A quick visit on a cool Saturday afternoon made for a pleasant walk. Even better was the lobster roll at the Lobster Pot, just outside the park in Rockport.
6 photos
Author: Andy Novick
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2025 Elkhorn Slough Photos
Elkhorn Slough (sloo) is a tidal wetland and estuary on Monterey Bay, California, near Moss Landing. The whole areas known for sea otters, harbor seals, sea lions, salt marshes, and hundreds of bird species.
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Turning 70 and Starting Something New
I turn 70 this July. I’ve wound down the consulting work that kept me busy for years. My wife, Ulli, and I have a stable home, family, and retirement plan giving me the opportunity to explore new ideas. In recent years I’ve paid attention to my health and developed an exercise program. Golf and photography are still hobbies that I enjoy. I still love computers and computer programming, so learning AI and AI programming is a natural fit for my interests and a wide open area for exploration.
There’s freedom in learning something purely because it interests you, with no client and no deadline. Right now, understanding AI and using it is that thing for me. We’re at the start of a monumental technological revolution and I want to be part of it. I’ve been doing the learning and using AI for coding. One of the primary purposes of this site is to help any one who’s interested, learn what I’ve learned. It should also keep me on track as it forces me to think about how I can explain the choices I make along the way.
There other things going on in my retiree life: family, exercise, golf, photography, reading, and maintaining a house. This is going to be a place to discuss all of them.
There’s no grand plan. I have curiosity and some time. That’s enough to start. I hope some of what I share is useful, or at least entertaining.
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What I’m Learning About AI-Assisted Coding
I’ve written software since 1971. Since the mid-1980’s I’ve heard that a new computer program is going to write the code from now on instead of programmers. That’s left me with skepticism about what AI might do. After spending time with them, here are a few early impressions.
AI can write working code
I started in March of 2025 coding with the chatbots. The CLI and VS Code based tools were only beginning to appear. But given a fairly simple problem in writing SQL the chatbots were able to produce working code. ChatGPT and Gemini were able to write some code but Grok went past that and found a bug in the code it was give to to adapt and fixed it. Now all the foundational models are good at code. The harnesses, like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and JetBrains, have taken that further and are very good at it. I documented that experience here:
Testing still matters
The AI tools are confident even when wrong, so testing matters more than ever, not less. The good news is that debugging skills are still useful. However, I’m working on some projects were I’ve not looked at the code and have interacted with the AI by doing my own testing and then going back and requesting changes like a typical user might.
Image Generation Isn’t so Great
Given the logos of Gemini, Grok, Claude, and ChatGPT, I asked each:
Using the four logos provided make an image for the theme of AI-Assisted coding. Include a few lines of code somewhere in the image, maybe in the backround. Make sure to produce a square image.
The results were pretty bad. They all butchered at least two of the logos. Most of the output wasn’t square. The image at the top of this post is from ChatGPT and here’s a try from Grok.
Grok First Try If you’re exploring the same territory, I’d love to compare experiences.
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Welcome to AndyNovick.com
Hello, and welcome. I’m Andy Novick, and this is my new corner of the web. It’s going to be a place to write about whatever I’m makes me curious, share links to my projects, and keep a record of what I’m learning along the way.
For a long time my online life was scattered across a handful of places: code on GitHub, photos on SmugMug, SQL articles on Novick Software, and an older personal blog called Andy’s Guy Stuff. This site is my attempt to pull those threads together into one home, with a blog at the center of it.
The blog is the heart of the site. For now, much of what I write here will fall under the category of AI Discoveries. These will be notes from my ongoing experiments with AI tools and AI-assisted coding. I expect it to wander into photography, programming, and the occasional thought about a book, a movie, or something happening in the world.
If you want to find my other work, the footer below has links to everything. Thanks for stopping by.
