Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The AI Age of Discovery

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how difficult it is to explain the changes that we’re seeing in the software development world. Any skeptics that remain, at least at major tech companies, are at risk of being a lost cause. In my own org, I’ve purposely adjusted my approach from “get everyone to try it once” to “how do we let great things bubble to the surface”. But outside the tech world, it’s nearly impossible to explain. There’s a great quote from a strong AI skeptic who recently “converted” (original language included):

The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. I have been trying to break this damn model by giving it complex tasks that would take me months to do by myself despite my coding pedigree but Opus and Codex keep doing them correctly. (source)

I finish work and immediately want to start working on whatever new idea I had for a project at home. I’ve literally had to forcibly put my computer to sleep so that I stop and go to bed. It’s an incredible amount of fun to be able to go from idea to working code in one evening. There is a whole world of ideas that were previously too expensive to try that are now easy experiments. As an example, in the last 10 days, here are apps that I have built:

  • Copilot Chat Export – VSCode extension that renders copilot chats as HTML for easy sharing
  • CommuteTracker – This app runs on my phone and automatically knows when I leave home and when I get to work or vice versa. It also automatically logs whether I took backroads or the interstate. Notably this was the first app I’ve ever developed in Kotlin.
  • RouteWatcher – This desktop app uses Azure Maps to determine how long it will take to get to work (or home from work) and it does this every 15 minutes with the results getting logged to SQL.
  • MlcSports – This phone app is basically a reworking of the MLC Athletics webpage, quickly showing me news for all the teams along with upcoming games.
  • TraktLite – I didn’t fully start this one within the last 10 days but it’s by far the phone app I’ve spent the most time refining. This is an alternative to the official Trakt.tv application for knowing which shows and movies I have watched or want to watch. I started with a specific scenario in mind and I’ve slowly expanded it to add more features that are tailored specifically for me and I’ve spent time refactoring the code to keep it clean.
  • WelsCallStats – Scans all of the call reports for WELS pastors, teachers, and staff ministers to generate statistics about the average call duration for each position, the percentage of calls that are accepted, the churches who have made the most calls, etc. (No I’m not publishing the stats. It’s for personal curiosity. Jon Hein and his team would publish them if they wanted to.)
  • WelsFamilyDevotions – I use devotions from the WELS at night with Elijah, but I don’t 100% love the mobile browser experience and it’s sometimes hard to remember which ones we’ve done before. This app just shows me the family devotions in order and hides any that I have read before. It also has a very clean view of only the devotion text without anything else.
  • Temperature Probe – Again, this wasn’t fully developed in the last 10 days but I spent a lot of time tweaking this embedded Python project that runs on a little QT Py ESP32-S2 board to record the temperature and humidity periodically.
  • Teams X Expander – This was a side project at work where I wanted to have a flow that would watch all Teams messages in a particular chat and anytime someone posted a link to a post on x.com, it would get the content of the post and share it in the chat so we didn’t all have to click the link to read it. It sort of worked but ultimately it was too hard to make it work within the security limitations of work apps plus the x.com API access is very expensive.
  • OneNote addon – This was another side project at work where I was trying to give GitHub Copilot access to search around all my OneNote notebooks. This has been a challenge to get working within our corporate environment and this one ended up failing too, but it was a fun experiment and I learned a lot about how OneNote add-ins are structured.
  • Interview question generator – This was another project at work that came from thinking about how to conduct interviews in this new agentic engineering world. It’s a bit silly to give people coding questions to answer, but how do I evaluate them? I used GitHub Copilot to generate easy, medium, and hard questions in three popular languages that would test how well the candidate could review code and find bugs. I was thrilled with the way this came out and shared it broadly in the company. There is a lot of discussion about how to handle interviews and I think this is a strong step forward.
  • I tried to make a tool that would convert drawings from the old “Microsoft Expression” software package into SVG. It churned on my request for a long time and eventually told me that the file format was completely proprietary, but it also discovered a way to install and old copy of it and export to something that could then be converted to SVG.

Ok, now look at that list and remind yourself that is 1.5 weeks of mostly spare time. It’s a couple hours each night. Now imagine how much I’m able to get done in my full work day on all the projects I actually get paid for! Now imagine this multiplied by 80,000 other devs (or whatever the acutal number is) at my company. And remember what I said before about new capabilities coming out almost daily that lets us run faster and do more things in parallel with less oversight.

