Route 12B

Apparently, due to the AWS outage, someone was able to rob the Louvre. They should not have chosen US-EAST-1.

You heard it here first.

Happy 4th of July, y’all! 🇺🇸

Andrew Ng over at DeepLearning.ai has a quick rundown of what businesses will be looking for in software engineers. He’s calling them “GenAI Application Engineers” and they have these three key skills:

1️⃣ Deep familiarity with a broad ecosystem of AI tools.

2️⃣ Proficiency in AI-assisted coding (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code).

3️⃣ Strong product/design instincts to iterate on prototypes quickly.

I’d just add that part of the product and design instincts will also include the engineer’s ability to orchestrate AI tools / agents to build and iterate on said product and design. It’s almost as if engineers will slowly take on the role EMs and be in charge of managing their own little team of agents. I find that pretty cool and interesting.

Behold, the legacy of SaaS

This is why Apple Intelligence sucks.

From now on, my age will be year-based. I am now 25.

Joanna Stern over at The Wall Street Journal has unveiled another mind-blowing development: with the help of WSJ staff, she created a three-minute movie in which nearly every scene, shot, and line of dialogue was generated using AI tools: specifically, Google Veo 2 and 3, ElevenLabs, and Runway.

As impressive as it is, you can tell you’re watching AI. There’s that familiar ultra-smooth feel, some shots of Joanna don’t quite look like her, and action sequences fall short of believability (for example, her karate kick barely connects but still shatters the target like something out of a low-budget CGI fest).

But it’s not hard to imagine how quickly this could evolve toward Hollywood-level production values. Probably the bigger shock is the price (or lack thereof): The entire short cost only about $1,000 to make. I’m no filmmaker, but I assume this is a fraction of what traditional filmmaking calls for.

We’ve come a long way since that bizarre, now-iconic Will Smith spaghetti video. It’s become an understatement to say AI is changing so fast. With these tools now available, what can we expect in another 3 years?

Last night I did a quick vide-coding session in Cursor for an iOS app that does currency exchange conversions. One of the key requirements in the PRD was to store the API key securely. First round of coding put the key in plain text right in the code.

So yeah, human oversight is definitely a thing.