[Weekly Retro] Seeds for ideas

#252 - May.2025

Hi there!

💡 Here is a quick idea for the weekend:

The world is full of seeds for ideas.

These seeds are reshaped through iteration. If you don't iterate (experiment) it won't grow.

This is the essence of the creative process.

I found this during the week: The Way of Code, by Rick Rubin.

Rick combined an insightful narrative with interactive pieces of digital art.

I think I spent more time than I needed looking into this (my wife had a lot of patience listening to me talking about geeky things).

Interactive art. Digital creations that you can remix and create new things.

I think this is one of the best examples I've found that resembles this era. A time where you can express your creative power through curiosity. Finding new ideas and remixing them with your context and expertise.

In Rubin's words:

"The world around you is pregnant with potential points of entry on your creative quest. Now find a seed and start modeling and modifying until you have something you're excited to share."

Why wait? Go for it!

📊 Interesting visuals

Inspired by the above, I needed to try it out. So I created something!

This is code (HTML with embedded CSS/JavaScript) co-created with AI. I will experiment with React later.

I named it: "Chaos and Order"

🧠 Ideas from this week

A creative transformation is happening now. I wrote about this during the week. Technology is democratizing tools for expressing our creative power. The future belongs to builders willing to experiment.

• Builders
• A new kind of artist

🛠️ Resources you can download

Mental models for managing AI-driven products: New mindset to navigate the complexities of AI product management. Yes, it's free!

👨🏻‍💻 Interesting links

• A good perspective on how we can seek balance between productivity and learning:

LLMs are Making Me Dumber

Here are some ways I use LLMs that I think are making me dumber: When I want to build a Chrome extension for personal use, instead of actually learning and writing the JavaScript, I Claude-Code the whole thing in a couple of hours without writing a single line of code. Instead of taking the usual route which would leave me with more actual familiarity with JavaScript, I now shortcut the process, leaving me with barely any JS knowledge despite numerous functioning applications. When I need math homework done fast, I feed in the relevant textbook pages in context, dump my problems into o3/Gemini, and check its answers for sanity instead of doing the problems myself. I cram before tests. (Yes, this is morally dubious and terrible for learning.) When I need to write an email, I often bullet-point what I want to write and ask the LLM to write out a coherent, cordial email. I’ve gotten worse at writing emails. My first response to most problems is to ask an LLM, and this might atrophy my ability to come up with better solutions since my starting point is already in the LLM-solution space. These are all deliberate trade-offs I make for the sake of output speed. By sacrificing depth in my learning, I can produce substantially more work. I’m unsure if I’m at the correct balance between output quantity and depth of learning. This uncertainty is mainly fueled by a sense of urgency due to rapidly improving AI models. I don’t have time to learn everything deeply. I love learning, but given current trends, I want to maximize immediate output. I’m sacrificing some learning in classes for more time doing outside work. From a teacher’s perspective, this is obviously bad, but from my subjective standpoint, it’s unclear.

Vincent ChengVincent Cheng

🖋️ Quote of the week

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” – Mark Twain

César Rodríguez
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