Searching for real estate in Japan has been a humorous lesson in the differences of how we market things here. You’d think of all countries, Japanese developers might be sensitive to promotional images that make their brand-new condo building appear to be radioactive. ☢️

Okay, so there's a great meme going around the /r/HomeKit subreddit right now, where folks are using ChatGPT to generate illustrations for each of their rooms in the Home app. Finally got around to joining in the fun.

Here's how I did it:

1. Take a vertical photo of each of the rooms in your home that you've configured in HomeKit
2. Start a conversation with GPT-4o and describe that you want vertical (9:16) illustrations for the Home app based on your photos, and any style preferences (I'll share my prompt below)
3. One at a time, feed it your photos, and offer feedback until it gets it right
4. Save each photo to a new album in Photos so you can reference it from the Home app
5. Over in the Home app, for each room:
   1. Select the room (on iPhone, tap the ellipsis in the corner; on iPad or Mac, select it in the side bar)
   2. Tap the ellipsis in the top right and choose "Room settings"
   3. Choose an image for the room background
   4. Select the image from your Photos library
6. Do this on every device, because (of course) the Home app still doesn't sync background images

I had a blast setting these up and didn't hesitate to repeat it for all my devices. The bland, samey look of the default HomeKit room design makes it easy to confuse where you are in the app, and these illustrations are nothing short of delightful. Apart from the tremendous image generation capabilities of ChatGPT 4o, photographing rooms without resorting to a comically wide angle fisheye lens is very difficult, and an artistic touch can emphasize the "feel" of a room better than a photo can.

Here's the full set of my rooms:

Oh, and here's the prompt I used:

I have a fun project for you! Please make stylized background images based on the photos of each room in my home that I send you. I'm going to use these as background images for each of my rooms in HomeKit. Important to note, these images must be vertical. 9:16!

Very excited about this. Would love for you to take each image and then remove any clutter (idealize it a bit), use your imagination to come up with an appealing sight line and focal length a bit, and then draw each image in a consistent color palette, namely with a hyperrealistic Japanese animation style that could only be accomplished by pixel-peeping with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.

(Humorously, if I let ChatGPT reply to this with text, it would say a variation of, "okay, I'll make some Makoto Shinkai-esque illustrations!" and then, because a particular artist was named, all subsequent images generated in the chat would be found in violation of Open AI's content policy. Amazing.)

Do you HomeKit? Go give this a try and melt some of Sam's GPUs for me. Send me your best rooms. 🏡

tl;dr it works. You should try it.

I finally got around to trying the new Agent functionality in GitHub Copilot.

You gotta really know when to ask an LLM for help, though. (I wrote last year how I decide whether to reach for an AI assistant, if you're interested.)

My experience and recent research both indicate that AI works best for creating new stuff from scratch, especially when that code is perfunctory and typical and conventional. That's the reason there's such a divide between people who've had terrific experiences with "vibe coding" and others—like me—for whom all the hours fucking with AI to make it do my job for me have mostly been a waste of my time. Every other time I've tried to use an agent mode in Cursor or Claude Code, I've asked it how to do things that most "staff" or "principal" or "distinguished" engineer have never tried and would have no idea how to do, so naturally they never went well.

But today I'm finally starting work on a new gem, and I had an annoying task that wasn't a legacy rescue, or exploiting a brand new language feature, or doing something totally unlike anything anyone has ever done before. So I fired up the agent mode using Anthropic's 3.7-sonnet model and let it go to work.

Specifically, I asked it to stub out a Rails engine to use as a starting point for moving over existing login functionality into a gem. It did basically everything in the same order and way that I would. It commented out additional hooks I'll probably need, which is nice.

It also gave me instructions for wiring up the new engine from the project I'm extracting the behavior from, which is a nice bonus.

Did it work? Yup:

Cool.

That Microsoft OneDrive still insists on sending me photo memory e-mails, despite the fact I’ve unsubscribed a dozen times, and even though literally every picture in my OneDrive is a screenshot from my gaming PC will never not be hilarious to me.

Perhaps this is partly because the Japanese Internet continues to be needlessly opaque (it has now been zero days since I encountered a UI built around HTML image maps), but ChatGPT has become an indispensable planning partner whenever Google would normally let me down. In the case above, I just typed "search for Indigo La End concerts in Japan this June", and it got me back only the June dates of a tour I didn't know was going on, and for which tickets only went on sale two days ago. From there it was literally two more clicks to be where I needed to be in order to buy a paper ticket I could pick up at any 7-Eleven nationwide.

These days, whenever a traditional Google-oriented search workflow would have been particularly fraught—whether that's due to out-of-date information (past concerts) or SEO spam (ticket resellers)—the fact that ChatGPT will jump through two or three extra hoops for me has made a huge difference in whether I find the answer I'm looking for or get lost in a forest of tabs and give up.

Every time I sin, another device appears on my desk.

Vertical monitors for folks working on documents have been a thing for decades — now that Apple Vision Pro supports an 8K-ish ultra wide screen orientation for Mac Virtual Display, I’d love to see custom aspect ratios that allow you to create only as big of a Mac window as you need.

Why freak out about tariffs and the economy when random signs on the side of the highways in Florida are able to offer such amazing investment returns?

