Roundup #16: Random stuff and reconnecting with my creativity
An update on nuclear, AI Software paradigms, the market for Dev Tools, and how creating Magicdoor has brought back a sense of creation that I haven't had in a while.
An update on Nuclear
A year ago, I was super obsessed with Nuclear power, writing a long stream of posts about it on LinkedIn. My reasoning had to do with Energy Abundance, this was the post that kicked it off, and this was the first one that was really about Nuclear.
I am still very strongly in favor of generating much more energy as a species, in a clean way, and I’m very strongly against ‘Degrowth’, having ranted about it multiple times. And I also still agree with initiatives to build more Nuclear capacity where it makes sense, but I have changed my mind to believing that Solar is the clear energy of the future, even in the short term. Here is a good post from Noah Smith with the stats. Here is a rebuttal from Matt Yglesias and a counter-rebuttal from Noah here.
The gist of it, as short as possible, or at least the arguments that struck me:
Nuclear power is expensive because of onerous permitting requirements, and because every reactor is a one-off project. The solution is to make smaller reactors that can be mass-produced, or approved once and then copied many times. It could fairly easily become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the world.
BUT, even then, you’re building a factory. There are somewhat limited learning curve effects in building factories. The data to back this up is in the articles linked above.
With nuclear power, we are still generating heat to boil water into steam, which is then used to spin a generator to create electricity. It is quite old-fashioned, really.
In contrast, a solar panel is a semi-conductor. It is just a big chip that makes electricity from sunlight. So there are two epic benefits from that:
No heat, water or generators.
There have been INSANE learning curve effects in CHIPS. Your smartphone is more powerful than supercomputers from a few decades ago.
Solar is already the cheapest way to generate energy today in sunny places.
The bottom-line is that while Nuclear would get cheaper up to a point by building more of it, solar might keep getting cheaper and cheaper, in lock-step with other electronics like GPUs. So it seems obvious that solar is just going to be the energy of the future, with batteries to cover intermittency.
The two AI software paradigms: I think I can explain them now
There are two main categories of AI tools being made. And while these are not really mutually exclusive (can be combined in one product) it is a helpful mental model to categorize and think about them.
Agentic: AI turns everything else into API calls. You interface with AI as with a human, telling it what problem to solve. The agent then uses tools to achieve the task.
Buttons and Sliders: regular apps that turn AI into API calls. You use an interface with buttons and sliders that calls AI when needed.
In current implementation, the GUI approach seems to be trending. For example Sora has lots of buttons and sliders to control the video output. On the frontier, agents are trending strongly with reasoning models, computer use, etc. Both paradigms have maximalists. People who feel that it’s pointless to make any GUI based AI stuff because AGI agents will turn everything into API calls. On the other end there are people who feel that hallucinations are so fundamental to the way current AI works that agents will never be able to replace UI.
‘Betting houses’ like Y-Combinator spread their bets across both but are definitely funding tons of GUI based apps. Seeing people use AI in practice, I’m also quite bullish on the GUI approach at least for the coming 10 years. One thing we can be almost certain of: maximalists on both sides are going to be wrong. But at the end of the day, nobody knows for sure what will get product-market fit. We have to figure it out by building.
The market for development tools is the worst market to be in
It is absolutely mental to me how much amazing free stuff there is for developers. Just take a look at some of these. WHICH ARE ALL COMPLETELY FREE:
Radix icons are totally free to use in your project. You can use them in Figma or directly in a project.
Lucide icons: same story.
Shadcn/ui is a set of components for web development that you can use for free. I link to the ‘blocks’ page because the demos are a bit bigger, but you would use the smaller components in practice.
TailwindCSS is a framework for front-end that comes with colors, borders, and all kinds of other things that you can use very easily (works seamlessly with Shadcn). Thanks to Tailwind it took me only 15 minutes to add a darkmode to Magicdoor.ai
Zustand is a state-management package, and this is probably not possible to understand for non-developers, but I can assure you of it’s significance and the effort that has gone into building it.
Resend is a tool for sending emails to your users. I haven’t exceeded the free plan limits.
Portkey.ai is a tool for integrating multiple LLMs and image models with one API. I’m still on free plan despite processing 4.3M tokens in the last 30 days.
Beyond that, for Magicdoor I am using these tools that ridiculously cheap for the value they provide:
Supabase: authentication, storage, database (incl backups): $25 per month
Vercel: deployment, server, cloud compute, logging: $20 per month
How could you possible build something in a market like this? The range and quality of available products is so unbelievably large, and the pricing is so low, it’s red an ocean as an ocean can be.
Reconnecting with my creativity
It has taken me decades to learn and accept that I am a very creative person. When I was a kid, I didn’t fit the mould of what it meant to be creative. I deeply hate cutting and glueing things and I still struggle to neatly pack a present1. My first ever failing grade in school was for music, when we were tasked with cutting out pictures of instruments and glueing them on a piece of paper (I think that’s called a collage?). I didn’t feel that had anything to do with music so I sloppily pasted two instruments on a white A4 paper and handed it in. The teacher felt I was contemptuous and that I didn’t take her seriously…. and she was 100% right about that. But this attitude from teachers led me to believe I was not a creative person, and even to despise ‘creativity’ as something stupid. In my mind, a creative person was someone who could draw or paint really well, or my high school ‘creativity’ teacher with short red hair and home-made cork earrings.
But at the same time, I also remember really enjoying LEGO. Building stuff from the manual was fun, but at home once or twice a year we would also get to take over the living room with a massive LEGO city. Nothing we built was from the manual, we just had a huge box of parts and me, my sister and my friends built whatever we imagined. I loved that, and I think I built quite creative things. Second example: if a computer game I was into had any kind of map editor, mission editor, or a way to create your own skins, I would be doing those things. And I was very into making music with synthesizers and computers all throughout my teenage years and even while I was studying.
Only recently, thanks to learning to code, have I had the insight that another thing I was very into at a point in my life is also creative: making Excel models. So, here are the major creative outlets I’ve had in my life so far: LEGO, making music, making excel models, writing semi-intellectual online stuff, and making software. To consider the more nerdy of those, excel and coding to be creative activities has been an eye-opener.
As weird as it sounds, realizing that those things belong in the creative category has helped me ‘reset’ my identity from a ‘closeted creative’ (“oh yeah, I do some creative hobbies but I’m really more of an analytical person”) to ‘openly creative’ (“I have always really loved creating things!”).
Not too long ago, I was in a book store and had the staff wrap a book for me. I looked very closely how they did it. Then I watched a youtube video and gift-wrapped another book (not just for fun, it needed to be done). I managed to do it very neatly. That made me wonder: Was I just that disinterested as a kid? Or did nobody really bother to explain it to me? Do I have some kind of issue that I can genuinely only learn thing by doing and figuring them out myself?