Slopfluencer: posts on model training, evaluations, agents, NLP, and building products with generative AI.
Self-extensible software is here and its amazing Source Material This is an X article I published about self-extensible software. Original X article We probably have a little bit of time before the all consuming machine gods take over our machines and everything is simulated. So until then, traditional software is probably going to stick around... right? Right! Back in the dark ages, when code was…
Seeding Context in Personal Agent Source Material This is an X article I published about Suggested Context in Personal Agent. A new conversation with your agent is either a time for new beginnings, or an annoying arduous task of re-populating the agent's context. A situation I've encountered one too many times is needing to re-seed a conversation with context. Pi's built in forking feature is…
As I've been working on Personal Agent, one theory I've been operating under is that if I want an effective agent, it needs to be able to understand my intent. Agents are just blank slates with default settings. The magic happens when it has enough context to be able to make decisions with the same understanding and principles that align with how I think. Until models are actually able to…
Here are some more features in Personal Agent that you should steal to enhance your own agent harness. If you haven't seen Part 1 , check it out. Reply with Selection A small and somewhat insignificant feature, but very useful. Reply with selection allows you to highlight text from the transcript and inject it directly into the input box as quoted markdown. I use this feature a lot when I want to…
I've been developing an agent harness I'm calling Personal Agent (naming is still hard, okay?). Personal Agent is built on top of @badlogicgames 's excellent Pi coding agent. It's amazing what you can do with it and I've done quite a bit. PA is built on Electron and is 100% fully vibe coded. I've not looked at a single line of code. The important thing is that I wanted a tool that's similar to the…
FOBO & 5 Stages of Grief Hooo boy. The last few weeks since my last post have been crazy. The software development world has been collectively going through the 5-stages of grief (and still is) while the tectonic shift in the industry is currently underway. Some people at the start of their grief cycle are still rejecting the notion that their jobs will change or still angry about it. Others are…
Its 2026 and the coding vibes have definitely shifted As I wrote in Its Time To Let The Model Drive , the latest generation of models have hit some invisible line where they went from "meh, they're okay" to "holy crap they're really good". Over the break you could see this unfolding as bored devs off from work finally decided to check out what all the buzz was about and use these models to build…
There's a ridiculous theory floating around on places like Reddit and Twitter that greedy model companies are selectively dumbing down their models for some profit motive. Typically these conspiracy theories focus on models getting dumber over time, or during peak periods, and the way model companies are doing this is through "quantization". Nevermind the novelty factor of the models wears off…
Its Time To Let The Model Drive (for coding) Its 2025 and you're still writing code by hand?! Just a few months ago, I would not have trusted a LLM to generate tons of code. The quality of the models were good, but there was some intersection between model capability, my skill issues, and my engrained preference to control the code. Something changed very recently. With Opus-4.5, GPT-5.2, and…
There is so much alpha [for your profession] in being terminally online As a beginner When you're learning something new, it's so important to fully immerse yourself in whatever you can about that particular thing. Passive learning contributes a lot to becoming an expert and being terminally online is just increasing the amount of passive learning. There were numerous times in my life when I've…
Introduction During my time at Clockwise, I worked on Prism , a calendar management product that leverages AI to interpret user commands to execute actions on their calendar. I won't go too deep into my work at Clockwise, but I will explore the concept of using domain-specific languages with LLMs to achieve a goal. I stumbled across this concept when I found Grammar Prompting for Domain-Specific…
Moving onto a new chapter I left Noom on June 5th, 2023 after 5 years. I wanted to write about a few of the highlights of my time at Noom, why I'm leaving, and where I'll be going. I never thought Noom would take off the way it did. When I joined the company in 2018, it was small and recovering from its last round of layoffs. The company hadn't found product-market fit yet. We were scrappy and…
Introduction Obsidian is all the rage right now in the productivity tool market, especially with software engineers. Similar to my note-taking app Collate Notes which I built in 2016 it utilizes a Markdown file format with a YAML "front matter" section on top (a-la Jekyll's doc format ) to handle document metadata. This local-file first approach means that your data is durable, since it's just…
Introduction After a recent reorganization at my company, I'm taking this opportunity to start fresh with how I approach my relationship with my direct reports. I've found that my instructions to my reports are often handed down piecemeal, expectations aren't set, or I've just forgotten things I should be doing. That is not a great experience as a direct report. This document is really meant to…
A good product-minded engineer is worth their weight in gold. One critical skill these engineers have is the ability to look at the business and understand why they are asking you to build what you're building. Then figure out if what is asked of you will achieve the intended goals. Understanding the business First, if you don't understand how your business makes money (or intends on making…
Introduction During my time on the Growth team at Noom, I've had to learn a lot about online controlled experimentation. I've put together most of the public resources I've come across into this document. If you're brand new to online controlled experimentation, I high recommend starting with Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments : A Practical Guide to A/B Testing . Its a detailed guide on the…
