I want to tell you about a neat experience I had with AI-assisted programming this week. What’s unusual here is: the AI didn’t write a single line of my code. Instead, I used AI to build a custom debugger UI… which made it more fun for me to do the...
Imagine you bake a delicious peach pie over the weekend, and you offer a slice to your friend. They respond: “Wait, how is this different from every other peach pie that’s ever been baked? It seems really similar to another pie I had recently.”
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: when people proudly announce how many books they have read in the past 12 months. 10 books, 20 books, 57 books! Worry not—I know you don’t care, and besides, I have no idea how many books I read this year.
In my previous post, Malleable software in the age of LLMs, I laid out a theory for how LLMs might enable a new era of people creating their own personal software: I think it’s likely that soon all computer users will have the ability to develop...
It’s been a wild few weeks for large language models. OpenAI released GPT-4, which shows impressive gains on a variety of capabilities including coding. Microsoft Research released a paper showing how GPT-4 was able to produce quite sophisticated...
Recently lots of people have been trying very hard to make large language models like ChatGPT into better oracles—when we ask them questions, we want the perfect answer. As an example, in my last post, I explored some techniques for helping LLMs answer...
Disclaimer: I’m not an expert on LLMs, this is just a quick report on a Sunday hack project. Please let me know if I can improve my approach or I got something wrong! Imagine you got the smartest person in the world, locked them in a room without...
In a previous post I’ve written about why browser extensions are an amazing platform for customizing existing software. Because the browser DOM can be hacked in open-ended ways, it’s possible to build extensions that modify the behavior of an app in...
A brief note: This is a mirror of an email newsletter I sent out in November 2023, originally hosted here. I’m experimenting with cross-publishing to my personal site and through my email newsletter service, so that the long-term archive can be hosted...
It’s delightful to have the freedom to Bring Your Own Client (BYOC): to choose your favorite application to interact with some data. For example, I can program with Sublime Text, while my teammate uses vim, and we don’t need to fight to the death...
Oops, this is a draft article that accidentally got published to my RSS feed. Real version coming soon, but enjoy the outline for now! (and email me) if there are topics you want me to cover If you’re an early career software engineer considering...