Sketches
The notebook opens — eighteen months of prehistory behind it, and one question: what can these things actually make?
The Focus AI launched on November 27, 2024, but the notebook opens mid-story. We had been talking to models programmatically since a ChatGPT URL-summarizer in May 2023; February 2024 brought the ollama hinge — "in which I discover ollama" — and ten weeks that toured the entire modern stack: local inference, structured output, streaming, RAG, a chat UI. By August we were wiring tool calls and a first LangChain agent, and writing chain-of-thought prompts by hand, months before thinking models swallowed the technique into the weights. This issue is what came next: a Chrome extension built with ChatGPT and Cursor, a Figma design sliced three ways, and a first essay on what generative tools mean for hard creative work. Sketches in the proper sense — quick studies to find out what the material wants to do.
The Quarterly Retrospective
We came back to technology because the machines started talking back. The first three experiments were small on purpose: a Chrome extension built in minutes with ChatGPT and Cursor, a Figma design handed to three different coding tools, an essay asking what it means when hard things get easy. Each one worked well enough to be unsettling.
The finding that held: the walls around 'developer work' are lower than they look, but the judgment calls didn't move. Three tools gave three different buildings from the same drawing, and someone still had to decide which one was right. That question — where does the craft go — became this magazine.
Slicing up a design from figma
In this hands-on comparison, three coding tools - Cursor, Aider, and v0 - are put to the test as they attempt to replicate a design from Figma into functional HTML and CSS code, revealing their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks.
Making hard things easier
Explore how generative AI-based tools can revolutionize the way we work, making creative tasks more accessible and efficient for both novices and experts, while also highlighting the importance of critical thinking and creativity in the face of automation.