robotelvis

I wrote an interactive tutorial for how modern AI works. Every chapter is explained with interactive playgrounds and every chapter has been proof read by my 11 year old son to confirm that it is accessible.

This was on hacker news a while back, but it now has 4 new chapters - taking the reader from next token prediction to a real AI agent with post-training, conversations, reasoning, and tool use.

The goal is that this tutorial shouldn't require much math knowledge. If there is anything in there that is too hard to understand then let me know.

My 11 year old son seemed to get it all, so I think it should be pretty approachable, but I'm sure there is stuff I can improve.

I also looked at getting a flip phone but decided it wasn't really viable. Realistically you need to have an iOS or Android phone, because even if you don't need it /most/ of the time, you do need it sometimes.

The trick is to find ways to carry it with you less.

I played with disabling Safari but it's hard to sustain that because you'll often find yourself needing to open a random QR code to do something.

But I have buried it on the third page of a sub-folder, so I'm not tempted to randomly open it.

I think the most important thing is to just not /usually/ have the phone in your pocket, so you break the habit of reaching for it.

Cool that you were able to do that.

There are definitely lots of things you need a smartphone for today, but fortunately few enough that it's practical to not have a smartphone with you most of the time, even if you own one.

Hopefully if enough people go phoneless, society will adapt to require smartphones less often.

I was asked to give a talk on how to make the most out of OpenAI's new Codex coding agent, and it turned into a blog post.

Codex works best when you have a really clean code base, with thorough tests, and well documented best practices. Getting your code base into that kind of shape might seem like a lot of work, but Codex is already great at the kind of mundane tasks needed to get your code into a state where Codex can work well.

Codex has also changed how I think about software engineering. With previous AI tools, I used them to help me write the code, but now my job is to mentor a team of AI agents as they write the code.

Even if you don't write code, it's important to understand what it's like to use Codex, because this kind of "manage a team of AI agents to do your job" is likely the future of all human work.