Years ago I remember listening to the audio book version of Freakonomics and the in particular the story about baby names (I think a standalone podcast episode can be found here). Being a teacher this has sort of stuck with my over time, since every year I get another crop of student names, some with interesting new spellings of older names, some with identical pronunciations to familiar names that I have to double check, and some I have to embarras myself a few times to get right (even with help from students, because my brain is only sometimes connected to my mouth). ...

After being recommended it by a former colleague, I was listening to the “You can learn with AI” episode of the Change, Technically podcast (which was really good, check it out) and it got me thinking: As educators, what do we really want to get out of generative AI (or even AI in general)? I tinker with things all the time because I like understanding where the edges are, but in an ideal world (setting aside the considerable ethical, technical, accuracy and fabrication issues) what would we want tools like this to do? ...

It’s 2026 and I’ve been trying to decide what AI and LLMs are useful for in my day to day teaching. One of the things that has been floating around has been the promise of reducing admin time for teachers using LLMs, but I honestly haven’t found the argument to be that compelling. I don’t trust it near the things that take up most of my admin time like communicating with students, parents, and partner schools. It’s mostly been terrible for curriculum planning, mediocre at best for assessment design, and laughably bad at generating lesson slides, particularly anything involving diagrams. ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) Clipy, an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find the GitHub repo for the project here I keep a relatively up to date version here if you want to try it What we had before Last week was mostly about fixing up issues with implementation methods. ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) Clipy, an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find the GitHub repo for the project here I keep a relatively up to date version here if you want to try it What we had before Last week was adding the record-replay feature (lots more about that this week, what a rabbit hole) and putting in nicer file management (which still needs some tweaks, but I’m pretty happy with it). ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find Part 1 here You can find Part 2 here You can find Part 3 here You can find Part 4 here You can find Part 5 here This is Part 6! I have a (somewhat) up to date version of this tool running on the site. Things might occasionally be broken, things might not work the same way as they did before. ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find Part 1 here You can find Part 2 here You can find Part 3 here You can find Part 4 here This is Part 5! You can find Part 6 here I have a (somewhat) up to date version of this tool running on the site. Things might occasionally be broken, things might not work the same way as they did before. ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find Part 1 here You can find Part 2 here You can find Part 3 here This is Part 4! You can find Part 5 here You can find Part 6 here What we had before See last week’s post for some of the details and screenshots. ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find Part 1 here You can find Part 2 here This is Part 3! You can find Part 4 here You can find Part 5 here You can find Part 6 here This week I was really excited about getting the Abstract Syntax Tree feedback and testing working, as well as just tightening up the user experience a bit, hiding knobs and dials when they weren’t used, etc. I’m getting close to the end of my initial feature list! ...

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython. You can find Part 1 here This is Part 2! You can find Part 3 here You can find Part 4 here You can find Part 5 here You can find Part 6 here What we had before The outcome of the previous week’s achievements was pretty satisfying since I’d tried and failed to solve the problems of having a responsive WASM Python runtime for user code before. Being able to lean on the agent to do things like make changes to C code where I knew what the outcome needed to be, and knew how it needed to work, but didn’t know what to do to make it happen was so valuable. ...