nicwolff (u/nicwolff)

nicwolff commented on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/floverfelt

nicwolff · 5 days ago

> I’ve often heard, with decent reason, an LLM compared to a junior colleague.

No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!

nicwolff commented on My experience creating software with LLM coding agents – Part 2 (Tips) efitz-thoughts.blogspot.c... · Posted by u/efitz

theptip · 10 days ago

> Finally it occurred to me to put context where it was needed - directly in the test files.

Probably CLAUDE.md is a better place?

> Too much context

Claude’s Sub-agents[1] seems to be a promising way of getting around this, though I haven’t had time to play with the feature too much. Eg when you need to take a context-busting action like debugging dependencies, instead spin up a new agent to read the output and summarize. Then your top-level context doesn’t get polluted.

[1]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents

nicwolff · 10 days ago

I've added a subagent to read the "memory_bank" files for project context after being told the task at hand, and summarize only the pertinent parts for the main agent. This is working well to keep the context focused.

https://gist.github.com/nicwolff/273d67eb1362a2b1af42e822f6c...

nicwolff commented on Developing our position on AI recurse.com/blog/191-deve... · Posted by u/jakelazaroff

ryandrake · a month ago

Just one person's opinion: I can't get into the mode of programming where you "chat" with something and have it build the code. By the time I have visualized in my head and articulated into English what I want to build and the data structures and algorithms I need, I might as well just type the code in myself. That's the only value I've found from AI: It's a great autocomplete as you're typing.

To me, programming is a solo activity. "Chatting" with someone or something as I do it is just a distraction.

nicwolff · a month ago

I'm not chatting with the LLM – I'm giving one LLM in "orchestrator mode" a detailed description of my required change, plus a ton of "memory bank" context about the architecture of the app, the APIs it calls, our coding standards, &c. Then it uses other LLMs in "architect mode" or "ask mode" to break out the task into subtasks and assigns them to still other LLMs in "code mode" and "debug mode".

When they're all done I review the output and either clean it up a little and open a PR, or throw it away and tune my initial prompt and the memory bank and start over. They're just code-generating machines, not real programmers that it's worth iterating with – for one thing, they won't learn anything that way.

nicwolff commented on Flux is a high-performance, zero-copy message transport library for Rust github.com/bugthesystem/F... · Posted by u/ziyasal

nicwolff · a month ago

Why can't AIs make ASCII art boxes line up?

    ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
    │                        Flux Architecture                       │
    ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
    │                                                               │
    │  ┌─────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐      │
    │  │  Producer   │    │  Producer   │    │  Producer   │      │
    │  │   (P1)      │    │   (P2)      │    │   (P3)      │      │
    │  └─────┬───────┘    └─────┬───────┘    └─────┬───────┘      │
    │        │                  │                  │               │
    │        └──────────────────┼──────────────────┘               │
    │                           │                                  │
    │                    ┌──────▼──────┐                           │
    │                    │ Ring Buffer │  ← Lock-free, zero-copy   │
    │                    │ (1M slots)  │     cache-line aligned    │
    │                    └──────┬──────┘                           │
    │                           │                                  │
    │        ┌──────────────────┼──────────────────┐               │
    │        │                  │                  │               │
    │  ┌─────▼──────┐    ┌─────▼──────┐    ┌─────▼──────┐        │
    │  │  Consumer  │    │  Consumer  │    │  Consumer  │        │
    │  │   (C1)     │    │   (C2)     │    │   (C3)     │        │
    │  └────────────┘    └────────────┘    └────────────┘        │
    │                                                               │
    │  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   │
    │  │              Performance Optimizations                 │   │
    │  │  • SIMD (NEON/AVX2) data copy                        │   │
    │  │  • Hardware CRC32 (ARM/x86)                           │   │
    │  │  • NUMA-aware allocation (Linux)                      │   │
    │  │  • Huge pages + io_uring (Linux)                      │   │
    │  │  • Cache-line padding + prefetching                   │   │
    │  │  • Batch processing (8K-128K slots)                   │   │
    │  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘   │
    │                                                               │
    └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

nicwolff commented on Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding reuters.com/technology/mi... · Posted by u/spenvo

bitwize · 2 months ago

Who is this person and why is she attempting to skinwalk the name of a really cool computer company (creators of the Connection Machine)?

nicwolff · a month ago

I hope Sheryl and Danny are getting compensated somehow...

nicwolff commented on Why I'm skeptical of Ground News sjodle.com/posts/2024/01/... · Posted by u/blowenopdestoep

nicwolff · 2 months ago

That first stacked bar chart appears to have "left" and "right" mixed up, if the analysis just below it is correct. Not confidence-inspiring, and hasn't been corrected in 18 months since the post was published...

nicwolff commented on uv: The Fast Python Package Manager kashw1n.com/blog/uv/... · Posted by u/kashw1n

nicwolff · 2 months ago

Dated tomorrow, no new information, blog has three posts total – AI slop?

nicwolff commented on Binary Wordle wordle.chengeric.com/... · Posted by u/eh8

nicwolff · 3 months ago

I, uh, got it in two. Is it creepy that the answer is my ZIP code?

nicwolff commented on Cap: Lightweight, modern open-source CAPTCHA alternative using proof-of-work capjs.js.org/... · Posted by u/tiagorangel

nicwolff · 3 months ago

Did no-one click through to the technical white paper?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374638786_Proof-of-...

"Proof-of-Work CAPTCHA with password cracking functionality"

The "work" is "to use the distributed power of webusers’ computers" to "obtain suspects’ passwords in order to access encrypted evidence" and "support law enforcement activities".

Funny how that isn't mentioned anywhere in the linked site.