AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back

Recent advances in LLMs have demonstrated increasingly powerful reasoning capabilities, primarily through eliciting chain-of-thought outputs from models. While these methods have proven effective, they rely on discrete, tokenized representations of reasoning steps. A recent research paper from Meta introduces a novel approach that steps away from...

I lived in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle for several years. Eastlake, by its name, sits on the east side of Lake Union. As a runner, I spent many mornings running along the lake, passing by the South Lake Union Streetcar. Each time I ran past the streetcar, what consistently struck me as odd was that the streetcars were almost always...

I haven’t been writing much recently (sound of crickets coming from this year’s blog archive), but this is such an OnBrand™ post that I couldn’t not write it. At work, I’ve been shifting into more of a TL role, and as such I’ve been tracking an increasingly large number of streams of information. We use JIRA for bug/feature level work, but a lot...

I’ve been in a mode of trying lots of new AI tools for the past year or two, and feel like it’s useful to take an occasional snapshot of the “state of things I use”, as I expect this to continue to change pretty rapidly. Claude 3.5 Sonnet (via API Console or LLM): I currently find Claude 3.5 Sonnet to be the most delightful / insightful /...

I’ve recently been contemplating a recurring pattern that I’ve observed in several teams I’ve worked on – the ‘Load-Bearing Script.’ The outline of this pattern goes like this: A team member writes a portion of a system as a shell script for a quick prototype. That shell script, initially quite simple, grows in complexity over time. Eventually,...