Ryan Schmidt

so wild to be able to do this in a few hours. Yesterday it was for images and videos and now today it's become kind of a tabbed Desktop...

(still some jank around scrolling and focus but it will probably be fixed tomorrow...)

YouTube video by gradientspace gsworkspace AI Canvas - New Features (Feb 12)

didn't have a lot of spare time yesterday, so I only added PDF and textfile support to my gsworkspace app, and a CSV-as-Table view. Of course by "I added" I mean I Described and Claude Coded. youtu.be/RroSqDfZi2c?...

gsworkspace.com

the hero we need

[2026 Canada] Software Engineer, Geometry - Early Career | Roblox [2026 Canada] Software Engineer, Geometry - Early Career

roblox is hiring an entry-level geometry engineer in Vancouver, if that sounds like your kinda thing: careers.roblox.com/jobs/7558821...

YouTube video by gradientspace gsworkspace: Building an AI Canvas with Claude Code

made a vid about this app that the robots have been coding for me. It's on Github if you wanna try it. youtu.be/gJo4UDf73mk?...

They made a website for it, too: www.gsworkspace.com

this website (blueprintue.com) is basically github gist but for unreal engine blueprints (a visual scripting language). Not run by a megacorp, so not able to implement a complex age-verification system. These laws are unbelievably stupid, and coming soon to a country near you...

nice blog post about a humanoid robotics startup failure: ruixu.us/posts/six-th...

not disagreeing, but the reality any large-ish organization is that you will never get everyone involved into a room to listen to your full-thoughts-and-nuances. At some level, it *is* the job of UX & Product to ask for the moon, and of Engineering to say No. I'd argue it's actually efficient!!

This does lead to a pretty toxic situation where UX/Product is always making huge implausible asks because they know it will be whittled down, and Engineering is always saying No-by-default because the initial ask is implausible. All I'm saying is that it is wrong to put it all on the Engineers.

What happens is UX/Product does not really recognize the initial request *was* too vague and goes away thinking "Engineer was lying". And Engineer does not realize they were actually listened to and goes away thinking "UX/Product asks for insane things".

going back and forth, UX/Product refines what it is asking for based on what the Engineer is saying, until the request becomes something more specific and actionable, and then the Engineer can get on board. IMO this is actually the system basically working. However...

TBH when I have listened in as a third party to this kind of conversation (very often as someone brought in as an external "expert"), what I see is that the initial UX/Product request was not actually very clearly defined. Engineer hears vague kitchen-sink request and says "not possible". (...)

yesterday I asked CC to change the icon on a shortcut in my app's installer...but it needed an .ico file and I only had a .svg in the repo. It noticed an image-processing package in the project's node.js dependencies, whipped up a .js script to do the conversion, and ran it. The mind boggles.

I think it's going to be super interesting to see how this plays out. I have gone very far w/ a claude-coded app without writing any code. But I'm still doing Engineer-work constantly - it's a terrible sw architect and constantly makes choices that we pay for later, until I tell it how to unwind

So in theory Engineers are no longer needed. Except the job of Engineering is not just to code, it's also to understand/manage the scope & impact of changes, now and in the future. Whereas Robot Coders will happily do whatever you ask - regardless of the disasters they are creating. (2/3)

You get this attitude a lot from UX/Product people and it's always mystified me. The premise is that all Engineers are lazy? They don't care about the product? Their job is to just shut up and do what they are told? But now we have robot coding... (1/3)

sure that kind of thing happens, all the time. But it's ridiculous to suggest that this is what is *always* happening.

If you are working with good engineers who care about the product as much as you do, then it's rare that they are telling you something is "impossible" for no reason.

I've said "it's not possible" hundreds of times to people who, eg, are not willing to learn about the constraints of unreal engine data structures, costs of deprecation, inherent math limitations, etc etc. Things that I "know how to build", but the "not-possible" is the time & cost involved

sorry but you are misunderstanding if you think this. "It's not possible" is nearly always engineer shorthand for "there are complex issues and tradeoffs here here that you, the asker, will not be willing to put in the effort to understand, so let's just not waste our time, ok?"

a significant challenge in claude-coding is just figuring out good ways to describe things in words. Abstract high-level concepts, very precisely identifying (eg) UI elements, explaining observed behaviors, giving things good unique names, etc. Perhaps time to bring back Technical Writing classes

used claude code SDK to make my app able to modify itself...

seems like electron also has libraries that apps can use to integrate w/ native OS stuff, which I can't do from vanilla node. My app window is not very disguised, it's really like a floating browser tab. But also apparently I can wrap my app in Electron v easily...so I guess I will try it, thanks!!

hmm I guess it kinda sounds similar, but it's just using my normal Chrome browser installation, called from a powershell script (the webapp itself was not modified to accomplish this). Maybe I could embed it in Electron easily, as an option? guess I could ask the Robot...

I'll tell it to clean up it's room ;) thanks!

gsworkspace/install/local/launch-windows-appmode.ps1 at main · rms80/gsworkspace Workspace application. Contribute to rms80/gsworkspace development by creating an account on GitHub.

it used the 'sharp' npm package and wrote an .ico binary directly:
github.com/rms80/gswork...

and the script probably does what you are saying:
github.com/rms80/gswork...

( but the beauty is I don't have to know/care😀)

yes that’s what it’s called on windows, but it did not make a service, just some kind of powershell trick

"...I can just whip up a script to convert .svg to .ico...ok done now I'll just bleep blorp boop". And now I have this.

seriously, wtf. this took like 15 minutes to sort out.

(also it generated the icon svg, not amazing but I don't have any better ideas...)

Apparently, yes. It makes a .bat installer you can run right from the github repo! The icon is a default icon though - I say, can you use the webpage favicon? It says "no, it's an svg and needs to be an .ico"...then it says "wait I see you have this image library in your node.js dependencies..."

Claude Code and I have built a client/server webapp. I ask it, could this be run locally and feel like it's a desktop app? Yes, it says it can launch Chrome in "App Mode" and run the servers in some hidden-but-attached console thing (??). Works. Now, can it be "installed" in ProgramFiles/etc? ...

soooo what’s the next IRC-in-browser we can all switch over to?