Make Your Own
Software With AI
Conjuring Code is a community for non-engineers who want to bring their ideas to life—with AI as a coding partner.
Adventures In App Building: Carnadh, The Bookshelf App
Book piles, a Japanese word, and an app named in Irish. How I built Carnadh, a household library you catalog by taking photos of your shelves.
Code Is Weird
If you feel like you should be able to read code but can't, there's nothing wrong with you. Code is cryptic, terse, and arbitrary for reasons that have nothing to do with you—and these days you can just ask the agent to translate it.
Episode 07 - Software Is For The Birds with Andy Balinsky
Andy Balinsky spent his career in computer security. Retired now, he's pointed that same attention at the things he loves: a podcast player that lets music keep playing underneath, a crib sheet for hundreds of traditional Irish session tunes, and a field app for the Purple Martin colonies he and his wife have tended for 25 years.
A Contractor In Your Back Yard
Software engineers have spent 50 years building millions of tiny specialized tools. An AI coding agent is the handyman who knows which one your job needs—and he's parked in your back yard.
Episode 06 - Building the Toolbox with Michael Porcelli
Michael Porcelli builds software for himself, not for other people: a receipt splitter for mile-long Costco bills, a ledger tracking his siblings' equity in an inherited house, and a database of his late father's 75,000-card baseball collection.
Hail Mary, Full Of Grease
The hero of Project Hail Mary does things no lone scientist ever could—unless he brought along something like an AI coding agent. That's the hopeful vision of AI: not a replacement, but a quiet tool for doing much bigger things.
Gears And Ghosts
There are now two kinds of software: gears and ghosts. The best systems will combine them both.
Episode 05 - Closing the Gap with Jonathan Milton
Jonathan Milton on turning his healthcare-operations expertise into useful tools — a calculator that exposes the fully loaded cost of staffing, and a game to coach future health care execs on solving the human problems well.