Thomas Ptacek:

LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.

Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a year, or your whole career.

I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and Googling and dependency drama of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.

Ptacek says he mostly writes in Go and Python, and his essay doesn’t even mention Swift. But the whole essay is worth keeping in mind ahead of WWDC. There is no aspect of the AI revolution where Apple, right now today, is further behind than agentic LLM programming. (Swift Assist, announced and even demoed last year at WWDC, would have been a first step in this direction, but it never shipped, even in beta.)

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

I don’t use the web interface to Movable Type, my moribund-but-works-just-great CMS, very often. But I was using it today and noticed something odd. Next to the small-text metadata that says I’ve written 35,086 entries in total, it said I had one draft. One. I don’t use the drafts feature in Movable Type — my drafts are stored locally as text files in BBEdit or unpublished posts in MarsEdit. I didn’t recall ever saving a draft in Movable Type, but, I thought to myself, I probably did it from my phone — which is the one device where I do publish and edit posts through the MT web interface because (to my knowledge) there’s no equivalent of MarsEdit for iOS.

It was a Linked List post pointing to Bob Lefsetz’s reaction to the then-new Beats acquisition by Apple for $3 billion, which was considered a lot of money for an acquisition at the time. The blockquote wasn’t fully Markdown-formatted yet — which is sort of tedious for me on the phone, but a single keyboard shortcut in either BBEdit or MarsEdit on my Mac. That’s probably why I left it as a draft. So, just now, I finished the formatting, and changed it from draft to published. Voila — a post I wrote on 1 June 2014 that hadn’t been published until a few minutes ago. I suspect many of you will think Lefsetz’s 2014 remarks on Tim Cook ring more true today than they did then. Others (I’m more in this camp) look at Lefsetz’s 2014 remarks as more than a little absurd — the only mark Jimmy Iovine left at Apple was the record for being the least prepared executive ever to appear on stage in a keynote. He was like Biden at the debate up there.

Lending strong credence to my theory that this forgotten draft was created on my phone is that 1 June 2014 was the Sunday before WWDC 2014, when I’d have been travelling, and thus using my phone for posting. Funny coincidence that I happened to notice it today, on the cusp of WWDC 2025.

A brief follow-up to my love letter to Apple’s discontinued MagSafe Battery Pack this week. I wrote:

They’re the only Lightning devices left in my life and they’re so good I’m happy to still keep one Lightning cable in my travel bag to use them.

Among its other unique bits of cleverness, Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack supports another cool feature: when attached to your phone, you can plug the charging cable into the phone, and after the phone gets to 100 percent charge, the phone will recharge the connected battery pack. So, if you own a MagSafe Battery Pack, you can recharge it even if you don’t have a Lightning cable handy. Just attach it to your iPhone and plug your USB-C cable into the phone, not the battery pack. I’m not aware of any other battery packs that support this.

That said, I still keep that one Lightning cable in my travel bag for the MagSafe Battery Pack because I want to be able to charge it whenever I want. Like, say, if I want to leave it behind, recharging, while I go elsewhere with my iPhone. Also, I like using the MagSafe Battery Pack as my bedside MagSafe charger. I like being able to check my phone from bed without worrying about a cable. In fact, I use one of my MagSafe Battery Packs as my bedside charger at home, not just while travelling.

Such a great little device. Really hope they make a sequel.

WhatsApp, on their official blog back in April 2023:

Last year, we introduced the ability for users globally to message seamlessly across all their devices, while maintaining the same level of privacy and security.

Today, we’re improving our multi-device offering further by introducing the ability to use the same WhatsApp account on multiple phones.

A feature highly requested by users, now you can link your phone as one of up to four additional devices, the same as when you link with WhatsApp on web browsers, tablets and desktops. Each linked phone connects to WhatsApp independently, ensuring that your personal messages, media, and calls are end-to-end encrypted, and if your primary device is inactive for a long period, we automatically log you out of all companion devices.

When I wrote about WhatsApp finally shipping for iPad earlier this week, I mentioned that you couldn’t use a secondary phone as a linked device to your primary phone. That used to be true, but obviously, I missed that this changed two years ago. Glad to know it. I’ve already added my Android burner and my spare iPhone that I use for summer iOS betas. WhatsApp has a support document on linking devices that explains the somewhat hidden way you do this with a secondary phone. My thanks to several readers who pointed me to this.

This makes it seem all the more spiteful, though, that Meta didn’t allow the iPhone version of WhatsApp to run on iPads (like they do with the still-iPhone-only Instagram app). I heard from a little birdie this week — second- or maybe even third-hand, so take it with a grain of salt — that Meta had this WhatsApp for iPad version ready to go for a while, and has been more or less sitting on an iPad version of Instagram, as a couple negotiating chits with Apple. Negotiating for what, I don’t know. But if that’s true, perhaps some (but definitely not all) of the ice has thawed between the two companies. I don’t see it happening, but it sure would get a big audience response if Instagram for iPad got some sort of announcement during the WWDC keynote, perhaps as part of an “iPadOS is now a fuller, more complete, computing experience than ever” segment.

One other oddity I encountered, when adding my Android phone as a linked device: by design, there is no way to sign out of WhatsApp on your primary iOS or Android device. If you are signed in to WhatsApp using another phone number, the only way to sign out on that device and then set it up as a linked device to your primary WhatsApp account is to delete WhatsApp from your phone and reinstall it. Weird.