perfidy

So when we last left the exciting adventure of developing yet another Markdown notes app, I had just proudly stated that I had functioning web and Mac desktop versions running. This was true. But it was also stupid¹1This should not be surprising for long-term listeners..

I used AI to build the app. Sadly, I used the wrong AI. I should have realized this last Fall, but fate, locusts, and the prejudices of others²2And stupidity, of course. prevented me from fully understanding what I had seen. The AI I brought to the dance was Lovable. Lovable in a technical and corporate sense, and reasonably lovable in a lived experience manner as well. Friendly, obsequious, and eager-to-please. Picked because it was just right there and not because I had researched and decided that it was the best way to go. Lovable was aimed at producing web apps. Aimed rather well, so much so that my attempts to build a Mac and iPhone app were almost certainly doomed from the start.

Building the Mac app was painful, Electron is a poor choice even though somewhat sensible given my initial thought that the app should be thoroughly cross-platform. Building the iPhone version was painful and impossible. So when I resumed work, some less dim part of my mind was on the lookout for a way to avoid the pain.

That impulse led to actual research³3Doom scrolling reddit, and I came up with a new plan: use better AI that are suited to my purposes. Granted, I should have been able to deduce that plan from first principles. But my intensive research also revealed a cunning trick. Use two AIs, and pit them against each other.

The results were revelatory. I kicked Lovable to the curb and signed up with Claude code and ChatGPT's codex. Claude has a slight edge on the leader boards for coding excellence, and so became the responsible lead junior developer in charge of plans, architecture and coding. Codex was relegated to the snarky, jealous junior-junior developer in charge of reviewing everything Claude does and eagerly pointing out the flaws.

Codex criticisms are fed back into Claude's interface, and the two of them working together are remarkably on point, focused, non-hallucinatory, and effective. Since Monday it's been⁴4Looks at watch one work week. I've not of course spent 40 hours on this because I have a completely different methodology for pretending to work at my real job. Maybe perhaps twenty hours all up.

In those 20 hours I've completely started over, trashing the original project entirely. The new app is written in a completely different programming language that I don't know. It's Mac and iOS native. It has iCloud sync. It pushes notes to git repos. It tags, it filters, it sorts, and it searches. It has syntax highlighting in the edit window.

It's everything I dreamed of, and it's very nearly complete.

I estimate that using two premier LLMs at once is about a hundred times more effective that using one modest one all by its lonesome. This new method⁵5To me, admittedly is generating some pretty solid, unit-tested code.

Image

The desktop version. See the pretty colors!

There's versions for the iPad and iPhone, but I'm too lazy to screenshot them. Frankly, I couldn't be more pleased with myself right now. Well, I of course I could, but it would take some effort.

Oh, and one more thing - the brother of the son of Yojimbo got a name, too: Aimo. Named after a rather interesting Finnish soldier whose name became a byword for too much of a thing.