Recent content in Writing on Elliot Massen
I built a mystery game powered by AI , where multiple agents play the suspects (and your ghostly sidekick) with each holding private knowledge, lying under questioning, and staying consistent across multiple turns without leaking the solution. 
 Based on the board game Cluedo, today I’m releasing the alpha version! Play a game or two, and let me know your thoughts. There’s still a…
Recently I’ve been spending more time in Claude Code on Desktop than in the CLI. 
 I’m finding that I can use the Desktop GUI to better manage multiple parallel work items, and then dive in with VS Code and/or Claude Code CLI for more surgical changes. I’ve never been a terminal poweruser or anything, so for me I find the Desktop GUI very useful for its status indicators, the…
If you want to run multiple AI coding agents in parallel, Git Worktrees are a useful trick. They allow you to spin up isolated branches of a repository in separate directories without the overhead of stashing, rebasing, or juggling multiple clones. 
 However, out of the box worktrees have a point of friction: every new worktree needs the same setup of non-commited files or directories, such as…
Things move quickly in the AI space, and I’ve found my ability to write up my thoughts on this site hasn’t really kept up. So I’m going to start thinking out loud. 
 I believe that writing, or more broadly communication, is an important skill regardless of your field or industry. In a period of great change it’s doubly so. In my opinion, if you can’t communicate…
Agent UX tends to signpost model limitations and is heavily shaped by technical constraints. 
 We stream responses token by token because inference can be slow. We accept unpredictability because varying batch size introduces nondeterminism. Latency and stochasticity shape the experience in quite significant ways. 
 But now inference hardware is improving , and research is pushing toward…
The following is the current list of AI tools I use each day, both at work and personally. 
 I’ll hope to update this as time goes on. 
 
 Claude Code : For making fixes across a large codebase (a little like an AI-powered find-replace). I have also found it useful for technical writing. 
 Replit : The Replit Agent is great for prototyping, but becomes a bit destructive once…
It seems that DeepSeek can’t be mentioned without referring to it being developed by a Chinese team 🤔 
 This rarely applies to the efforts of US or European teams however! How often do you hear “American ChatGPT” or “GPT-4o from the United States”? The answer is rarely, only if it adds neccessary context. 
 Yet DeepSeek is almost always framed in generalised…
New LLM features like OpenAI’s Tools and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol offer some quick wins for interfacing with external systems. 
 However, when used as the only means of interfacing, they can also introduce a major challenge: lack of ultimate control. 
 When an LLM is put in control of the conversational flow, the result is unpredictability. It introduces the unnecessary…
I had a blast at Unparsed this week ✨️ 
 There were so many great talks on both the design and dev tracks, as well as some really interesting projects coming out of the hackathon. If I had to pick just one highlight though, it was learning more about Small Language Models 🤖 
 As ever it’s a super exciting time to be working in the Conversational AI space and it was great to get to…
One simple example of bias in large language models is to ask a question like “Who was President in 2003?” 
 Leading models will provide an answer that’s only relevant to the USA, without seeking a clarification nor caveating the answer. The answers give no mention to the possibility that I may be asking about the President of Ireland or Nigeria, for example. The model is…
I’ve been continuing to read a lot about generative AI and large language models. Each day seems to bring new announcements. This remains exciting, and gives a LOT of food for thought. 
 Yet beyond the excitement, I’m keen to seek out how this technology is being used, and its challenges. This month I wanted to share articles that focus on the practicalities of utilising LLMs.…
July 2023 saw the announcement of three new developments in large language models: Meta’s Llama 2 , Anthropic’s Claude 2 , and StackOverflow’s OverflowAI . 
 In this post, I’ll provide a very brief summary of each model. While it’s promising to see the space continue to expand beyond OpenAI’s offerings, many questions still exist surrounding training data…
This month’s bookmarks span the topics of AI, cybernetics, logging & resilience. 
 Panic: A serendipity engine 
 I’ve recently been starting to familarise myself with the field of cybernetics, and this led me to a great piece of interactive art, called Panic . It was shown at the Australian Cybernetic exhibitation in late 2022. Panic took text input from the viewer, and ran it…
December came and went before I knew it! And now here we are in 2023 all of a sudden. 
