~/meetings / 2026-07-09
Meeting #14

> 2026-07-09

Casual, wide-ranging session. Whit shared that an HEB SXP/Digital team partner he'd met in-store submitted the Store Assistant CAPTCHA/Siri-shortcut idea to HEB's internal suggestion box, and Lawrence demoed his personal Christmas-lighting home-automation project — a spatial fixture database with local-network light control, running on his home server with Claude's help. The group revisited the old Cooking Connections recipe-history site, discussing why HEB had it taken down and feature ideas for a future version. After Lawrence left, Whit and Yohannes talked AI ethics, limitations, and vibe coding, then Yohannes gave an in-depth walkthrough of the Godot 2D action game he's building solo — combo timers, elemental status effects, and a composition-over-inheritance architecture.

3 attendees(Whit, Lawrence, Yohannes)
##topics covered
  1. 01.Store Assistant CAPTCHA workaround submitted to HEB's internal SXP suggestion box via a digital-team partner Whit met in-store — hoping HEB builds a Siri shortcut directly into their own API
  2. 02.Why HEB keeps its product/UPC API closed — competitor access to sales and inventory patterns, and HEB's own app relies on owning that user data
  3. 03.Cooking Connections recipe-history site revisited — why the original version got taken down (Shadow IT policy, unauthorized use of the Cooking Connections trademark/logo)
  4. 04.Feature ideas for a future Cooking Connections version: ratings/comments, and a 'feature this recipe' toggle for promo items with an auto-expiring window
  5. 05.Business intelligence angle — logging recipe/promo data over time to catch sales patterns and inventory-planning gaps (items selling out days before restock)
  6. 06.Production and supply-chain constraints on stocking — smaller stores get deprioritized in production allocation behind higher-volume stores
  7. 07.AI prompting technique: describing the goal and letting the model figure out the approach, rather than prescribing steps
  8. 08.AI's impact on the legal industry — people increasingly using AI instead of paying for attorney time
  9. 09.AI accessibility concerns — worry that expert-level advice (legal, etc.) becomes wealth-gated as AI erodes the affordable end of those professions
  10. 10.AI hallucination and inconsistency — noted instances of an AI assistant contradicting its own prior answers in the same conversation
  11. 11.Machine learning for robotics/prosthetics — training via reinforcement/trial-and-error (simulated repetition) rather than manually programmed movement
  12. 12.AI security as an open research problem — adversarial prompt injection and the difficulty of making a system that can't be tricked by the data it ingests
  13. 13.Vibe coding described and demoed — building a Bazite Linux + KDE Plasma desktop for a family member's PC by describing requirements to Claude and iterating without reading the underlying config
  14. 14.Debate on vibe coding — value for tedious/config-file work vs. risk of not understanding what was actually built
  15. 15.Bug bounties — how they work, typical payouts, and the appeal of finding real vulnerabilities in production systems as 'ethical hacking'
  16. 16.Lawrence's personal home-automation project: a companion app that models holiday lighting by physical placement on the house (roof planes, zones) instead of by wire order, with local-network control that bypasses the light manufacturer's cloud
  17. 17.Godot game architecture walkthrough — composition-over-inheritance, reusable node-based components (health, hitbox/hurtbox) shared across player/enemy/obstacle entities
  18. 18.Combo system design — timer window between attacks, resets if the player doesn't chain in time
  19. 19.Elemental status effect system — burn/freeze/shock as data-driven attack resources rather than hardcoded booleans, with a proposed refactor toward an enum-style status-effect model
  20. 20.Elemental 'form' transformation mechanic — switching elements leaves a residual effect that combos with the next form (e.g. lightning form into fire form causes an explosive reaction)
  21. 21.Discussion of Jonathan Blow's upcoming puzzle game, Order of the Sinking Star, as a reference for tightly composed, independent game systems
  22. 22.Design philosophy: keeping components decoupled and avoiding duplicate code, even though full decoupling (e.g. status effects) is hard in practice
##decisions & next steps
  • →Next meeting confirmed for 2026-07-16, same time (3 PM) and location
  • →Yohannes to bring an updated demo/progress video of his game to a future meeting
##notes
Attendees inferred from an unlabeled transcript and confirmed with Whit before writing.
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