I have always thought how cool it was to be around for the mainstream birth of the internet. I was the perfect age to start coding HTML in notepad. It was a whole new frontier and we were (in parallel with others) discovering amazing new techniques and ways to combine technologies to make cool experiences. This has been a similar feeling except now I’m getting paid to do it and the changes that took months before are happening daily now. It is awesome to get paid to learn this, make discoveries, and share them with others!

benmartens March 2, 2026 Geek No Comments

Best of YouTube

It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post!

The first video I have for you is from an amazing musician named Jean Batiste. This was the first of his videos that I watched and it sent me down a rabbit hole of exploring his music and even his Netflix documentary.

The Veritasium channel has a lot of great science content, but I especially enjoyed this video about the physics of throwing a football.

And finally, I have 5 years of videos for you to watch from the channel Ghost Town Living. In 2020, this guy bought an old abandoned mining town and he has been exploring the mines and bringing it back to life. I started with the first video and I’ve been watching them all in order, but if that’s too much for you, start with this recap of his first year and see if it hooks you:

benmartens February 19, 2026 Links No Comments

Two Days Behind

I’m writing this as I’m still processing this excellent article: Something Big Is Happening — matt shumer. It is long, but honestly I would rather have you read that than this post.

Even for people in the tech industry, it’s difficult to explain how fast AI is improving. At work, one of my main responsibilities is literally to figure out what new tools and capabilities we can apply to our team and then help the team grow. Even with 100% of my effort focused on this, I feel like I’m holding on by my fingernails. It’s not fear that robots are taking over but a realization that things are changing faster than any of us expected. We are watching chapters worth of history books fly by every day.

For example, last week I was out sick for a couple days. The morning when I finally felt well enough to check messages, a non‑technical friend asked me what it was like working with AI. I joked that I’d been gone for two days so I was probably already behind. Then I logged in and… sure enough, a brand‑new, ground‑breaking model (Claude Opus 4.6) had dropped, and my programming tool (VS Code) had released features that make it even easier to work with multiple coding agents at the same time. I spent the entire afternoon just absorbing what had changed.

The pace of change is difficult to describe. Last summer I was mildly interested but it was clearly just a toy and most of the demos were hype. In the September, Claude Sonnet 4.5 came out and I could see how it was on the verge of being legit. On Nov 24, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 and it was the inflection point. It was clear to anyone using it that there was no turning back. Opus 4.6 came on Feb 5 and OpenAI’s Codex models are surging too. People ask me what this is going to look like in a year. Who knows? I can’t even tell you what next WEEK will look like.

So yes, if you’re in software engineering, this is life‑altering in a way we’ve never seen before. But the key point is that this will change your life too. Whatever your job is, AI is already working to make parts of it obsolete. It’s a general‑purpose skill amplifier. That means whatever you’re already good at, AI can make you dramatically better and faster at it. This rewriting of reality matters for everyone, not just for people in tech. Here’s how to position yourself:

  • There will always be people around you who think this is all hype and the fad will pass. Do your best to bring them along, but the most important thing is to make sure your future isn’t tied to their denial. If it’s your management chain, find a new job. If it’s someone you’re thinking about hiring, keep looking. Denying AI’s usefulness today is like believing in a flat earth. It is provably better right now. This isn’t up for debate. Don’t waste energy arguing with people who refuse to see it. You gave them a chance to come along. If they resist, they’ll get left behind. Honestly, it might already be too late for them to catch up.
  • You might not be able to predict exactly how this will change your job, but you can keep yourself relevant by leading the way. Be the person who keeps up, uses these tools to undeniable effect, and teaches others how to do the same.

Back in December, I would still try to soft pedal all of this when I was in a group that I knew was mixed on AI. I did not want to sound dramatic or turn them off even more with my enthusiasm. But week by week, that is getting harder to do. The gap between people who use these tools and people who do not is widening so fast that it feels strange to pretend nothing is happening. I would normally end this by saying the future is now, but honestly it feels more like the future was last week and we are all just trying to catch up to it.

benmartens February 11, 2026 Geek

Painting

When we bought this house, there were a LOT of yellow rooms. We slowly got rid of them all and eventually, the only one left was the formal dining room which we let Elijah use for his Legos. It was time to paint that and we knocked it out in about a day. Two big wins on this project were having Elijah’s help and also finally having a good experience with caulking. I successfully caulked all the baseboards in the room and it went so well that I did a bunch more around the house. If you’ve ever seen me use caulk before, that will thoroughly amaze you, but I give all the credit to this video.