 Thankfully I still found some time to read some interesting articles. Here’s a few bookmarks from December: 
 Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming 
 “Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming” by Christoffer Ekerot highlights the importance of smaller, constrained…
This article was originally published on 24 Days in December . 

 In this post we’ll walk through how to version a PHP API by using Composer. It presumes some general familiarity with the PHP language (7.0+), the Composer dependency manager, and Git. This post will cover what versioning an API means, what a PHP API could look like, the basics of contemporary versioning practices, and…
I recently find myself spending a lot more time reading technical blogs, and coming across many insightful and interesting posts. 
 I tend to bookmark these so that I can revisit them later. I thought it could also be worth sharing a subset of them here every now and then. 
 Here’s a few bookmarks from November: 
 The Perfect Commit 
 “The Perfect Commit” by Simon…
Preface 
 This year I’m determined to get back into reading. I used to read a lot when I was younger and, unfortunately, it’s a habit that I’ve lost over the years. 
 At the start of the year I decided that I’d like to read at least three books this year, and decided to track my progress on Goodreads. I’ve had more free time since finishing uni, so I managed…
I thought it would be worth posting a short update on the status of this blog as I haven’t written in some time. 
 To be honest, I feel like I haven’t had too much interesting to say. In my early monthly updates, I felt as though I was tracking a journey. I enjoyed documenting the ups and downs and am glad to have them to look back on. I feel as though I’m in a slightly…
Last week, a pull request was opened on the Lerna repository . The request amended the license to prohibit use by sixteen entities who are known to collaborate with ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and was merged. 
 In this post I’d like to explore and hopefully start a discussion about the questions this raises about Open Source software (OSS) and highlight issues within the tech…
After the longest break from blogging since I started in 2016, I’m back! The past few months have been different and difficult. Since I last wrote I took on a part-time job, taught on a Code First: Girls course, got accepted for an undergraduate research position, HackSussex won a student award and… I left the part-time job. Honestly, it’s been a difficult start to the year 🤷🏻♂️ 
 The key…
2018 has begun! 🎉 I know it sounds cliché but this year does bring a lot of changes for me. The biggest one is that I’ve left TRIM-IT. 
 It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but it’s the only sensible option. I’ve really enjoyed working on TRIM-IT over the past two years, I’ve had brilliant opportunities that I otherwise would have never had - it really pushed me…
Even though 2017 is now dead and gone, I still want to do this blog justice and finish up my entries for the year. I’m not always great at making sure I write one post a month, so this will be a catch up of the final two months of 2017. The biggest thing that happened has to be: HackSussex! 
 HackSussex is a hackathon I organised with Pete and Sam at our uni (University of Sussex). It was the…
In the last two months I started back at uni for my second year and won first place at a hackathon! 
 Nearer the end of September, TRIM-IT held a focus group with barbers about a new feature we’re looking into. At this point I won’t delve into the feature itself as its still in the works and open to change. It was really good to sit down with barbers and hear about their experience. Its too…
In the last month before my next year at University: I moved into a flat with my girlfriend, released the first major update to the TRIM-IT app and dabbled with websites on a peer-to-peer browser! 
 One of the better things that happened in August, was that the new iOS update to the TRIM-IT user app went out! The update contains two key changes: 1. you can now login & signup with just your…
July sees the second half of the year! I’ve received my grades back from first year, had my first go at public speaking and built & launched my first ever progressive web app ! 
 So after finishing the first year of my bachelors in June, I got my grades back! I’m really happy with how I did – I’ve secured a first, which was my goal. I know my grades don’t count until second year but I still…
Another double month post this time, in May and June I had my end of year exams, rolled out a new product and took a short trip to Manchester. 
 The one word I would use to describe May is: stressful . There was so much going on. University was wrapping up, so this meant deadlines, deadlines, exams and deadlines. The scariest of all these was my Neuroscience and Behaviour exam… yes I actually…
I can’t believe it’s already the end of April, 2017 is moving so quickly! 
