This is James

I’m James Johnson. This is my personal website. Here I write, draw, create, experiment.

Latest posts

Apr 3, 2025	creating	Tiro, a personal note-processing system
Apr 2, 2025	reflecting	Q1 2025 quarterly reflection
Mar 28, 2025	creating	Creating animation process toolset with generative AI
Mar 19, 2025	linking	Simon Willison: Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Mar 18, 2025	linking	How Andrej Karpathy uses LLMs
Mar 16, 2025	creating	My animation process toolset: grouped layer PSD export

Highlights

Tiro, a personal note-processing system

I created Tiro, a personal note-processing system designed for fast, structured capture and organization of daily notes.

Q1 2025 quarterly reflection

I've been doing a lot of code creation with AI this quarter, in a sort of structured vibe-coding way. I love it!

Creating animation process toolset with generative AI

I developed a process for creating animations, using Claude 3.7 to code the tools. It worked well, but now I've thought of a better way to do it.

Vibe-coded fractal trees with threejs

My son and I created a little application to generate fractal trees. It was great fun and educational too.

Animation of sparks on the back of my childhood fireplace

I created an animation of sparks on the back of my childhood fireplace

Maintaining websites with Bear App and Quarto

Making this website enjoyable and fun to edit has been the single most important change I ever have made to my productivity processes.

A process to semi-automate research using few-shot classification and GPT-4 summation

I spend several weeks or sometimes months researching new topics. In this post I start to create a method to do this more efficiently, but whilst doing so I realise the process is overly complex and come up with a better process.

Hatching practice

I've been experimenting with hatching. I learn that I should do pencil sketches from references and add shadow-lines before inking.

Update, memory

Musings on note books and a failed experiment using ChatGPT to record stuff

Learning by writing essays

Why writing essays is a great way to study and learn

Thinking about coconuts

Why are coconuts so big? Why do they have water in them? Are they a nut or a fruit? What is the white stuff for? Did dinosaurs eat coconuts?

On misremembering and AI hallucinations

Does generative AI really understand things? I used to think not, now I'm not so sure

Self-prompting — leveraging your mental cockney builder

We use prompting techniques with AI. We can also use them on ourselves

The WEIRD bias in generative AI responses

“The responses from generative AI depend on their training data. That data is biased, so the responses are biased.”

Tree of knowledge image

I created an image of the Tree of Knowledge, based in part on sacred geometry

My seal

King Charles has a seal, and I wanted one for myself. So I set about designing one.

We need to talk about your information diet

In this essay I look at how we have been programmed by evolution to enjoy cute kitten pictures on Instagram and dumb rage-bait videos on Twitter. We are making ourselves dumber, is there anything we can do about it?

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell image

This work is inspired by *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell* by William Blake

William Blake timeline — an information visualization experiment

I created a visual timeline of William Blake's life

Gods of the visual essay

Here I list some of the people that I think write the most inspiring visual essays

AI is coming for your job

How to survive the coming AI job apocalypse