It’s hard to make some simple shit that’s great
Writing software is weird now. Most engineers I know are using LLM-assisted coding tools in some capacity. We can debate the pros and cons of whether this practice is a good idea and the impact it’s going to have on us and the software create, but for now, it is a reality.
The hard parts remain
The parts of software engineering that have gone away are the straightforward parts. The parts where you scaffold a new CRUD endpoint, add a new database table, or write a mapper between an external and internal representation of some data. The LLM is usually done with about as fast and you can point it at the problem. So what does that leave?
It seems OpenAI’s naming scheme is now following Apple’s iPod naming scheme
Today, we’re launching three new models in the API: GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and GPT‑4.1 nano.
https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-1/
The OpenAI playground has been down for me all day with a Cloudflare error.
I am working on a macOS app, built in Swift and called Hudson. I’ve been inspired by the UX of Chorus and the simplicity of Ollamac. My goal is to build an app that allows me to quickly send prompts to API or local LLMs. I have most of the core functionality working. What’s next is to build something like Chorus’ ambient chat UI.
Having an LLM prompt available via a global hotkey across any model and where my conversation history is stored locally feels like it will address several of my needs. It’s not that a similar app doesn’t exist, it’s that I know I will want to tweak the UX exactly to my liking. With LLMs being so good at generating code, this is now a project that will take a week or two rather than a month or two.
It’s been a little while since I worked at all on Delta but I still have the itch to have access to the source of the tool that becomes my daily LLM driver. I recently setup Chorus which advertises itself as a tool to chat with multiple models at once. This isn’t really a main use case for me but besides not being open source, it’s basically everything I want.
- Clean interface
- Text streaming
- Use my own API keys
- Local model support (ollama, LM Studio)
- Broad model API support
- Mini-mode triggered by a hotkey
- Conversation history
- Image support
I don’t love that their cloud is involved with the service. I understand this is required for them to make money but I can’t see myself using a cloud product for this in the long term, especially for sending images of my system. I feel like there is too much potential for things to go wrong.
OpenAI shipped a new version of 4o that can generate images. I tried generating images in ChatGPT and it popped open a side chat and edit tool I hadn’t seen before. I got rate limited before I could try much.
I read this paper on using “chain of draft”, a more compressed version of chain of thought to achieve similar results to chain of thought reasoning. The main unlock with this approach is a reduction in inference latency and cost due to few tokens needed to achieve similar performance.
I mostly browse social media apps like LinkedIn and Bluesky on my phone. Recently, LinkedIn started surfacing a popup prompting me to download the app after a bit of scrolling the browser. This prompts me to close LinkedIn entirely. I’m curious if my behavior is unusual, or if they’re getting enough conversions to app downloads for it to be worth it. It’s certainly caused me to use LinkedIn less which I am guessing is not the point.
So much of the world is outside of what can be specified. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-and-i/id1719789201?i=1000696284548
I feel like .cursorrules are finally starting to snap into place for me.
I’ve made many messes in Cursor, but once I exhaust what is possible without structure, if I want to continue, I need to create a structure.
There’s nothing like a painful refactor to reinforce how and why you should define conventions for your codebase.
Usually, when diving into a new idea, I don’t love to think about this stuff, but it’s always time well spent.
With this in mind, my plan is to try and build rules and structure as I go rather than pushing my projects to the limit then needing to clean up.
Stumbled upon the react-three-fiber library today and now I am building a game where a lander can fly around a mini-solar system.