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http://alejo.ch/

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I went back to a senior IC role after managing for 5 years and I think there are big differences. Yeah, some aspects have to do with leadership (regardless of whether or not you manage) and there's overlap, but... there are also huge differences. I wrote about one I experienced: https://alejo.ch/3g9

The approach we're taking to deal with this very real context rot is using a bunch of related techniques which we call transposing the agent loop: https://alejo.ch/3jt

In essence, we run many short agent loops, generating their prompts dynamically from structured data. Each loop advances the state in a small step towards the final goal.

AI juries 1 month ago

Oops, you're right, I put the wrong url (Android auto complete fail, oops, suggested a link and I assumed it was the right one). I meant to link to https://alejo.ch/3gk

I guess I'll hide this submission and do another one with the right url.

Sorry for that and thanks for pointing it out.

War on Raze 3 months ago

by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications

I don't think that's fair. If you're familiar with the programming language, his writing is fairly clear. If you're not, maybe you're just not in his target audience.

IOW, optimizing his text for people familiar with the language is probably a better choice than teaching the language, which would distract him from his goal.

She has a cool blog, I liked her articles!

How does she keep track of what row she's on, as she knits? I wonder if she'd be interested in specifying her patterns in a format my knitting software (visualization) could consume.

Anyhow, cool stuff!

Tree Calculus 3 months ago

This is indeed much better. I couldn't really follow the original, but this one made it click. Pretty cool!

That's exactly my understanding as well. This is, essentially, the LLM hallucinating user messages nested inside its outputs. FWIWI I've seen Gemini do this frequently (especially on long agent loops).

I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365

I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..

I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089

I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0

I'm currently working on my second ruana.

Looks pretty cool. I think it's great that you support light/dark mode. FWIWI, I'm also a huge fan of Excalidraw.

I wanted to ask you: is there's a reason you use a separate svg file for each (light/dark) mode?

A single SVG file using CSS can change it's own colors based on the user's preference. I have an example here: http://alejo.ch/3jj - the 3 plots should honor your mode (I put the generator code here: https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg)

Just figure I'd ask. If you have a good reason for using separate files, I'd love to hear it (because it probably would also apply to what I'm doing). :)

How long have you been tracking? Can you share an insight you've had from your data?

I've been weight lighting for ten years and initially tried to track things (down to how many reps I did of which exercise, with how much weight) and quickly came to the conclusion that is want worth it for me.

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

Even as an experienced developer who even owned CPAN modules and was very familiar with the Unix ways, Python was a no-brainer.

I mention this on light of the article's claim that this has to do with "a new generation of programmers brought up on … I don’t know, Microsoft systems, Visual Basic and Java". No. The new languages that appeared were just so much much better.

Project Gemini 8 months ago

Agree, that was exactly my reaction. What a terrible introduction, wasting many words on such platitudes as telling me that the idea isn't new but it isn't old fashioned either, or that they want to provide "some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already."

Wonder if you've tried spec driven development (as opposed to just prompting)?

I used to create requirement-oriented prompts and I felt something similar to what you describe. However, I've switched to generating parts of my source code from my specs in a semi-automated way and it made the process much more pleasant (and efficient, I think).

I wrote a bit about my current state here: https://alejo.ch/3hi - for my Duende project I generate 8821 lines of code (2940 of implementation, 5881 of tests) from 1553 lines in specifications.

I also started building my own, it's fun and you get far quickly.

I'm now experimenting with letting the agent generate its own source code from a specification (currently generating 9K lines of Python code (3K of implementation, 6K of tests) from 1.5K lines in specifications (https://alejo.ch/3hi).

I actually I'm somewhat torn on this.

In my blog, I do this in my poems, such as: https://alejo.ch/39l — I don't expect this to be controversial, makes sense for poems, right?

However, I'm also experimenting with rendering my prose with the same type of breaks, like https://alejo.ch/3gb or https://alejo.ch/3g9

My guess, reading this thread, is that most people would tell me that they find the breaks annoying and would rather read my prose without the breaks? Hmm. Would love to hear some feedback.