Humans can do stupid sh*t, too, sure. But wrong or not, human artefacts are a manifestation of their intent. Text an agent edited after being told to do this or that is only derivatively so. To be able to lean more comfortably into AI generation of artefacts, I want agents to treat everything a human has touched with much more respect. I.e. it should think twice before changing a line of text or…
In this article I continue the more critical line of thought I began in Mindless Drones . I hate AI for what it makes us become, yet still hold that there is no point in not using it — at least for engineering, or for anything whose output can be judged to be of the same or better quality, only more of it. But never just more of it: which, sadly, is clearly the case for most non-engineering uses…
Man’s collective mastery of nature, moreover—even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion—can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well-being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by…
Screenshot from a CMUX workspace; left hand side me speaking to the agent: “im not even sure what to look at” - to which it responds: “Let me just point at them directly - I’ll outline both titles in the live browser and screenshot”; right hand side, it, helpfully, highlighting the relevant element in the context of a browser window of the running application So this…
A new question which started bugging me recently is how, if I start allowing my AI to make more and more edits in my “second brain”-type notes archive, can I tell what’s what, i.e. what changes did the agent make and which ones did I make. For whole notes, the answer lies in the diffs. That is, either I store the next version and am that version’s author, or the agent does…
I keep thinking about this article I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform link and how it maps to my own experience with my own projects, one of which is a Todo app I make heavy, heavy daily use of and which has become quite important to me. I kind of have a sense of where it’s at, architecturally, and also a lot of experience working with web apps to…
Currently enjoying: Prompt Tuning . This started off at work with a requirement to give users an FAQ-type answer-bot able to answer simple questions, but our knowledge base consisted of completely unstructured data. I’ve never done this before, but it came together very quickly — by which I mean how to get some sense of control over the outcomes. What needs to be done is to formulate…
Little Sunday art project I’ve made here. I call it Quadra Pong . This is basically to demo why I like cmux so much (for all its current flaws …).
That is funny 😂.
Drawing on Karl Popper, David Deutsch, and a Rich Hickey quote about “guardrail programming,” this essay speaks about the tension between specs and code — particularly relevant now in the context of AI-generated software. The argument: tests are not equivalent to code, nor a substitute for it; their purpose is to reduce cognitive load by telling a story about the system’s…
Recently I found I had good success with what I dubbed text-driven development . I was always a little bit fond of the idea of behaviour-driven development with its core idea of specifying application behaviour in natural language, but still trying to nudge people towards gathering examples, in the interest of making things as little ambiguous as possible. Well, I think it’s a neat idea, but…
“All intelligence systems have this property of trying, acting, seeing the difference, changing, acting, seeing, sensing.” Just such a great clip.
Good that that debate has been put to rest, if there ever really was one. LLMs are here to stay, and I don’t know anyone who’s tried them who doesn’t use them for something — which means they think they can get a speedup on that particular something, whatever else they say about LLMs being stupid or “not real AGI” or “Schießmichtot ” (shoot-me-dead, a German expression meaning basically whatever…
Currently having a blast with LLMs and books . The low-hanging fruit is saving scanned pages in a folder and asking the LLM to look at each page and rename the files according to the page numbers, i.e. p.35.jpeg, p.36.jpeg and so forth. My plan was to get full books into my archival/retrieval app Rhizome . Turns out current LLMs are superb at transcribing full pages, but apparently there are…
As someone who is a fervent adherent to automated testing, I should have known better anyway, but for fairly complex vibecoded projects of mine, I found myself neglecting to add tests at some point. My intuition came from a place of accepting loss of control to some degree, leaning into it, one might say. After all, there are people advocating for exactly that; notoriously, Yegge . But also people…
For a couple of days already I have been ruminating over putting down an ontology for Tracker ( GitHub ), my personal issue tracker, somewhere, when it hit me all of a sudden, that I already have a perfect place for this: my Personalist app, about which I’ve written here . Tracker’s ontology is now hosted here , at personalist.org . The thing with software ontologies is that they shift…
I’ve decided to follow through with my conviction expressed here and in other places, “ to interact mostly with material and sources we have a direct relationship to ”. So I vibecoded my own blog here, and am back to good old fashioned Atom feeds. Ah, the youth . You just don’t see it when you are younger and just use whatever is shiny and fancy (which was: Substack at a particular…
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