If you work in software, you’ve probably had the same weird couple of years I’ve had. You ask an LLM to fix a bug, it fixes the bug. You ask your coding agent to improve the architecture and performance of a complete app, and it does just that. Somewhere in the back of your head a voice asks: okay, but where does this actually go? At some point I got tired of getting my answer to that question…
If you’ve raised kids, you know: they don’t develop in a smooth upward line. For weeks nothing seems to change — and then overnight they’re walking, or talking in full sentences, or suddenly grasping abstract concepts. Developmental psychologists call these growth spurts : periods where the brain reorganizes itself and a whole new level of capability clicks into place. The in-between stretches…
One week ago I started TropicClaw : an analysis of the gaps between Claude Code and the new paradigm of OpenClaw. I wanted to understand what the secret sauce was, the combination of capabilities that made so many people go wild about it. Let me talk about the findings and how it inspire dme to make my own autonomous agent, by extending Claude Code. What is OpenClaw? OpenClaw is a free,…
TL;DR: I configured local log analytics reporting on my site with goaccess and pforret/goax , a bash wrapper script, to analyse regular, SEO and LLM bot traffic. I then also extended my fail2ban configuration to ban vulnerability scanning bots. toolstud.io I have a mildly popular website of web calculators and converters , that sees a decent amount of traffic per month. But just how much of that…
TL;DR: I’ve created a daily updated AI terminal coding agent leaderboard (i.e. Claude Code and its competition), ranking popularity based on monthly downloads. It lives on https://terminalai.forret.com/ . AI Terminal Coding Agents I have been a very enthusiastic user of Claude Code for about 6 months now. It is really getting better by the day. Its skills and insights are way beyond a junior…
TL;DR: “ Adding an autonomous AI agent to a late software project makes it later .” I. No Silver Bullet In his seminal 1975 text, The Mythical Man-Month , Frederick P. Brooks Jr. used a chilling metaphor to describe large-scale software projects. He compared them to werewolves: “ usually innocent and straightforward, but capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed…
In the preparation of my PromptParlour meetings, I wanted to get an idea of who in Belgian government is responsible for understanding and forecasting the (exponential) progress of Artificial Intelligence, and its impact on Belgian business, innovation and society. Who do Belgian/Flemish ministers call when they want an expert opinion on legislation or government intervention? This report was done…
I was driving home after work and I had a vague idea: what if I could represent a video with an image where the X axis was ‘time’ and the Y-axis was something that represented the images (it was this vague in my mind: “something with the colors”) in that video? Three hours of work later, spread out over the same evening, I got it working, assisted by A.I. every step of the way. The idea hit me…
TL;DR: I compared three AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI) for transcoding an existing audio-processing C program to Golang. The clear winner in this case was OpenAI’s Codex. See the results on github.com/pforret/leqm-nrt . LEQ(m) So I work in digital cinema technology. Part of my work involves processing and transforming audio and video for advertising. For instance, we care a…
TL;DR: I created a Jetbrains plugin in Kotlin, a language I don’t master, with Jetbrains’ own Junie AI Agent. It went quite easy, and now I have my first published plugin in the Jetbrains marketplace . Source code: toolstud-io/LlmBrains I’ve been using Claude Code for a while, because I like the way it integrates with PHPStorm, my main IDE. Claude Code also has a plugin for Jetbrains IDEs , that…
TL;DR: I have started using mkdox (which uses mkdocs, material and Docker) to create a static documentation site for every repository/project I’m working on . It’s easy, light and fast. It also invites me to document everything in Markdown, which is great for coding agents. Recently I realized: Projects ♥️ documentation . A lot of my repositories or projects have a folder /doc or /docs or…
TL;DR: I am starting a community with in-person events for discussing A.I. First one will happen in Oct/Nov 2025. Join the mailing list at Prompt Parlour if you are interested. Back in April 2023, I gave a speech on Generative A.I. at CommPass . ChatGPT had been launched some months before and had become the fastest product ever to reach 10 million users (in 40 days). We’re now 2,5 years later,…