That terrible presentation, the enshittification of OpenAi

Thinking about the GPT-5 presentation fiasco yesterday(friends don’t let friends use Dalle for charts) and the resulting, almost overwhelmingly negative reaction to the style of the speakers and the substance. I’m wondering if what we’re seeing is less a problem with LLMs having hit a ‘wall’ and more with the ’enshittification’ of OpenAI itself? They’ve never been particularly strong on the pure research side of things. Their main strength has always been productizing scientific breakthroughs in consumer products. Take the fundamental ‘attention is all you need’ paper and transformers architecture. Neither of those were OpenAI breakthroughs. Instead, their incredibly talented early team identified ways to capitalize on those important insights with their own breakthroughs in model training and scaling. ...

August 8, 2025 · 4 min · 666 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

What 50 First Dates can teach us about LLM memory

You’ve been there. You and your AI coding buddy are in the zone. It’s feeding you perfect snippets of code, it understands your weirdly named variables, it’s practically reading your mind. You’ve built half a dozen functions, and the project is humming along. Then you close the window. You come back an hour later, open a new chat, and ask it to build the next piece of the puzzle. The AI stares back at you with the digital equivalent of a blank expression. It has no idea what your project is, what a user_auth_service is, or why you keep muttering about the global_config.json. It has, for all intents and purposes, become incredibly dumb. ...

August 2, 2025 · 5 min · 899 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

The Factory Must Grow... And So Must Your Engineering Intuition

Factorio is more than a game; it’s a powerful tool for training your engineering intuition. Discover how it mirrors the challenges of software development and why you should be playing it.

April 21, 2025 · 9 min · 1728 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Rethinking AI in Education: Veritasium and Cognitive Science

My Notes after watching Derek Muller’s talk on AI in education. As someone working in EdTech, especially focusing on what we can do with LLMs, you hear it constantly: AI is going to “revolutionize” education. Personalized tutors, instant feedback, access like never before – the whole pitch. But I caught a talk recently by Derek Muller – you know, the Veritasium guy – and he offered this really grounded take that hit home for me. It’s making me rethink the hype and actually consider the cognitive science underneath it all. ...

April 15, 2025 · 4 min · 709 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

AI Plays: The Elevator Saga

Ever tried Elevator Saga? It’s that addictive JavaScript challenge where you control elevators to transport impatient virtual humans. Sure, you could spend hours crafting the perfect algorithm… or you could do what I did and let AI handle the heavy lifting. Tools Claude 3.5: Model I prefer for generating code and specifications. It’s like having a coding buddy who never sleeps. Whisper: For transcribing my ramblings into something resembling a coherent spec. LLM: A command-line tool to interact with AI models like Claude and generate code from my documentation and spec. My Lazy Developer Workflow I built a four-step AI pipeline that took me from “what even is an elevator API?” to passing the first four levels with minimal effort: ...

March 20, 2025 · 3 min · 583 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>