of the Week

llm-ui - a React library that we were considering to use to render LLM output on the front-end. Looks neat!