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  "description": "Here's what I published from Sunday, March 1, 2026 to Saturday, March 7, 2026:\n\n\nThe Age of Living Software\n\nThe world of software is changing so quickly that it's hard to keep up with all of the new ways we can use it. One of those ways became apparent to me yesterday.\n\n\nCustom Software\n\nI'm on the admissions committee for my department, and about three or four weeks ago, we all met together to discuss ways that we could use AI to streamline and enhance our review of student applications to our",
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  "publishedAt": "2026-03-08T11:00:03.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.aaronmiller.info",
  "tags": [
    "The Age of Living Software",
    "**💬 Comment on this post**",
    "Anthropic Will Win Against DoD",
    "wrote",
    "Pentagon’s Anthropic Designation Won’t Survive First Contact with Legal System | Lawfare",
    "Anthropic doesn’t have to work for anyone, including the government",
    "**here**"
  ],
  "textContent": "Here's what I published from Sunday, March 1, 2026 to Saturday, March 7, 2026:\n\n* * *\n\n## The Age of Living Software\n\nThe world of software is changing so quickly that it's hard to keep up with all of the new ways we can use it. One of those ways became apparent to me yesterday.\n\n## Custom Software\n\nI'm on the admissions committee for my department, and about three or four weeks ago, we all met together to discuss ways that we could use AI to streamline and enhance our review of student applications to our Master of Public Administration program.\n\nI took notes on everybody's feedback and ideas, and I also recorded the meeting and exported a transcript. I used these for a two-hour planning session with Claude exploring and detailing what the app would be like. After that, Claude Code and I spent probably another five to six hours building and tweaking it and getting it ready to go for everybody. This is a fully functional Next.js/React app with a Convex database using email auth, and then connected to my university's OpenAI endpoint.\n\nThe app ingests a CSV file with all of the student applicants and their details, then ingests the PDFs of every student's application. Those PDFs contain things like letters of recommendation, their statement of intent, resumes, and transcripts. All the PDFs were then analyzed by GPT-5.2 Thinking—assessing things like grades in quantitative classes, a demonstrated interest in public service, and so on.\n\nEverybody on the committee loved it. I’d show screenshots, but they contain private data so I’ll just describe. As they reviewed each applicant assigned to them, reviewers saw a panel on the left-hand side showing the AI summary of the applicant, their statement of intent, their transcript, and their letters of recommendation. In the middle was a view of the actual PDF so that the full application of the student was there to read. On the right-hand side was our scoring mechanism, where we scored each candidate on a variety of dimensions and left comments. Not a design breakthrough, but tidy, efficient, and orders of magnitude more convenient than our previous approach.\n\n## Living Software\n\nThis was all really cool and it worked really well. But the especially fun part (and the part I wanted to comment on in this short post) was the page that I had created for our admissions decisions meeting. It had all the applicants listed where you could click on one and it would expand to show each of the reviewers' comments and scores. We used it together to go through all 123 applications and make admit, deny, or waitlist decisions on each one.\n\nBut here's the amazing part: this meeting review page was just something I designed quickly, thinking through the basics of what we needed. Then throughout the first hour of the meeting, as we came across user interface improvements we could make, _we just made them_.\n\n_“It would be really nice if we could see a count of each declared emphasis and how many we’ve admitted so far.”_\n\n“Great idea! Give me a minute.”\n\n _“Can we make this part float like a frozen row in Excel.”_\n\n“Sure!”\n\nEach time, I pulled up Claude Code to prompt the change, pushed to GitHub, Vercel rebuilt, we refreshed the page, and in a few short minutes the software was substantially better. We easily made a dozen changes to the app on the fly.\n\nAs a treat, I secretly had Claude Code make a celebration screen that appeared when we made the final decision. Digital confetti makes everything better.\n\nIt was all frankly amazing, and it shows where we are now—where software doesn't have to be a \"take it or leave it\" proposition. (This being how most users have been forced to experience software for decades.) Instead, the app was a living and adaptive thing that fit our needs in the moment. Such a model of software is mind-blowing when you think about it. \"One size fits all\" is an old paradigm now, and it's exciting to think about software that adapts and changes in a living way as you use it.\n\n**💬 Comment on this post**\n\n* * *\n\n## Anthropic Will Win Against DoD\n\nRegarding what I wrote yesterday, this piece is an expert overview of the laws at stake and why DoD’s supply chain risk designation for Anthropic is doomed to fail.\n\n> From the government's perspective, Claude does pose some concerning vendor reliability issues. But the specific actions Hegseth and Trump took have serious legal problems. The designation exceeds what the statute authorizes. The required findings don't hold up. And Hegseth's own public statements may have doomed the government's litigation posture before it even begins.\n\nPentagon’s Anthropic Designation Won’t Survive First Contact with Legal System | Lawfare\n\n**💬 Comment on this post**\n\n* * *\n\n## Anthropic doesn’t have to work for anyone, including the government\n\nI’ve seen enough takes on the Anthropic/DoD conflict since it all went down last week, and I’m surprised at how often this important principle is being left out of the conversation:\n\n**There are many freedoms enjoyed by Americans—and therefore American businesses. One of them is that we don’t have to work for the government if we choose not to.**\n\nIf I want to be employed by the government, I can choose from the range of options the government offers. If they want to hire me, I can work for Reclamation and help maintain dams, or for the Social Security Administration to process claims, or for the military to defend the United States. But once I’ve decided to work for Reclamation, it doesn’t mean the U.S. Government can also require me to work as a janitor, a Congressional aide, or a spy._Note that it doesn't matter if what the government wants is entirely legal._ If we can’t come to an agreement, they can fire me or I can quit.\n\nAnthropic chose to quit, and it’s nonsense that this is some sort of veto over the powers of a democratically elected government. You can argue that Anthropic _shouldn’t_ have the beliefs they have about AI and military action or government surveillance. You can make a moral claim that they should want to support the military. But if your argument is that Anthropic refusing to do so is some sort of corporatocracy, then you're ignoring essential rights.\n\nThe point isn’t that corporations should have power over government. The point is that people, and therefore their businesses, have power above government. That power appears in the voting booth, of course. But it also comes in all the other freedoms we enjoy because of the limits on Constitutionally designed government.\n\nThe Department of Defense offered Anthropic a job, which the company accepted. When the terms of employment changed, Anthropic quit to uphold their values. This is fundamentally how a free society with a limited government should operate.\n\n* * *\n\nFootnote: I get that there are laws entitling the government to force its citizens into certain behavior, but these are constrained by the first, fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments of the Constitution, as a start. All of these favor Anthropic’s right to refuse the government’s demands.\n\n**💬 Comment on this post**\n\n* * *\n\n**If someone forwarded you this email, you can subscribe****here**",
  "title": "Weekly Digest - Mar 1-7, 2026",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-08T11:00:03.456Z"
}