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ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

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Code review as human alignment, in the era of LLMs

I've recently been doing a lot of both submitting and reviewing pull requests to PyTorch that were authored with substantial LLM assistance. This is a big difference from earlier this year, where it was clear LLMs worked well for greenfield projects but the code was too hopelessly sloppy for a production codebase. Here are my [ ]

Learning to love mesh-oriented sharding

Famously, PyTorch and JAX don't agree on how shardings should be represented: PyTorch takes a mesh-dim oriented view, where for each dimension in your device mesh, you specify what sharding should be applied; JAX takes a tensor-dim oriented view, where for each dimension on your tensor, you say which mesh dimensions (potentially multiple!) shard it. [ ]

Draw high dimensional tensors as a matrix of matrices

I have recently needed to draw the contents of high-dimensional (e.g., 4D and up) tensors where it is important to ensure that is clear how to identify each of the dimensions in the representation. Common strategies I've seen people do in this situation include printing a giant list 2D slices (what the default PyTorch printer [ ]

So you want to control flow in PT2

With contributions from Richard Zou. PT2’s dominant internal representation, FX graphs, do not directly support control flow (if statements, while loops): they only represent straight-line basic blocks. Most of our graph capture mechanisms are tracing based (fx.symbolic_trace, make_fx, Dynamo), which means that we expect to be able to linearize all conditionals we encounter into a [ ]

The Parallelism Mesh Zoo

When training large scale LLMs, there is a large assortment of parallelization strategies which you can employ to scale your training runs to work on more GPUs. There are already a number of good resources for understanding how to parallelize your models: I particularly recommend How To Scale Your Model and The Ultra-Scale Playbook. The [ ]

You could have invented CuTe hierarchical layout (but maybe not the rest of it?)

CuTe is a C++ library that aims to make dealing with complicated indexing easier. A key part of how it does this is by defining a Layout type, which specifies how to map from logical coordinates to physical locations (CuTe likes to say layouts are 'functions from integers to integers.') In fact, CuTe layouts are [ ]

State of torch.compile for training (August 2025)

The purpose of this post is to sum up, in one place, the state of torch.compile for training as of August 2025. Nothing in here isn't something you might not already know about from elsewhere on the Internet, but we rarely put everything together in one place. The target audience for this document are teams [ ]

Vibe coding case study: ScubaDuck

A lot of strong engineers that I know haven't really taken a serious look at AI coding; they've used LLMs to ask questions or write simple scripts and appreciate that it is a useful tool, but haven't actually tried building a nontrivial application entirely from scratch in vibe coding style (here, I use the term [ ]

Why you should maintain a personal LLM coding benchmark

Do you use an LLM for coding? Do you maintain a personal benchmark based on problems you have posed the LLM? The purpose of this blog post is to convince you should do this: that you can do so with marginal effort on top of your day-to-day vibe coding and that you will get both [ ]

New Years resolutions for PyTorch in 2025

In my previous two posts 'Ways to use torch.compile' and 'Ways to use torch.export', I often said that PyTorch would be good for a use case, but there might be some downsides. Some of the downsides are foundational and difficult to remove. But some... just seem like a little something is missing from PyTorch. In [ ]