SOPHIE COLLINS

Since implementing better, more professional harnesses and constraints around my agentic development and having Codex and Claude review each other's PR's, things feel very different. When you're in full YoLo vibecode mode, you think of an idea and it's on the page five minute later. But I'm trying to harness this stuff to build proper, functioning, robust, maintainable, coherent software. So I'm forgoing dopamine for quality. But it feels very different. I feel more like when I was a Product Manager frustrated at how long it takes to add a button to a form. Everything is slower now, but *I… more…

I've got an enormous amount to do and things feel in disarray, at the moment, but I'm doing a little bit of work while I watch one of my favourite childhood films: The Hunt for Red October. I have seen this movie so many times, I know almost every line of dialogue. I decided to watch today as I saw a Hunt for Red October movie production mini documentary that went into the production and how they made it. Thirty minutes later, I'm watching the real thing with a cup of coffee. I loved it at the time because (i) Sean Connery, Sam Neil, Alex Baldwin, Tim Curry (ii) Submarine movies are great… more…

The dopamine is flowing with OpenAI Codex today. I've got Claude and Codex reviewing each other's work systematically and while progress seems slower than the heady days of any early project, it feels like every move is way more considered and the output is improving code quality. A lot of my current work is developing using frontier models to build applications and harnesses using self hosted LLMs and RAG. My next step is going to be to bring as much of the coding "in house" as possible.

To my friends (so I can avoid telling you all one at a time): Hannah and I have separated. We care about each other and we're not discussing details. No one's fault - we love eachother deeply and have a lot of chemistry, but just couldn't make it work. The separation has been amicable and conscious, but never the less completely heartbreaking. It feels devastating to lose your best friend and roadmap for a future (both for us and for me). I don't feel like it will be ok, but know it will.

This evening we rented bikes and cycled into Amsterdam. It was about 12km in, but pretty flat, so we did it in about 35 minutes. When we got there we were both hungry so decided to grab a bite to eat and get a drink. We picked a random cafe. Hannah had her (not at all surprising) order of Fish and Chips and I had the worst steak I've ever ordered. After dinner we did a boat tour around the canals. I was hoping for one with some more narration, but we ended up on one that was more silly and boozy with minimal tour guide stuff. It was still fun, but I think I was after a little more mental… more…

We went for a little explore. There is a cool park just nearby with interesting scupltures, kids play activities, great trees and interesting landscaping.