Weeknotes #63 (January 17, 2026)

Posted on: Jan 17, 2026

Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.

Things I worked on

Wrote a piece on How I use Generative AI going into 2026. Who knows what will change in the next few months to years from this point, but this was at least how I felt about Gen AI at this moment in time.

Saw an article on Claude Code in RollerCoaster Tycoon (OpenRCT2) which is wild to think about given it is a relatively complex game. The article mentions that and that there are things it is not good at, but it is interesting to see how we've grown from Reinforcement Learning harnesses for video games like Tetris of a decade ago to this now.
Anthropic released Claude Cowork which is basically Claude Code for general purpose use on your machine. Definitely seems to have some rough edges but definitely curious to see if this goes anywhere.
Starting to explore Convex and see if it would be a useful datastore for some side projects. The main premise is it is a mixture of relational databases, document databases, realtime sync, and all reliant on Typescript's type inference such that rather than rely on writing SQL, everything is exposed via typescript APIs & functions. It has a reasonable paid tier, but it is also Open Source and you can self host it if you wish with mostly the same capabilities as the hosted system.
Watched The Godfather for the first time yesterday with friends. Definitely can understand why it is one of the highest acclaimed movies in history and holds up very well over 50 years later.