Introduction I'm in the process of rebuilding this website using eleventy and I wanted to get fancy with this revamped site. One feature I wanted was a custom Open Graph social share image for each page on the site. If you're not familiar with Open Graph, check out this explanation . In a nutshell, when you share links to the site on social networks, it should an image to draw people into the…
The Grug Brained Manager this collection of thoughts on managing software development teams by a grug brained manager based on grug brained developer . grug brained manager not smart. somehow managed to convince boss that grug capable of managing others. grug barely capable to polish mouth stones. grug pretend grug know what do. grug talk to other grug managers and realize nobody know what to do.…
The good ole days Update (2023-01-21): I've migrated this blog to eleventy and use its built in RSS/Atom feed generator now. Back when I was a young lad, RSS feeds were the way to stay up to date on news, blogs, and other content. You'd find sites you liked, then add their content to your RSS feed reader and then you'd be able to go to a single place to view all your news and content. You'd be…
Note taking hell Update(Feb 7, 2023): I've written down how I'm currently using Obsidian I have a hard time sticking with a note taking system. I think at this point I've tested all the major note taking tools: Evernote OneNote Simple note Turtl Google keep Standard Notes Workflowy Bear todo.txt plain text markdown files Omni notes Apple Notes Obsidian Notion Roam Research Athens Resarch Coda…
Striving for dispassionateness Not influenced by strong feelings or emotions; impartial Definition As I continue on my leadership journey managing the Growth engineering team at Noom, one aspect of my personality I've been trying to work on is detachment. I have a mantra "Strive for dispassionateness" that I plastered on top of my personal goals to remind me to continue to detach myself from…
I've used iTerm 2 for a few years now but came to the realization that I don't actually use any of its features. Mac's built in terminal is more than enough for my needs. See ya later iTerm 2 and thanks for being rock solid all these years.
Oh my dearest linter, adding squiggly lines under my mistake. Gently teaching me why I'm wrong. How do I fix it? Some help would be nice. You autocorrected it! Thank you twice! The documentation is right at hand: "you idiot, don't add an ampersand!" But I think you might be wrong, my dear linter this is an edge case! Well then I'll just have to add a little comment to disable that tiny check on…
Finally got my dotfiles set up. Now I can have a consistent environment across both Mac and Linux. Really only using it for managing initial environment setup scripts and to manage my terminal environment. Will continue to evolve it as I need to but glad to have built out the basic scaffolding.
Over the course of 2020 and 2021 I've become increasingly sedentary with lockdown and full remote work. Having gone from commuting into the office 1-2 times a week down to zero meant I had less opportunity to walk. Along with the birth of my son and having less time and energy to exercise I needed to find a way to integrate more walking into my routine. If I could figure out how to exercise while…
I've dabbled in investing in the past but over the last two years I've really gotten involved heavily with managing my portfolio. I'm still a complete amateur but I did pick up some very valuable lessons: I've started to attach probabilities to events way more than I used to. This has the benefit of helping me think about potential events more objectively. There is a zen to riding the highs and…
Bash tools are super powerful once you get a hang of using it. This whole blog is pretty much a bunch of scripts and Pandoc . Its pretty cool what you can build once you get over the learning curve. I'm a few years into my career now and I've only really used shell scripts when working with CI. I've never felt totally comfortable with it, maybe it's because it feels like casting spells by uttering…
Changes in 2018 Last year I left Penguin Random House in April to work at Noom. I’m normally a utility reader and don’t do much reading for entertainment. During my entire 2.5 years at Penguin Random House, I think read at most a handful of books. The culture at Noom really embraces reading and encourages it, so this year I got some recommendations from my colleagues and began reading. This list…
I've been on quite the fitness journey these last few months. Here's my story. How it started I didn’t grow up athletic. I didn’t play any sports, exercise, or spend much time outdoors as a kid. I enjoyed indoor activities like video games, legos and computers. When I got into my 20s, I got into cycling and rode with friends for fun and as a way to commute to work. It was hobby first with…
This article was originally posted on medium . VS Code is a great editor platform. I tried my hand at creating an extension and although the documentation is fairly complete and thorough. I still ran into some issues. I’m documenting them here for other extension authors. VS Code functionality takes the form of commands in the command palette. Promises If you’re used to the ES6 Promise style then…
Imagine your job is to run a website. You build it, get it running, promote it and people start using it. Things are going well! After this initial rush you settle down into maintenance and growth mode. There is no more mad scramble to add new features or scale the site. Users like your content and slowly tell their friends. Things are growing, albeit slowly. First you add some site analytics…
I started working on Collate in December of 2016. I was dissatisfied with the note taking apps on the market and wanted a tool that would work for my needs. I had been toying with the idea and finally started writing code over the Christmas holiday. I had a basic prototype built with Electron, bootstrap and jQuery by February, then rebuilt it with Electron, Vue.js and Bulma from scratch because…
I dropped out of college at twenty. The next few years were spent at various jobs until I ended up as a legal assistant at a law firm. The firm was filled with fax machines, typewriters, and massive paper files. What was the norm in 1988 was still the norm in the legal industry at the time. It was a slow moving beast, mired in paper and yesterday’s technology. I wanted to work with modern…