I still want to replace the chandelier but here are the before and after photos. The change isn’t enormously obvious in these photos, but I assure you that it’s nice to now have yellow walls around anymore.

benmartens February 9, 2026 Home Improvement

Church AV Equipment List

I’ve written previously about the 2022 upgrade of our church’s AV booth, but it feels like it’s time for another update, and I also want to include a full list of all our gear in case its helpful to anyone else.

  • Mackie ProFXV3 16 audio mixer
    • We basically got this model because I counted all our possible inputs and then wanted a little headroom. We don’t really use any of the extra functionality over the smaller versions.
  • Two PTZ Optics Move SE 12x cameras
  • Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro video switcher
    • This has dramatically simplified our video situation. It takes care of various resolutions and framerates, records to a USB key (or connects to the computer), and allows me to perfectly syn the audio input with the video input.
    • I also enjoy having this be its own device. Some day we’ll probably move to something like OBS running on the PC, but for now, it’s really nice to have a device that “just works” without worrying about any updates or configurations.
    • This device also supports streaming directly to YouTube or Facebook but we haven’t started that yet.
  • Shure microphone setup
    • Pastor:
      • BLX1 Wireless Bodypack Transmitter
      • Shure DH5 DuraPlex Omnidirectional Headset Microphone
        • This is an upgraded microphone that fits Pastor better.
    • Shure BLX24R/SM58 Wireless System with Rackmountable Receiver and SM58 Microphone Capsule Band H10
      • We usually have this by the piano. We aren’t often recording/posting piano stuff but it helps us amplify the piano volume during the services to make sure people can hear it while they are singing.
  • Mackie C200 speakers
  • QSC GX3 300-Watt amplifier
    • I would not buy this again. There’s nothing wrong with the product, but it’s extremely overpowered for our space. We usually leave it on volume 2/10 and I’m pretty sure that if I turned it up much past 7 I could damage the building. We were coming from an extremely underpowered system so I guess I overshot the goal.

So our whole setup is PC independent. Once the service is done, we take the thumb drive out of the video switcher, plug it into the PC, and upload to YouTube.

We also updated our internet service from DSL to business cable and now our service is reliably at least 200Mbps symmetric. Uploading is usually done before we can finish entering the metadata!

We have a TV in front of church that is mostly used to show quick videos after church but is rarely also used during a sermon. We can control that from the balcony using an HDMI over Ethernet extender. This adds about 200 ms of video lag but we take care of this by using VLC for playback and adjusting the synchronization in the VLC settings. The TV in front of church is set up as a second monitor on the balcony PC so we can prep content privately and then drag it over to the TV in front of church. Via an HDMI splitter, that front TV feed also gets sent to an input on the video switcher. This lets us show the sermon PowerPoints directly in the video recording with perfect quality.

We have a great crew that is trained to operate this booth. Our sweet spot is around 4-6 volunteers. That is big enough that we don’t feel like we’re doing it too often, but we also do it often enough to remember how it works.

If you’re curious to see what it all looks like, check out CalvaryLutheranWA – YouTube. I edit the shorts after the fact, but pretty much everything else posted on that channel comes straight out of the AV booth with no post processing.

If someone gave us a bunch of money to upgrade this, I could easily spend it, but unless we get asked to start live streaming the whole service or something like that, I think we’re in a pretty good spot with our setup … for now.

    benmartens February 5, 2026 Geek

    Homemade Air Filtration

    Many years ago, I duct taped an air filter to a box fan and hung it from the ceiling above my workshop area in the garage. It’s cheap, but it was so effective that I ended up having another one that I move around the shop when I’m doing a particularly dusty task. (Note that it is a bit of a fire hazard to purposely draw some dust right into your fan motor so use at your own risk. The filter doesn’t catch it all.)

    That has worked great for years but it’s a pain when I change the filter because it’s hard to get the old tape off and then the new tape doesn’t want to stick to the dusty fan. After thinking about ways that I could model and 3D print some kind of clip, I realized that others had surely solved the problem before. Sure enough, I found a great model online that included the ability to easily resize the clip to fit my specific fan and filter. After a little trial and error, I got it sized just right and the clips are awesome! This is so much better than the old tape approach. I did have one of the clips break when my mobile version of this fell over so I might reprint these to be a bit thicker.

    benmartens February 2, 2026 Maker, Woodworking

    Doom Scrolling Thoughts

    I recognize that this is a loosely supported hot take, but you know how we look back at smoking in the early/mid 1900s and wonder how they could have done that to themselves? In 30 years, I think we might look back at social media like that.

