Farm House

March 20, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

The house at the farm is coming along.  I'm stepping in to fill the oldest kids' shoes as he steps away to do other things.  I'm trying to line up painters and today mom, Emma and I drove out to the farm to clean up the site and haul away trash.  The schedule is moving along at a rapid pace and the siding and roof are coming along, with electrical after that.  In a few weeks the drywall should be up and the interior should be ready for painting.  We might actually get this place ready for renters by the start of summer.

Mocha Friday

March 20, 2026 by Adam in Family

I just finished my last gulp of that delicious elixir, the enthusiasm for the day trickling into my extremities.  My life in the AI apocalypse continues.  At work I built an imaginary laser defense planning system for meteor impacts.  It was mostly to learn some technologies I'll be working on but it was shocking how fast and fun it was.  At home I'm working away on my Nancy Drew Lovecraft mashup game.  It's currently generating Day 3 art content on its own.  I've got to do a human quality pass on the thing one of these days, but it's wild how easy it's been to build a full, complex roleplaying game.

And real life continues onward.  Yvonne finished her finals, waiting for the results.  They had a pretend mass casualty event the next day which she said was fun.  Duncan's done as well, so there's a brief lull before the next set of adventures.  Emma's hours are cutting back as the chocolate season wanes, but I think she's enjoying going home early and enjoying the sunshine.

There's a lot of farm house related excitement happing lately.  We met with Nathan with HiLine this week to give him a check and it looks like the house is going up fast.  We need to get painters sorted out really soon.  I think I'm on the hook for hauling garbage away.  It's a little stressful, but also very exciting to see this all finally come together.

I've loved the warm weather, wearing shorts, and seeing plants pop up this week.  The greenhouse is full of seedlings, flowers are popping up everywhere, and the blue skies seem to have woken up the entire town from their long winter nap.

Tomorrow is Delta Green!  We're doing it a little early so my oldest son can move in with his girlfriend that afternoon.  I'm excited to return to the surreal horror with my friends and family.  I'm sure it says something deep about what kind of person I am.

Hey Kiddo

March 18, 2026 by Adam in Family

I continue to be on an AI kick.  It's gotten really easy to have AI go do research, analyze huge amounts of information and make presentations on it.  I told it to make a "Hey Kiddo - How To Be Okay in the AI Revolution" page using information gathered from the Internet.  I made a dry version first, but I decided I needed a "cool dad" version instead.

Steamboat Simulator

March 17, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

Dad came over for dinner last night and we ended up talking about AI and some of his dream hobby projects.  He wanted to make a steam powered model boat since the world speed record is tiny and he thinks he can (hopefully figuratively) blow it out of the water.  I told copilot to research steam powered model boats, fed it various specifications dad rattled off, and let it build a thing while we ate dinner.

The end result is a simulation of an Arduino controlled steam powered radio controlled boat.  I simulates the physics of the system, the remote controls, the Ardunio code that controls the engine, and links to the research that went into it.  It's some of the most impressive work it's cranked out with minimal work.  Just click the autopilot button and see what happens.  The engine cutaway tab on the sim page shows the animated engine move.  It's shockingly good.

Springtime

March 16, 2026 by Adam in Family

I didn't spend my entire weekend playing with AI agents.  Emma and I planted flowers, fixed the flagstones on the path to my shed, broke down some junky furniture to slowly feed into the garbage.  We had a nice walk around the neighborhood - I'm enjoying seeing the sun and going out without a jacket for a change.

I continue to fiddle with my Lovecraftian Nancy Drew game.  It's really impressive how much I can get copilot to do.  It can crank out prompts for images, music, and sound clips - sometimes even doing it all itself and getting the results integrated into the app.  It's not perfect - sometimes the results are a little weird - but it feels like there's a real game coming together.  I've been having copilot do the bug testing, so I've been giving more design advice instead of fixing broken things.  It makes building things way more fun.

