5 Resolution Things You Should Do Right Now

(Post title inspired by 2013-style listicle clickbait. You’re welcome.)

Resolution is still a very new piece of software, but it’s still the case that I’ve been working on it and thinking about it for a while. There’s a lot of stuff I want to add (and some things I want to change completely!), and if I’m being honest, I spend most of my time thinking about that.

One of the problems with that, though, is that I often take for granted what exists in Resolution right now, until someone excitedly explains it to me and I sort of blankly say “yeah, I know”. (Again, I’m working on this.)

Anyways, here are five of those really cool, simple things that you should go try out right now. No forward-looking or “coming soon” features required.

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Sneak Peak: Resolution Refactor

We like to stay ahead of the curve here at Resolution. So when I heard people were writing actual web applications with large language model chatbots, I spent $20 on the GPT4 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and got right to work.

Here’s a little window into today’s working session:

Is this easier than working with skilled, experienced professionals? In a way… absolutely! This thing does exactly what I tell it, works incredibly fast, and is happy to allow me to change my mind whenever I want, as many times as I want. I feel absolutely no guilt at all doing things like pivoting completely and dumping an entire code base that would cause normal, human software developers to push me into traffic or at least passive-aggressively respond to my meeting invites with “MAYBE”. (BTW, I invented that move, so… respect.)

However, there are downsides. For instance… well, here’s where we stand as of today, product wise.

Pretty bad! I think the math works, but it’s hard to tell because this entire thing is totally illegible, despite the cheery confirmation of my robot engineering department that the problem had been addressed. (UPDATE: The math definitely does not work, at all.) It’s hard to say that I can’t make this any better, because I probably can! I’ll keep yelling at this thing every couple of hours and it will keep making changes without even a scintilla of human empathy or understanding and send them to me in chunks of truncated Python that I copy and paste in a text editor with a hopeful, utterly clueless look on my face.

The future is here! Somehow, though, I don’t think the AI Edition of Resolution is going to surpass the slow-cooked, human-architected production version anytime soon. Sorry, Brian.

Onboarding, Payments, and a Shiny Model Index

Couple of big announcements here at Resolution HQ. Before handing it off to my new favorite algorithmically generated executives, I’ll sum it up for search purposes —

1. There’s a brand new onboarding program. Just open the Scratchpad and follow the prompts for a Resolution walkthrough based on a model you can actually relate to.
2. Payments are now working. If you need to save more than two models, and/or you want to see Resolution get better, we’ve got a solution for you. Here’s more on our thoughts on pricing if you’re interested.
3. The Model Index has a bunch of good stuff in it, and you can search the entire thing without even opening an account. Just to be absolutely clear, the Model Index is hand-curated by me. Just because you make or share a model, it does not mean it goes in here. I have no idea what you all are creating and only post things that (a) I make, or (b) a Resolution users shares with and says “add this to the index, it’s cool!”

That’s it. Now, here’s AI-generated Resolution CTO Brian Cunningham with another important announcement.

Well said, excu-bots!

Good Goals Gone Bad

Life with Goals

Like most professionals, I have been dealing with goals for most of my career. Early on, I was mostly impacted by annual goals. Later, when I got into management, everything started to revolve around quarterly goals.

But those details don’t really matter — the important thing is that almost all of the goals I’ve encountered have been logically dubious, unhelpful, and hurt employee motivation far more than they’ve helped it.

To be blunt, I’m now going to tell you why that was the case, and how to fix it.

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Meet Resolution’s New Artificial CTO

Now that we’re live, Resolution is making some important staffing decisions.

Welcome aboard, Brian. Hope we hear more from you soon.

Resolution 1.0 Is Live

Big news! The new and improved, public version of Resolution is live and ready to use. It’s still missing some stuff (more on that in a sec) but the major improvements are up and running. Those include:

• Account creation
• Model publishing to a public URL
• An onboarding engine / help center / contact widget
• A scratchpad where you can build an (unsaved) model without logging in
• way better ESC/Enter handling (this was making me crazy)
• better error messages
• tons of weird, edge case bug fixes
• prefixes for units (so you can append “inches” or whatever to the end of “length”)
• Just general handsomeness and reliability

What’s Missing / Immediately Next

Hilariously, our biggest remaining tech holdup isn’t tech at all — it’s me getting a bunch of stupid tax and corporate information established with Uncle Sam so I can set up Stripe properly. Actually switching over to real payments shouldn’t take long after that, so ideally it’ll only be a couple of days. BUT, for now, you can make an account and save/share up to two models as is, and build as much crazy stuff in disposable-Scratchpad-mode as you’d like.

I’m not going to actually blitz people with this thing until payments are running (you know, because money), but I’m more than happy to have you kick the tires if you’ve found this on your own, or already knew about it. Make sure to check out the Examples page not only for video walkthroughs, but included links to models you can really use and copy into your account.

So be sure to check out what’s new, share what you build, and let me know what you think!