    I’ve been chewing on this for a while and it’s one of the main reasons why I stopped using social media in general but more specifically, I avoid any app with an infinite scroll. That mind-numbing flick, flick, flick feels like the exact opposite of what we’re told about how to decrease the risk of cognitive decline (Alzheimer’s, dementia, etc.). Much of the research into those diseases is inconclusive at this point and then I realize it’s another big leap to say that doom scrolling makes it worse. But it seems illogical that repeatedly losing track of time while scrolling through 10 second videos is going to strengthen your cognitive abilities. Smoking one cigarette doesn’t give you lung cancer and flicking through videos on the toilet one time isn’t going to rot your brain, but what does prolonged and repeated infinite scrolling do to you?

    This is going to take the scientific community a long time to study, but there are already papers available that link doomscrolling to poor memory, shorter attention spans, impaired decision making, and cognitive overload. In kids, it has been linked to increased rates of anxiety and depression. Links are one thing, but is it correlative or causal? This is harder to figure out but there is evidence for doom scrolling being causal. There are some studies that survey how people feel and perform after being exposed as well as fMRI studies showing craving reactions and abnormal prefrontal cortex activity. There are also strong causal links between doom scrolling and increased stress (cortisol) levels which has major known negative effects on long term health. At the same time, technology can massively improve your mental health when used correctly. There is a difference between passive scrolling and active, intentional use.

    “All in moderation” is a motto I support, but after setting up an app on my phone that tracked my screen time, I realized that I’m not able to do infinite scrolling in moderation. I’d rather err on not using it at all.

    More reading:

    benmartens January 29, 2026 Uncategorized

    75,000 Mile Update

    Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

    It has been 8 months since the last post in this series, but that’s certainly a case of “no news is good news.” We continue to love the car and pile on the miles. And, knock on wood, we still have a grand total of 0 service visits. No recalls, no warranty service. Nothing. The only service money I’ve spent on the car are one set of tires, a few sets of wiper blades, and windshield washer fluid.

    Since we announced our plans to move to Minnesota, I’ve gotten some questions about what we’ll do with the car. The current plan is that we’ll still be driving it. While there are certainly fewer Teslas in Minnesota than Washington, it’s still a great car. I would imagine there are fewer superchargers, but the only time I care about those is when I go on road trips. The number of chargers within 100 miles of my house is pretty irrelevant. And yes, the car is fantastic in the cold weather. (In November of last year, Tesla accounted for 31.2% of all sales in Norway.)

    All that being said, I expect to be over 100,000 miles by that point. If you remember my original math, that was my predicted “break even” cost point versus the Ford Escape we would have purchased instead. In reality, we’re on track to hit that point sooner since gas is more expensive than I planned for. So if we get that far before selling or having a major problem, that’s a win in my book. How long will the car last? I don’t know. Maintenance costs are very low but the battery does degrade. We’re currently around 85% of our original capacity. For daily driving, it makes no difference but on a long road trip this could translate into an extra charging stop. I think that 85% number is a bit below average but it’s still well within normal bounds and the packs are warrantied up to 120k.

    Trading for a refreshed Model Y is tempting though. The list of small new features has piled up over the years and I wonder if we should take advantage of the strong used Tesla market in this area before we move. But that brings in questions about higher sales tax and registration costs here too.

    Another big disincentive to sell is that Tesla recently discontinued the inclusion of “Autopilot” on their new cars in an apparent effort to get more people to pay $99/month to subscribe to Full Self-Driving. I LOVE the Autopilot feature on our car and I would guess that at least half the miles I drive are with that feature enabled. I use it just about any time that I have cruise control enabled. The main differences between FSD and Autopilot is that FSD will change lanes on the highway, stop at intersections, make exits/turns to follow your path, etc. Autopilot is more like a cruise control that adds “stay on this road until I tell you differently” and it works all the time on any road or pretty much any weather condition. We’ll see if that decision sticks or not. A lot probably depends on which number is bigger: 1) the additional revenue from people adding FSD or 2) the loss in sales revenue from people who won’t buy the car without that feature.

    So for now, there are no changes to the plan. We love the car and I’m happy with the way the cost numbers are working out.

    benmartens January 27, 2026 Electric Vehicles

    Guest Bathroom Renovation

    If you’ve been upstairs in our house, you’ve probably visited our pale yellow bathroom. Our main bathroom was originally yellow too, but we had that remodeled back in 2013. After living in this house for ~14 years and saying I was going to remodel our guest bathroom for about that long, we decided it was time to hire someone.

