Afzal Najam

AI promised efficiency. Instead, it’s making us work harder. AI tools were supposed to free up our time—but they’re increasing our cognitive load and making us less productive. Here’s what’s really happening (and how to use them without burning out).

AI was supposed to make us more efficient.

Instead, it’s fragmenting our workflows, bloating our calendars, and burning out high performers.

I wrote about the false promise of AI productivity and why we’re actually working harder than ever:

afterburnout.co/p/ai-promise...

50% OFF Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System The fascinating inside story of how the Android operating system came to be. In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn't get investors interested. Today, A...

Don't have the Androids audiobook yet?
Or need a second copy to listen to it in stereo?
My publisher is running a 50% off sale through September 5, get yours for $10:
www.audiobooks.com/promotions/p...

Stop Calling AI a “Junior Engineer” They are tools, not teammates

Stop calling AI a "junior engineer"

blog.mmckenna.me/stop-calling...

Lol had some fun with Goose at MCP hack night in Toronto.

Everything's fun when the tokens are free 😅

@iandouglas736.com Thanks for hosting this!

#TorontoTechWeek

Safety critical and driving errors on day 1:

1. The Supervised Robotaxi failed to turn left and panicked during Rob Mauer's ride, whipping the wheel back and forth. It then drove on the wrong side of the road, failed to correct itself and continued to drive down the wrong side of the road.

At MCP Hack Night!

Everyone's saying we're more productive with AI now.

So we can finally have a 4 day work week then?

Revanced is heaven-sent.

I really hate this business model. Capture all the users with almost no ads and then pull the rug by limiting features that were previously free.

Add new, more attractive features behind a paywall!

That's super useful. "Red Lines Tools" is similar but just for lining things up without the ruler part. Free Ruler + Red Lines Tool would be quite perfect!

I was barely online during KotlinConf 2025, so here's my follow-up now.

Thank you so much everyone who joined us, in person or online. It was an incredible experience connecting with the community! ❤️

Here are some highlights of news below, as you've probably missed some! 🧵

Union types + Rich Errors

Still not clear to me how union types will work (typescript PSTD), but Im all in for rich errors

I wouldn't mind a future where I controlled my computer over voice to tell some LLM to code different things, wearing AR glasses to glance at what it was doing when needed, while walking in a park during the work day. The pieces are kinda all there, except maybe the AR glasses to peek at the screen.

Anybody tried out @getpieces.bsky.social ? I just tried it and while it's super cool. It gave me "keylogger with an AI" vibes just because it's always screen recording and has all the accessibility permissions. Plus, it didn't help that Local mode didn't do anything on my M1 Mac.

Don't use Gson on Android. Use Kotlin Serialization instead. It relies on code generation instead of reflection. This helps avoid optimization related crashes and faster app performance.
github.com/google/gson?...
github.com/Kotlin/kotli...

50% OFF Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System The fascinating inside story of how the Android operating system came to be. In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn't get investors interested. Today...

Wait, you *still* haven't listened to the Androids book? What are you waiting for? A sale?
Good call: my publisher is selling the audiobook for 50% off until May 11 here:
www.audiobooks.com/promotions/p...

Can/will a future version of WindowSizeClass use this instead of WindowMetricsCalculator?

Compose Multiplatform 1.8.0 Released: Compose Multiplatform for iOS Is Stable and Production-Ready | The Kotlin Blog Kotlin Multiplatform becomes a complete solution for mobile development, enabling flexible code sharing across both business logic and UI without compromising app quality or losing control over platfo...

🔥 Compose Multiplatform for iOS is Stable and Production-Ready! 🔥

Build mobile apps faster with shared UI code, full control over native experiences, and the confidence to ship at scale.

Explore all the updates in Compose Multiplatform 1.8.0: 👇
blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/...

I'm currently looking for a new fully remote, contract role. I have 15 years of Android experience, and plenty more Kotlin, Java , C / C++, and even more obscure stuff

I just use the website on the phone. No app.

We need ranked ballots at the very least.

Google and new Google assistant APIs. Every couple of Android versions, there's some new way.

AI hasn't solved all problems of the world. Volunteering can be meaningful too :)

Todoist | A To-Do List to Organize Your Work & Life Trusted by 30 million people and teams. Todoist is the world's favorite task manager and to-do list app. Finally become focused, organized and calm.

Using a todo app is good. I chuck tasks into the thing and trust I won’t drop ’em.

Todoist is an excellent todo app. It’s easy to get started and has scaled really well for me.

- `Modifier.animateBounds`
- Compose dialogs go edge to edge now. I think this also affects `ModalBottomSheet`
- Customizable overscroll
- More types of built-in Haptic Feedback

🧵 2/2

What’s new in the Jetpack Compose April ’25 release Upgrade your Android UI development with Jetpack Compose 1.8: autofill integration, text enhancements, visibility tracking, stabilized APIs, and more

Compose 1.8.0 dropped yesterday #AndroidDev

- Finally auto-fill in Compose + autofill commit will be called automatically (we’ll see if that works for us though)
- Text auto-size
- `Modifier.onLayoutRectChanged`. Less overhead than `onGloballyPositioned`

🧵 1/2

🪿 It’s really Goose vs. Goose! 🪿

Matt and Joe go head-to-head in The Great Goose-Off! 🥊 They’ll have the same task, the same time limit, but different prompts, different MCP servers, and different strategies.

📆 April 8, 2025 at 10 am PT/ 1pm ET
📺 linktr.ee/blockopensou...

Join us for episode 2!

Community-Inspired Benchmarking: The Goose Vibe Check See how open source AI models measure up in our first Goose agent benchmark tests

🪿 Which LLMs pass the vibe check?

We evaluated Goose's performance with popular closed and open source models — from coding Flappy Bird to creating wiki pages.

Here's what we found → block.github.io/goose/blog/2...

Let's build an Electon video conferencing app (Around.co alternative maybe?) with Gemini!

#vibecoding

www.twitch.tv/afzal____