This section is organised around one question: what has to be true before you can trust AI to do real work? Reliability, context, economics, security, evaluation, and eventually physical action - each post is a different angle on the same problem.

Start here

I want to build

I want context

Resources

Link indexes and tool directories - useful for discovery, not the narrative spine:

AI explainers - foundational concepts

AI Explainers

TL;DR A curated set of the clearest technical explainers of foundational AI concepts - the ones that build real intuition, not just vocabulary Covers fundamentals (backprop, neural networks), transformers and language models, and generative models like diffusion Authors include Andrej Karpathy, Stephen Wolfram, and NVIDIA’s developer team - high signal, low fluff Read one piece slowly rather than skimming five - the value is in working through the maths, not collecting links Pairs well with the courses list if you want a structured path after the explainers click A curated collection of clear, technical explanations of foundational AI concepts. These resources help build intuition about how modern AI systems actually work. ...

February 15, 2023 · 2 min · James M
GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer

GitHub Copilot

Reading path: For the canonical stack essay, start with AI Dev Tooling. TL;DR GitHub Copilot is the AI pair programmer from GitHub - code completions, function generation, conversational assistance, and an agent mode that can plan and execute multi-file changes Works across VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Xcode, and the GitHub.com editor Now multi-model: routes between OpenAI’s GPT-5 family, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet and Opus, Google’s Gemini, and several open-weight options depending on the task and plan Tiered pricing: a Free tier with capped usage; Pro at $10/month; Pro+ at $39/month for heavier frontier usage; Business at $19/user/month; Enterprise at $39/user/month with org-wide controls The original mainstream AI coding assistant - now competing with Cursor, Cline, and Claude Code on agentic depth Best when your team already lives inside GitHub - the integration with Pull Requests, Issues, Actions, and the GitHub.com agent surface is the differentiator GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer developed by GitHub, originally launched in partnership with OpenAI. It provides code completions, suggestions, and AI-powered development assistance across multiple IDEs. ...

January 14, 2023 · 2 min · James M