Last year at Rails World, I indulged in some horn tooting and victory-lap taking when I showed off the publishing platform and strength-training app I built to support Becky's business.

The paper-thin pretense of my talk was, "wow, look at how incredible Ruby on Rails is for empowering developers—even solo acts—to build ambitious products." And don't get me wrong, that was the main thesis. But the presentation was also an opportunity to show off my work and drop the mic.

As a consultant, I spent my entire career hearing how hard it is to build a real product. That as a Johnny-come-lately contractor, I could never know why things had to be slow. Or complicated. Or buggy. I lost track of how many times someone referenced Steve Jobs' epic judgment of consultants as the reason they wouldn't hire me on a contract basis and why I was only valuable if I joined their corporate family in W-2 matrimony.

Well, all that consultant FUD turned out to be bullshit. Simply by doing all the things I'd been telling others to do for two decades, I enjoyed the smoothest software development experience I've ever witnessed at any company of any scale. Literally everything went great. The resulting app looks, performs, and functions better than I ever imagined it would. My product owner / wife is thrilled with it. In its first 4 months on the market, only two bugs have been reported by customers and both were fixed in an hour or less.

Of course, one reason I held back on celebrating the success of my own ability to somehow form all the right opinions about good software was because it would have been premature. The true test of any software system is how easy it is to change later. Well, as you might be able to tell from the braggadocious tone of this post, I finally have an answer after delivering the platform's first major post-launch feature.

Becky has been wanting to start a podcast for a while, and given that we already had a bespoke CMS with her name on it lying around, it only made sense to try my hand at slotting in a podcast hosting component. I was nervous it'd take a while to get up to speed, as I hadn't touched the codebase in months. Nope: everything went so smoothly I can't believe I'm done already. the whole podcast system was finished in under 8 hours with plenty of time leftover to dunk on corporate America and the dysfunctional way seemingly every company on earth is intent on writing software.

Anyway, I've maintained a pretty meek stance over the years when it comes to dishing out categorical advice on how to write "good" software. Lots of disingenuous caveats like, "I've seen my approach work well, but maybe your solution is best for your situation." Most of that pussy-footing was born out of my own misplaced desire to please everyone. But at least some of my self-consciousness was on account of the narrative that consultants just couldn't hack it when it came to building something.

Well, I'm ready to call bullshit. Turns out, I'm better at building software than most people and, hell, most teams. If you want to get better at programming, the most important thing you can do is practice. But it wouldn't hurt for you to read or watch my stuff. 🎤🚮

Apple Intelligence summary of the abstract, which I couldn't be bothered to read:

A study comparing learners' motivations, self-regulated learning processes, and performance with different support agents (AI, human expert, writing analytics, or none) found no difference in motivation but significant differences in learning processes and performance. While AI support improved essay scores, it may also promote dependence and "metacognitive laziness."

Think of how much they saved by sending me this nonsensical content marketing collateral instead of a coupon.

Just me, or has Apple Music started giving top billing to some really weird recommendations? Every day I log in, the top recommendation is an artist I’ve never heard of, with a track or album that sounds like AI generated lofi or stock music. I admit I listen to a fair number of instrumental “Focus” playlists and channels, but I think they’re trying to do something clever with the backend algorithm and they’re failing to grasp that people use “lofi music” and “music music” completely differently.

Update: and 20 minutes after posting this, it stopped working. HomeKit giveth and HomeKit taketh away.

Out of the box, Apple’s Home app will turn on any lights you add to a scene, even if it’s only to decrease their brightness level. As a result, if your goal is to simply dim the house’s lighting at nighttime, then your scene may have the unintended effect of actually turning on a bunch of lights.

While not the best-looking app in the world, third party apps can separate a light's power state from its brightness level in a HomeKit scene, and Eve is a free one that lets you configure this.

1. First, make your HomeKit scene how you want it in the Home app, because that UI is nicer
2. In Eve, open the "Automation" view from the sidebar
3. Find the scene in the "Scenes" tab
4. For each room with a light you want to dim without turning on, tap the > chevron to the right of the room name and then uncheck each light's "Power" setting while leaving the "Brightness" setting as-is

And there you go. Dimmer lights without inadvertently turning on all your lights. 🎉

Can you catch COVID from 2020 wine?

Becky and I circled the Costco three fucking times looking for eggs before independently realizing that OF COURSE they're in the room labeled "Dairy".

Why, American people?

Having recently begun the long, arduous journey off 1Password and onto Apple Passwords, one of the biggest annoyances is how much friction it adds to the drudgery of signing into a service to have to reach behind my monitor to scan the Touch ID sensor or to ensure I’m sufficiently camera-ready for a Face ID check to pass.

Turns out, you can just turn this off altogether! I would have preferred a reasonable time-based settings like 30 minutes or an hour, but I expected the answer to be, "go pound sand," and this is indeed better than that.

Record scratch you're probably wondering how I got here.

I added string cheese to my cart, and this popped up.

Really feels like these ¥100 silicone mug toppers are trying to have it both ways.

It has been very fun and very weird to be traveling across Japan using an app that I built doing workouts designed by my spouse, but it's worked a lot better for me than fucking around with Fitbod and other apps ever did.