A thought I've been having. If you decide to build natively for both iOS and Android, eventually any team will try to come up with some shared abstractions to reduce complexity. Over a long enough time scale, don't you end up reinventing something like React Native?

This would not pass human PR review

I've been trying to get Opus to recreate this in JS

It's English. It's no rules o'clock

I've been thinking a lot about whether breaking and orchestrating a large PR into smaller ones should be a first class feature on Firehose, or whether Firehose should provide you with the legos to build that workflow yourself.

While I was traveling to Poland I kept making improvements to Firehose, and I ended up with a huge branch. I'm now breaking that huge branch into 9 smaller PRs and automating the process with an orchestrator. I asked it to make me a dashboard so I can keep track of the progress.

How can they call it equal stress if one person is saying it's killing them and the other is saying it's fine?

C. S. lewis with maybe the greatest paragraph ever written on love

the best founders i know are ok looking stupid they dm strangers, post unfinished work, ask dumb questions ego is the bottleneck

THIS IS ALL JAVASCRIPT WTF. Even the music. I asked Opus to make me a 5 minute video based on my blog post about our 2025 Japan trip raf.dev/blog/japan-trip-spri…

ok but aren't you raising the question by pointing out that the question is being begged?

wtf it synthesized the sound of cicadas

Claude explains how it was built: It's built with Vite and TypeScript, as nine scenes on one 3-minute timeline. Every frame, a 2D canvas redraws each pencil stroke from scratch as several slightly offset, wobbly passes. These are re-randomized 12 times a second, so the lines shimmer like hand-drawn animation. A WebGL shader then adds paper texture, grain, a vignette, subtle chromatic aberration, and heat haze that grows as the story gets hotter. The charts plot real data: JMA summer temperatures back to 1898, plus 2026 records from JMA releases and news reports. There are no recordings at all. Every sound is synthesized live in the browser. The koto is a plucked-string simulation, the wind chimes use FM synthesis, and the flute, shō and taiko are built from oscillators and noise. Cicadas, rain and wind are filtered noise, and even the reverb is generated. The music plays from a written score, and the audio clock drives the animation, so sound and picture stay in sync.

I just voice dumped into the prompt box: "All right, this is an empty repo. Make me a 3-minute animated visualization using JavaScript, or you can do it in TypeScript if you want, about Japan's hot weather in 2026. Pull some online data to see why it was hot and how it compares to other years. I really want the animation to be visually appealing. I wanted to use a hand-drawn pencil style with a little bit of tasteful chromatic aberration. And maybe a bit of a pastiche look but it's supposed to look really, really cool. Also, use a JavaScript synthesizer to make a melody for this visualization that goes along with the theme."

I'm so blown away y'all. You should stop whatever you're doing and ask Opus 5.5 to make you a visualization. I was telling @Bostonasian about the new models, and decided to try making one about Japan's hot summer. I asked it to also have audio. It's so good! Prompt below 🤯

hi Jamie, @birch_js, I wanted to connect you with my good friend Jimmy @Bostonasian, who has been building an Expo app. I've been trying to get him to go to a React Native meetup in Tokyo. Do you know when the next one is?

The magic at the time was that you didn't have to do the math yourself, and you could change a number and the entire thing would update automatically

Wow that's fucked up

There's not enough talk about how SaaS engineers + AI are going to wreak havoc on the video game industry. Web games are going to be competing a lot more for our attention in 2027

Veep above 30 Rock? Nooooo