I’ve long been a skeptic but I think goose may be one of the best LLM tools for coding.

I read Declan’s article on new technology adoption and the problems posed by models.

I haven’t had as much trouble as it seems Declan has in getting models to write vanilla js, but I share the concern about new technology/framework adoption and how we’ll solve this problem if models end up authoring most of the code that gets written.

Maybe projects like llms.txt¹ and similar can help by providing context to models on how to use a technology, but finding a way to do this is now a meaningful hurdle to using something new and the slop filled web seems to be making it harder to push forward the knowledge cutoff of the foundational models.

Two, random interesting learnings from Julia’s survey results:

The first

ctrl + l clears the terminal. I used to rely on cmd + k for this but when using the embedded terminal in Cursor, it opens a completion panel so I had been briefly stuck typing clear.

The second

history 0

which gets the all time shell command history. This is useful for history 0 | grep <query>. I use fzf and ctrl + r to search through the history typically but this is still nice to know. This had be an edge case I never quite resolved in my switch to zsh. I was used to getting full history in bash with history.

I’ve been doing a lot of vibe coding lately (though I only recently learned there was a term for this). My most recent projects include a Krea-like image editor. I am currently working on adding inpainting using a mask and prompt. I am also developing a tool that captures raw thoughts and processes them through an LLM, following some structure to summarize, deduplicate and consolidate. The general goal is to synthesize and organize ideas for a project, article, or just to help with understanding where my ideas are leading.

After more thinking than I really expected I would do about such a thing, I open-sourced Delta today. I still really like the concept of conversation branching for ideation, thought partnership and rabbit holing with LLMs. There are several folks who are working on closed-source, cloud-hosted versions of similar ideas. I don’t have the bandwidth to pursue the project further right now, but if I can empower someone with the time and interest, that would be a win.

I’ve been working on and off on a very simple, Krea-inspired image editor in the browser that can turn sketches into images using Flux Canny. I’ve tried a few separate times to prompt models (Sonnet, o1, r1) to add an undo-redo stack to my project. All have failed. It’s possible I am under specifying the ask but interesting to identify this as a particular area where models don’t seem to do very well.

I spent some time building an iOS app today, all with Cursor. I’ve never really written Swift before (well apparently I tried it a year ago). Since this was pre-Sonnet, I probably wasn’t doing a ton of code generation at the time. It will be interesting to see how far I can get.

I worked through a bit of setup to mount an R2 bucket to the local filesystem with rclone but haven’t taken the final step to modify my system security permissions yet.

Played through David Peter’s fun code puzzle: https://shark.fish/curiosity/

The agricultural revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at this disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.

• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

I spent some time looking for low latency, image-to-image APIs. I look around a fair bit and think I’ve settled on together.ai.

My main needs are very similar to Krea

• < 1 sec latency
• ability to specify the starting a prompt and image

I’m still validating this is the case but latency seems nearly there and I’m still trying to confirm how to make a start image work.