    I wasn’t looking forward to the search because contractors out here are very busy and very expensive. Everyone seems to want their project to get a million likes on social media. We just wanted to get rid of the yellow. Here was our specific task list:

    • Remove yellow marble shower surround
    • Remove countertop, vanity, mirror, light fixture, and medicine cabinet
    • Remove yellow flooring
    • Replace the shower valve to a modern pressure balancing valve
    • Tile the shower walls
    • Install a new pre-built vanity, mirror, and light fixture
    • Install an LVT floor

    If you’re into home improvement, you can probably see why I kept thinking I would do this. It would be hard and I would have to learn things, but it’s not impossible. When I chatted with the first contractor to get a ballpark estimate, I had more motivation to do myself. They said this type of project is usually $60,000-80,000. WHAT?!

    A couple weeks before I was ready to dive in, some friends from church turned me onto their contractor. They said he was very reasonably priced, was willing to let the homeowner buy materials and do some of the work, etc. His quote was MUCH more reasonable and we quickly agreed to a deal.

    My end of the project was buying all the supplies: tile, flooring, vanity, lighting, plumbing fixtures, etc. We used the same line of faucets and fixtures that we used in the main bathroom so that part of the decision was easy. We were going with a basic white, rectangular tile so that was pretty easy. Finding a vanity was a lot of clicking but I finally found a ~60″ wide, single sink, white vanity that was very well-built out of solid wood and I found a lighting fixture that was wide enough to not look goofy. The flooring was probably the hardest part. We had a big stack of samples in the house before we finally found one we liked that also happened to be in stock. Everything arrived at the house by the time we needed it except for the flooring which got installed about 15 minutes after I picked it up and brought it home. That one was a little too close for comfort.

    I was shocked at how fast the contractors worked. Within two hours of showing up at the house to start the project they had fully protected all the flooring up to the bathroom and demolished the entire bathroom. By the end of that first day they even had the backerboard in place so they could start tile on day two. It’s awesome to watch people work with confidence and skill. For home improvement projects, I’m lucky if I have one of those and I rarely have both.

    Since the original bid felt so good to us and because the company also had a major painting business, we tacked on having them paint the stairwell. It has needed to be patched and painted since we moved in but climbing up two stories on stairs did not seem fun. They also repaired and painted the whole front door wall and trim. It looks amazing!

    I’ve been asked why we remodeled this when we know we’re moving. It’s mostly so that we don’t have a yellow bathroom in our real estate listing. While our house is far from fancy/modern for this area, that bathroom was especially unusual. Hopefully this new bathroom will keep a few more people flipping through the pictures in our listing.

    benmartens January 26, 2026 Home Improvement

    From Batteries To Plugs

    This year we received a gift of some battery powered ceramic Christmas tree decorations. (I’m not sure if this is the exact model, but it’s very similar.) They have a built-in timer that turns them on for 8 hours and then off for 16 hours. It’s very rudimentary, but it worked… for a few days. Each tree takes 3 AAA’s and we’d have to swap them out every few days.

    After the Christmas season, I decided to convert them to plug power. I’ve done this type of thing before, but I’m not super confident in my abilities yet so I decided to purchase some parts to make life a little simpler instead of doing it from random scraps around the house. I bought a 4.5V power supply with three barrel plugs coming out if it and everything had white cords. I also bought power jacks that were the same size as the plugs and came with wires already connected.

    From that point, I was able to figure out exactly where to connect the new wires. I did this with the continuity tester on my multimeter. This helped me figure out what was the start and end of the battery tray. I plugged in the power supply, connected to one of the jacks, touched the wires to the correct battery terminals and voila! Light! From there, soldering the wires onto the terminals wasn’t too difficult.

    The trick was that without major surgery to the trees (or using a different connection), I wasn’t able to fit the jack into the footprint of the tree. And since the trees spend the rest of the year in styrofoam holders, I couldn’t modify the size of the tree. So the plan was to have those wires and jacks soldered in place but then the base would be removable.

    I turned to Fusion 360 and modeled a base that is about 3/4″ tall and has a lip that surrounds the base of the tree. There’s a cutout in the bottom to feed the wires out to a hole for the jack. Since Fusion 360 is parametric, I was able to just adjust some parameters for each of the three trees and print out three different sizes. That worked but my initial design was a pure cone shape. It looked a little awkward, so I made the edges of the bottom wavy like snow and that improved things dramatically.

    Thankfully the trees still work after this adventure and I’m excited to set them up next year. They will get plugged into the same setup and go on/off with the timer that controls the rest of the village. No more batteries to swap!

    benmartens January 22, 2026 Maker