Work's fine - slowly moving my current work forward while getting ready for the next things.  It feels like we're entering a phase of our lives where change is going to come quickly..

I Opened My Third Eye

March 13, 2026 by Adam in Family

I've been listening to the Dresden Files, where the main character is a wizard detective.  Jo was running an Open Mic at Wordcrafters, so I was on the couch under the kitties last night listening to the audiobook.  I fell asleep and woke up to the dramatic line "I opened my third eye".  Somehow it stuck with me, a funny reflection on my life with AI these last few weeks.

As I type this on an early Friday morning, I've got an AI agent building out my Lovecraftian Nancy Drew game.  I've given it an overall plot and some of the core systems are already there.  It won't be able to add art, music, and sound, though I've got some ideas for that as well.  It's doing the coding and dialog writing.  So far the results are rough around the edges, so I've told it to test things out and fix bugs it finds.

In another window I've got it working on making monster portraits for my D&D campaign.  I've got a really nice DM web page at this point, so I can display pictures and movies, play sound effects, get background music going, and so on.  I sometimes feel like a one man band with the drums and the kazoo but the end result is nice.

Work is in a similar state - I've got a bunch of work all queued up and ready for humans to review it, but that part is slow.  I still need to review the implementation plans and output, but AI makes quick work of the actual coding parts.  I've started asking it to do things that I usually didn't in the past as it took too much time - performing more in-depth analysis or testing out api calls systematically.  When coding is almost free, lots of things become possible.

As for the week and upcoming weekend, all is generally well.  It's finals week next week - Yvonne just needs to pass her class and then she can take the real test for her EMT certification.  Duncan's working on his final project this weekend.  Emma's been a little sick but hoping to get to work today.  I think this weekend will generally be chill - no roleplaying games or big activities.  We'll probably library and project and thrift through the weekend.  

Reconfiguring My Brain

March 09, 2026 by Adam in Family

It's been a weird couple weeks - I can feel my brain reconfiguring itself as the age of AI is upon us.  I'm juggling multiple AI agents, performing various tasks and helping them out when they get stuck or do something dumb.  It's such a strange way to work now and I'm still getting used to it.  I spent the weekend playing around with more ideas which you can read about in the project section.

I tried hard to do some real human things in between my AI fueled madness.  Emma came over Saturday after watching the Beetlejuice musical at the Hult Center.  Her big brother and cousin Jordan came over and we ran a Call of Cthulhu one-shot.  They had a great time, battling Lovecraftian horrors in the 1920s, using Tommy guns against zombies and running away from giant monsters.

Emma and I went for a little walk and stopped by my mom's house.  She wanted to show us Egert's tiny house he's been building, so we drove out and took a look.  It was pretty cool, and it was good for Emma to walk around in one to get a sense of what it would be like.

Sunday began with a hearty breakfast as usual - there's something magical about a day that starts with french toast with blueberries and a cafe mocha.  Emma went off thrifting with her brother.  Jo and I planted onion starts and cleaned the garden a bit.  I worked away on my various AI projects.  When Emma returned we headed to the library and I picked up a couple AI books.

I love how we're getting warmer weather with blue skies and flowers in bloom.  I wandered around in a short-sleeve shirt this weekend and it was lovely.

My AI Girlfriend's Head Came Off

March 09, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

I went a little crazy with AI over the weekend.  I've been rethinking the way I do my job and hobbies as all the LLMs roll out to change our lives.  I've been using them for awhile, but I went pretty hard this weekend, spinning up a bunch of weird little demos to play around with ideas.

It started with a simple thing I'd already been doing - read a Call of Cthulhu PDF and turn the mission into a nice web page with notes, then create image prompts I can use to make player images.  It worked beautifully and saved a bunch of time.

