Month Notes for July 2026
One of the most visible things in this FIFA World Cup are the pink shoes. Why are nearly 90% of them pink?
I initially thought it was all the same model of shoe, some sort of draconian sponsorship deal with FIFA where all the players had to wear the same shoe. But it was not. It's different shoe makes deciding all together that pink is the hottest color this year and every brand made the same colored shoe.
I was invited to speak about a hyper-personal local-only location and place logging Android app that I've been vibe coding for the last 10 months. I had a script of what I was going to present and demo, but I needed a few slides with screenshots to set the stage. Initially I fired up Google Slides out of habit, but after scrolling around the templates for a few minutes, I decided to just vibe code the slide deck.
Using Claude (chat), I just gave it the script and asked it to create a slide deck for the talk in HTML. After much back and forth for about 30 minutes, it created a fully web page with a slide deck with keyboard shortcuts, animations, attached images. It was blown away by how good the result was, how easy it was to attach images, make modifications, etc, all through chat.
I really think it can only get better, maybe the technique of creating the slide deck could be encapsulated into a system prompt, a custom harness just like Claude Code. It makes me wonder how far it will go, do you create many different harness for every type of work it can do? Or just one general harness to rule them all (Claude Cowork.)
I discovered how to use Claude Design again, it is much better since it first launched. First demos of it were extracting a design system from an existing app, which seems like a bit of a party trick.
The real value of it is being able to iterate on a design like I am talking to a designer. Switching to Fable also have unlocked a lot of design quality upgrades, the design it came up with was much closer to ideal.
The ability to produce mocks with animations and transitions baked in. Drop in screenshots of existing apps and asking for re-designing, or adhering to another design system is so simple and delightful.
The clunkiest bit of it is that I don't have a clear way to hand off to Claude Code, and be able to automatically plug into the frontend implementation process.
I updated my Japan Train Lines project as my first experiment with Fable, making it be a 2D SVG based thing into a 3D WebGL (ThreeJS? I dunno, I didn't look at the code much).
Then shortly after, a chrome extension, a bookmarking site, an Android share extension and a full blown Android app to a unique UI aesthetic all over a long weekend. This has been so crazy how much I can get done with Claude Code and Fable.
This was all done while continuing to watch every FIFA World Cup 2026 game and also the F1 races and associated content.
Before heading off to Sydney, I co-hosted our EIGTH Vibe Coders Tokyo. We had someone from Google Deepmind give a talk about using local models for vibe coding. One of the interesting things I learnt is that it was possible to vibe code using a local model through a skill. I'm still not quite convinced it could work, but an interesting technique nevertheless.
As part of the meetup, I gave a 5-10 minute live demo of using Gemma4 31B (and also Qwen 3.6 35B A3B) together with Pi to do some simple vibe coding locally without cloud token costs. It was good to show people what was possible, but how different it is waiting for 2 mins (local) vs 20 seconds (cloud). Interesting discussion also ensued about what is a good local model to use. I find that the non-MoE models like Gemma 31B tend to feel slower but perform better with less errors. Using the MoE Gemma4 equivalent seems more responsive but has a much higher chance of error, the total running time tends to be pretty variable, but on average pretty close.
The second half of July was spent catching up with friends and family in Sydney. I haven't been back for 8 years and there's a big list of people to catch up with, family issues to sort out, junk at home to deal with.
Attended the Claude Sydney Meetup. Learned a few things and met some people in the community there. The meetup was in a really nice place at Stone and Chalk. The host, Rye, showed off a Football Manager simulator called manager11, someone showed off ways to adapt your resume using AI to find a job (Sonnet writes better resumes than Opus), another showed off how to make a synthesized voice with ElevenLabs and make a podcast to read him back tech news, and finally someone showed off a lot of tools that seem to target people who want to run multiple claude subscriptions.
It's pretty cool to chat and learn how others are using AI, but I do like the Vibe Coders Tokyo meetup vibes where we are less about doing community marketing for a company, but purely getting people to meetup.
Attended the first Home Assistant meetup in Sydney, which was in a pub in the CBD. There were lots of people geeking out on home automation, including someone who manages a 15-home home assistant setup, another who made a AdventureTime character robot with an ESP32 display. It was a really cool meetup, I'm wondering whether something in Tokyo could work...
One silly little experiment I've done in Sydney is exclusively drive EVs around for the whole 4 weeks I'm in town. This involved figuring out which car rental companies have EVs for rent, figuring out the models and experiencing them.
Sydney is such a car-centric city that it is hard to get around without a car. The EVs here are also very different from Tokyo or the US. There are a lot of BYDs on the street, and other Chinese companies like Geely, Jaecoo, GWM, Chery. Though like US, there is an insane amount of Tesla going around.
By pure coincidence I managed to hire the Smart #1, Polestar 2 and the Tesla 3. I swear I didn't do this intentionally. My quick two-liner review for these cars:
- Smart #1 does this auto-seat adjustment when you enter and exit the car to help you get on and off easily. The drive is OK, but I'm shocked that the model I drove didn't do quick charging.
- Polestar 2 is like they retrofitted a Volvo with an electric motor and gave it a bit old Android phone as the interface. It drives like a tank, but has some nice smart features.
- Tesla 3 is very simply to drive, as you'd expect is the nicest of the three cars I hired. Not having Android Auto or Apple Car Play is very annoying because their Tesla Maps is just not that good (no traffic lights).
Things I miss about Sydney that I only realized after being here:
- Fresh berries in supermarkets! Blueberries, Blackberries, Raspberries -- all reasonably priced and available in supermarkets!
- Halloumi is served everywhere! I love Halloumi, it's available in Kaldi Farm Coffee around Tokyo occasionally, but here it's just always available.
- Decent to amazing espressos served everywhere! You don't need a best espresso guide to get a nice juicy shot.
- Coffee shops tend to open in the morning 7am - 3pm (compared to Tokyo's 10am to 6pm.)
- Dogs behave themselves off leash.
Things I miss about Tokyo now that I've been here:
- Toto Washlet. This must be the single biggest reason why Japanese don't travel outside of Japan much.
- Being able to get to places without driving. Without driving, it's quite hard to get around Sydney just on public transport.
- Food prices -- the portions are bigger here, but generally food is pretty expensive here. I'm paying double of what prices are in Tokyo.