Ai-and-Productivity on Yuval Bloch — Complexity & Ecology

Figaro - or how we create the app we need

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Hackathon for App Development

Over the last three months I’ve been part of developing MIRA — a Multilayer Interactive Rendering Application — which we’ve already presented as a preprint on arXiv. I wrote about how AI heavily shaped that development process on my blog, but the most important conclusion from the whole experience is this: small-to-medium app development has become genuinely easy, thanks both to AI and to the modern ecosystem of browser deployment tools and JavaScript libraries.

Developing MIRA

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three months ago, my PI Shai Pilosoph offered me a spot on a project he had already started: a new tool for visualizing multilayer ecological networks. I was skeptical. Already on an extension for my thesis, I was afraid to take on anything new when I was already stretched thin. But he showed me what he had built so far, and we talked about how publishing it could support the field in a meaningful way — and add something real to my résumé. So I decided to join, as second author, alongside my colleague Shir who stepped in as the lead writer.

How and Why I Built My News AI Agent

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I fell for the trend. I built my own AI agent — and worse, I vibe-coded it. I suppose even I eventually surrendered to the spirit of the era. But I did so with a specific goal: to use modern tools to return to something older. To the era of print.

Moving Forward by Reaching Back

Let me describe how I consumed news fifteen years ago, when I was still a high school student. Every afternoon, after coming home, I’d pick up the newspaper and spend about forty minutes reading what had happened in the world. I’d focus, try to understand the context of events, read what interested me — and then close it and go do homework, hang out with friends, or read a book.

The Algorithm of the Ring - Why It’s Time to Quit Social media

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“The world is changed.
I feel it in the water.
I feel it in the earth.
I smell it in the air.
Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”
— Galadriel, The Lord of the Rings

When something changes in my life, I tend to place the responsibility on myself—for better or worse. So when I recently decided to change my relationship with the digital world in order to improve my focus, I understood it as a sign of personal development: I had reached a point where I needed this change.

The Surprise: When AI Reduces Developer Productivity

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Surprise: When AI Reduces Developer Productivity

Once in a while, I run into a paper that makes me say, “F*ck.” These papers often go under the radar, but their results truly revolutionize how we look at something.

The paper, with its perfectly non-appealing name, “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity,” is one of those. The brilliant interpretation by Cal Newport (the writer of Deep Work) in his podcast Deep Questions adds even more power to this finding.