Before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, a worker could clean about 450 grams of cotton per day manually. With the cotton gin, that same worker could process 23 kilograms—a 50x productivity boost. Similarly, Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, introduced in 1831, revolutionized farming by allowing a single person to harvest up to 12 acres of grain in a day, compared to the half-acre possible with traditional methods—a 24x increase. And then, in 1913, Henry Ford’s assembly line delivered an 8x improvement in automobile production, reducing the time to assemble a car from 12 hours to just 90 minutes.

This... read more

As I continue developing the Higher Level Dev Kit, I am constantly amazed by how Claude Sonnet 3.5 not only executes my ideas but often improves upon them in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Let me share a recent experience that truly highlights the transformative power of AI in software development.

Capturing the Essence of Each Commit

I recently added a feature to my toolkit that captures the essence of each commit in a JSON file. This file is stored in the target repository under a .hldk/specs directory, effectively creating a history or story of the repository’s development. The idea... read more

When Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 3.5 on Friday, June 21st, 2024, software development changed forever.

Just a few days later, on Monday the 24th, I was made redundant from the fintech payments company where I had been working for over six years, as it prepared to shut down. In hindsight, I believe this turn of events was quite serendipitous.

I had already been experimenting with ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), trying to leverage them to become more productive in my role as a backend engineer. But with Claude Sonnet 3.5, we finally had an LLM capable of writing decent, reliable... read more