This week
- Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…...
Last week
- Agentic software development hypothesis This is the quality content you come here for, right? Agentic Software Development Hypothesis: Weak form: Any coding task for which a complete specification is available will become trivial. Strong form: Any coding task for which a...
- Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for static code analysis, focusing on checking and enforcing better modularity. Computational sensors for dependency checks were good at enforcing rules, but the rules were limited. Building a computational sensor for...
- In her recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, Birgitta Böckeler laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides and sensors that increase the probability of good agent outputs and enable self-correction before issues...
Two weeks ago
- No comment on this PR may mention the following topics: Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs The environmental impact of LLMs Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output Moral judgements about people who use LLMs We have asked the moderation team to help us...
- Increasingly humans delegate writing code to agents. Will there even be source code in the future? To wrestle with this question, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a...
About a month ago
- In the early 1960s, Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 computer systems. After it was done he penned his thoughts in the book The Mythical Man-Month which became one of the most influential books on software development after its publication in 1975. Reading...
- To continue our journey into quantum error correction, it is time to dive deeper into the theoretical foundations of the field. When learning about the surface code, you might have wondered: what exactly makes it work? Would it work as well on lattices other than the square...
about 2 months ago
- In our previous episode we wrote a merge sort implementation that runs a bit faster than the one in stdlibc++. The question then becomes, could it be made even faster. If you go through the relevant literature one potential improvement is to do a multiway merge. That is, instead...
- As of this PR, simdutf can be used without libc++ or libc++abi1. Simdutf was the final remaining libc++ dependency in libghostty-vt2. After updating Ghostty to use this new simdutf build, we were able to remove libc++ and libc++abi completely from our dependencies. Note that at...
- In an earlier blog post we found out that Pystd's simple sorting algorithm implementations were 5-10% slower than their stdlibc++ counterparts. The obvious follow up nerd snipe is to ask "can we make the Pystd implementation faster than stdlibc++?" For all tests below the data...
- To pursue our quantum error correction journey, we now need to dive deeper into the maths that underlie the main ideas of the field! Why \(k\) in the surface code is independent on the specific cellulation. We will see chain complexes, homological algebra, etc. All codes are...
- Creating a subset of Go that translates to C was never my end goal. I liked writing C code with Go, but without the standard library it felt pretty limited. So, the next logical step was to port Go's stdlib to C.Of course, this isn't something I could do all at once. I started...
2 months ago
- One of the most optimized algorithms in any standard library is sorting. It is used everywhere so it must be fast. Thousands upon thousands of developer hours have been sunk into inventing new algorithms and making sort implementations faster. Pystd has a different design...
- David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much. And sure, reviewers do catch bugs. But I think that framing dramatically...
3 months ago
- The shell sits in front of a lot of my work, but I mostly use it for the outcome: running unix commands and scripts, creating branches and making commits. Unlike when I'm writing code, I'm rarely thinking about how the shell itself works under the hood.So, to dig a bit deeper...
- BM25 models the odds a term would be observed in a relevant document vs the term occurring in an irrelevant......
- There was a famous Covid era chart that I always struggle to find, showing how hard it is to estimate an S curve while living through it. in the early days it seems that everything is exploding as an exponential and you always get hypey essays about how YOU, YOU DUMB DUMB, DONT...
- There are a lot of prime classes, such as left truncating primes, twin primes, mersenne primes, palindromic primes, emirp primes and so on. The Wikipedia page on primes lists many more. Recently I got to thinking (as one is wont to do) how difficult would it be to come up with a...
- SFQ: Simple, Stateless, Stochastic Fairness Roll the dice. Paul E. McKenney’s 1990 paper Stochastic Fairness Queuing contains one of my favorite little algorithms for distributed systems. Stochastic Fairness Queuing is a way to stochastically isolate workloads from different...
- Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to...
- A judgment list labels a document as relevant irrelevant for a query So you get a label say 1 5......
- How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it....
- Optimal Caverna Gameplay via Formal Methods You know what's better than gloating after winning a board game? Winning every possible board game. And you know what's better than that? Having a machine-checked proof that you win every possible board game. Caverna: The Cave Farmers...
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