 This month has been lovely, not only because the weather is picking up (finally)! Since the last time I wrote, I went to an interesting talk in Old Street by Sam Altman from YCombinator. I found the talk itself alright, although it didn’t really break much new ground. I can’t help but think of Peter Thiel when I think…
This monthly thing isn’t really working out so well. Despite not posting about the past three months, here we go. 
 The biggest thing that has happened since the new year is by far the TRIM-IT launch! We opened up our services to Lambeth and since then also Lewisham. I can’t explain how brilliant and strange it is to see that we are facilitating trims every day. There’s always going to be more…
So I missed my October post, to be honest I expected to miss a post here or there. I’m not perfect! Anyway October and November have been so, so busy for me. So busy that I can barely recall much of what has happened besides a few key things. This post is being written late too, I’m not gonna hang around to edit this. 
 I’ve begun getting so grades back from uni, the first two were above 90% –…
A year ago this month marks when I moved into my halls at University. I can’t quite believe that a whole year has already passed, I can still sort of remember the excitement I had on that day. I have to say that I feel a completely different person to the one I started uni as a year ago. 
 The last few weeks me and Pete have been applying the finishing touches to the TRIM-IT beta app. There…
As I write I’m on the 29 bus back to Brighton. This month I’ve been back at Tomango covering my old role there, therefore I’ve been back on these bus routes again. I don’t think I’ve missed these bus journeys. Right now I’m heading back to Brighton because, as of the last week, I’m now living there again for my next year at university. I still haven’t properly unpacked. 
 This month has been…
So it’s 2AM and I’ve decided I have to start blogging at least monthly. Here goes. 
 This year so much has been going on and will continue to, I feel like it’d be a waste if I did not at least try to write about it. The aim here is to provide a little insight into what I’m up to, maybe share my findings along the way and ultimately produce something that is somewhat interesting to read.
I was an average swimmer when I was 12 years old. 
 On Friday evening I entered a swimming pool, with the natural intention to swim. As someone whose interests lie mainly with technology, one thing that I have always prided myself on is that I am an average swimmer. Except that I was an average swimmer when I was 12 years old. I am now 19. 
 I have to admit in those seven years I have been…
Since publishing this article, I worked as a full-time web developer for two years before I changed my mind and attended university. I’ve decided to keep this article published to document my thoughts at the time. 

 I am eighteen years old and decided not to go to university. 
 A fork in the road for college students is whether to continue on in education to university or to…
As I mentioned in my previous post, I seem to have managed to become enthusiastic about the web again. I’m still yet to figure what the gains are of even writing this blog, but whatever… I’m writing it. 
 In this post I’d like to outline some things that seem to have made web design (seem) easier than they (seemed) when I first tried getting into it all a few years…
Recently I have found a renewed interest in web design and development. 
 I am working on a personal project to help keep myself organised. In college I am also doing a project which counts towards my final grade. I figured to get the best possible mark I should get involved in it all again. 
 Once again I have made some minor design tweaks. I took away the aweful background image, I…
Hello again, might as well keep some what of a log on what I’m doing to the website, even if it’s just for personal reference, as it doesn’t have much other use. 
 I removed the Facebook and Twitter features as they seemed to slow the website down a lot, I’d like to look into changing that somehow. I also decided to remove my email address, as I am receiving much spam.
Just checking back in. 
 Recently I have restarted work on a website I am working on for a friend’s clothing company. I’ve come back at it with a fresher, minimalistic design in mind. I’m hoping to have the basics of the website completed very soon and then start to work with my friend on the content and tweeking some aspects of the site for his needs.
As you can see the design has changed to a much better one, in my opinion. 
 I’ve been working on using CSS3 to make my website designs look better over the past few days and it’s worked out pretty well. Today I have started work on a new project of mine, I wont say much about it just yet, but it’s going to be refreshing to work on something new.
Blog post uno!! I’ll be interested to see if I keep up with this, I don’t usually. However I have more hope for this. 
 I’m using a friend’s CMS (Nexedit) and it is very nice and simple. I thought I might gel with it better than I do most blogging platforms. We’ll have to see how it works for maintaining a blog. I may try and see if I can make the site work with…