Sparking Creativity with AI 📺 Episode 6

Building Single Purpose Apps with GitHub Spark ✨

I recently got access to GitHub Spark’s Technical Preview, and I’m really excited for the potential it presents. Spark is GitHub’s latest AI tool designed to generate micro apps—single-functionality tools you can build for specific needs. The most exciting bit is these apps are hosted online and can maintain persistent data. So you can finally put off building that stimulus queue tracker you’ve been thinking about for months.

That’s exactly what I did as my first test case, asking Spark to generate a stimulus queue app with categories, ratings, and the ability to mark items complete. If you have access to GitHub Spark you can see it in action

I also had Spark build a HackerNews client that pulls in top posts, lets me summarize and analyze the sentiment of comments via an LLM integration. The ability to create one-off applications that don’t warrant a full-service solution—and tweak them exactly to my needs—is what makes Spark compelling.

Right now, access is limited to the GitHub Spark preview, but for those in the program, Sparks can be shared, forked, and modified to fit individual use cases. The potential for highly personalized, AI-assisted development is huge. Maybe this helps solve the old developer trap of building an automated solution for a one-off thing that takes longer than just manually doing it yourself.

Deep Research and the Future of AI-Powered Insights

OpenAI’s Deep Research recently rolled out to Plus members, giving access to 10 research requests per month. Which is great because I’m not quite to the point I’m ready to fork over $200 per month.

I’ve only run a single research request at this point, but I was impressed with the way it generates the report and shows its works. Most interestingly was seeing it hit the paywall on wjs.com and pivot to other data sources. Since I have a subscription to wsj.com I asked it to share what it was trying to open and I was able to review the article myself.

The entire research process took about 15 minutes, delivering a structured report on the topic I chose, AI’s impact on agency pricing. If nothing else it did find a lot of useful content for me to evaluate on the topic as well which saved me a lot of time going around researching on my own.

While tools like this have clear efficiency benefits, they also raise questions about how to integrate AI research assistants without losing originality and confirming quality. The real value, I suspect, will come from treating Deep Research as a data-gathering tool, with human expertise layering in analysis and strategy.

Stratechery’s analysis of Deep Research is much more in-depth and well said than anything I could put together. I strongly recommend checking it out for a deeper analysis.

My question to ponder is how do we balance the benefits of AI driven tools while making sure our work still leverages the creativity and perspective that only exists from unique human experiences?

Models, Models, Models Dropping Everywhere

Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet along with an extended thinking feature. It’ll be interesting to see how extended thinkings impacts Claude’s vibe, which I’ve tended to prefer over ChatGPT, since extended thinking skips their character training.

Speaking of vibes, OpenAI announced ChatGPT 4.5. I haven’t tested it yet myself (re: $200/month) but word is that it does a better job writing.

Amazon is boosting up Alexa to go beyond setting screen time timers for your kids to now dissuading you from trying bangs. And other AI enhancements.

Nvidia is doing just fine post DeepSeek. Turns out it still requires a lot of compute to run models at scale despite their training costs.

Term of the Day

The Greatest Ever

This section’s name may be slightly hyperbolic (but we all love hyperbole these days), but it is a space for me to share the cool things I use wether tech related or not. No sponsorships just cool stuff I use.

I’ve pretty much always been a hat guy, but usually it was repping the St. Louis Cardinals or a random minor league team with a cool logo (looking at you Kannapolis Canon Ballers). This last year I finally upgraded to a Melin hat. They’re more than I’d typically prefer to spend on a hat myself, but a good gift request. And I gotta say, it is a nice hat. They’ve stood up to a beating on beach trips, workouts, and everyday use.

I’d definitely recommend if you’re looking to upgrade past your local sports team hat game.

Next Time On

What topics in tech interest you right now? Hit a reply and let me know or shoot an email to [email protected].