Next was making a system to take images and turn them into 3d models.  I started with an AI generated spaceship image.  It tried to turn it into a CAD drawing, then iterated a few times until it looked more like the picture.  The results were okay, but I wanted to tweak it more, so I created a system where I could click on a part, type in how I wanted to change it, and it would do its best.  Pretty soon my spaceship was looking less monstrous and more like a real spaceship.  

I wanted to play more with my old Kinect, so I told copilot to use a javascript talking head library to display a talking head that I could speak with and have it detect where I was in the room and look at me while it was speaking.  The first weird thing was that copilot picked a young woman avatar - probably the default in the demo - and I realized I'd accidentally made an AI girlfriend.  Sadly every time it tried to talk the head would stop displaying, leading me to laugh hysterically.  We finally worked out the bugs, including gesture detection.  Then it would say weird things like "Nice T-Pose, are you asserting dominance?".  I decided to shelf it as it was all a little too weird.

The last project was more practical - walking a novice through the steps of building a tiny house.  It was okay, but rough around the edges.  I'm experimenting with some better communication between copilot and a web page - we'll see if it pans out.

Tetris Effect

March 06, 2026 by Adam in Family

I've changed the way I do work.  Instead of typing out code myself, I've switched to working with AI agents to come up with an implementation plan together, then pass the plan on to another AI agent to write and test the code.  It's a huge change and I can feel my brain rewiring itself to adapt to my new world.  Like the early days of Tetris, I find myself having weird AI dreams and thinking in different ways to get things done.

I've also been having a lot of fun making my own software thingies.  I hooked up my newer xbox one kinect that I got last weekend thrifting.  It might have been a flop as a gaming peripheral, but I'm having a ton of fun making RPG props or just weird art.  I told it to make a Minority Report style user interface thing that tracked my hands and let me move windows around on a screen.  Soon enough I was flinging dialog boxes around the tv screen with the flick of a wrist.  Well, mostly flailing around and getting tired - it's probably easier if you're Tom Cruise.

We're all trying to figure out what this new world means for our industry - what skills do we need in this new world, how will we build software, how will the world change.  We had a reorg at work and I'll be with an AI-focused group, so not only will I be using AI more, but building tools for others to use.  What a strange, wild world we live in.

The week was generally good.  Jo and I started some seeds.  Last night we saw an odd but interesting play about bigfoot and family dynamics.

As for the weekend, I had a couple players drop out from the normal Delta Green game, so I'll be running a 1920s Call of Cthulhu one-shot instead.  I'd already gotten it mostly ready, though I've added a few more videos and such to add to the fun.  It'll be a small group, so we'll make some characters and have some fun.

Relaxing at Work

March 02, 2026 by Adam in Family

It was a very full weekend - sitting down for a few hours seems like a nice change of pace. 

Saturday Emma and I started our grand adventure at Smith Family Bookstore, then the library, and finally MECCA.  We returned home tired but with books and art supplies.  After lunch we went out again to a thrift store.  I bought another Kinect, this one with improved tracking - I'll probably vibe code some weird thing for the Delta Green game to entrance and horrify my players.

The day wrapped up watching Death Note with Duncan, Yvonne, and Jo, then wandering upstairs to chat with Emma and try to keep her awake until at least 8 pm.  Her chocolate factory work has her getting up so early these days.

Sunday morning Emma was picked up to go fishing.  Jo and I worked on getting the garden beds ready and planted some peas.  I've been itching to get things started growing - optimistically planning for the future and all that.  I'd also been wanting to clean and power wash the porch.  It took hours, pulling down ivy and moving heavy things around, but it finally got done.  Emma returned from her fishing trip empty handed, but enjoyed the company of her big brother.  

As for fun things, I continue to work on my lovecraftian video game using AI tools.  It's getting crazy good at making changes, testing that it worked, and planning out complicated features.  More and more I feel like I'm a designer rather than a programmer.  I think the same think is starting to happen with my real job, though we still require a lot of accuracy and stability that it's not quite ready for.