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Coding agents and deep learning

Andy sent me this post about how Carl Kolon uses and thinks about coding agents. The post is pretty interesting, and when I went to reply to Andy I realized that at seven paragraphs perhaps the reply is better suited to here than a signal message. Also, because that is more friendly than replying to messages with links to your blog to drive traffic and the adoration of your readers? This is of course a forward looking statement for me, I do indeed hope one day to have a reader here but baby steps. Similarly to Carl I certainly started using LLMs as "smarter search", cutting and pasting queries into claude.ai, and waiting patiently for an answer. I think this should make Google very worried, especially as its so good at finding answers. The improved performance over a "raw Google" is largely because of persistence -- the LLM doesn't perform  single search, it will keep searching until it finds the answer. The decreasing levels of supervision Carl talks about is what I am talking about when I talk about prompts and planning, which has been my favourite LLM topic for the last few weeks. Increasingly I am writing a plan for…

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I have a new respect for gitlab admins

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  • Post category:gitlab

It is hard to transition from one gitlab machine to another, especially if you have a stupidly large OCI registry using the new metadata database. If you happen to need to dump the metadata postgresql database from an omnibus container, may I comment this pattern to you: $ docker exec -u registry -it gitlab /bin/bash $ cd /var/opt/gitlab/postgresql/ $ pg_dump -U registry -h /var/opt/gitlab/postgresql registry > registry.sql That's an hour of my life I'm never getting back right there.

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I think I just experienced my first hallucinated security vulnerability

Yesterday my time I experienced what I think was my first LLM hallucinating a responsible security disclosure. Honestly it was no curl situation, but I think it was still interesting. The bug is on launchpad.net if you're interested in taking a look. I think in total I spent a couple of hours on the whole thing, with the hardest bit being trying to understand what the author was claiming. Fundamentally they had conflated being able to change the state of memory and other hardware inside their virtual machine with changing the state of those things for the hypervisor. They did not seem to understand that the video memory of the guest was not the video memory of the host for example. That said, I tried to be nice and I hope my replies were perhaps a little useful to them.

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Ancient code, mental health, and AI tooling

In the early 2000s I was in my mid 20s, working a dead end job as a Windows programmer, and had two very young kids who were not super good at sleeping. I had worked as what I would now call a systems programmer for the Australian patents and trade marks office for a few years in the late 1990s doing low level image manipulation code -- we had a for the time quite impressive database of scanned images of patents and trademarks, and sometimes we need to do things like turn them into PDFs or import a weird made up image format from the Japanese patents office. So when you combined those things -- previous experience in a field I found interesting, a job I did not currently find interesting, and a lot of spare time very early in the morning because the kids wouldn't sleep but my wife really did need a rest -- you end up with a Michael who spent a lot of time writing image manipulation code on his own time. Even back then I was pretty into Open Source, so I released what I think was probably the first Open Source PDF generation library,…

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Talking to people about AI is hard

I am not entirely sure what makes the AI debate so polarizing, although I suspect it has something to do with feeling threatened by a changing landscape. What I can say with certainty is that I find having a nuanced conversation about AI with people often difficult. It seems to me that people fall into two polar opposite camps — those who thing AI is completely great and that we should fire all the programmers and creatives; and those who think that AI is all bad and we should go backwards in time to a place before it existed.

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Thinking about things

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  • Post category:Management

I am on vacation, as I am sure many people are at this time of year. This means the usual things for me — cleaning up the home office, this time in the most annoying manner I can think of; playing with personal projects I haven’t had time for during the year; and just… resting. Part of resting for me is reading, which is how I happened up this excellent blog post about how the expectations placed upon Silicon Valley engineering managers have changed over the last couple of decades.

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Initial thoughts on Creality CFS 3D printing

I’ve had a Creality CFS upgrade for my K1 Max sitting on my workbench for probably a month waiting for me to install it. Part of that delay is that I knew it would take a while to install, and I am glad I waited.

I finally got around to doing that yesterday, and I have thoughts… First off, the Creality installation documentation is ok, but not great. I would have been in a lot more pain without Thinkering with Jerd’s tutorial video. So thank you to Jerd, whoever you may be. I also agree with Jerd that the extensive use of hot glue on connectors is super annoying. While I suspect it makes sense in terms of ensuring that devices work when they arrive to a customer, it makes upgrades super annoying and surely there is a better way. Overall I think I spent at least six hours on the install.

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A self drive computer science degree, 2025 edition

What is you want to study computer science, but can’t afford university fees? Or, studied computer science a really long time ago and want to see what’s changed? Or just like learning stuff? Well, lots of schools now post their lectures on YouTube, so its entirely possible to construct a zero cost “self driving degree”, as long as you’re good enough at Canva to make your own certificate at the end. I consider this list incomplete, but in the end I decided I’d post the things from 2025 that I’d found and liked. I can always do an updated version later.

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Writing my own KVM client in python

I was talking to a friend the other day about our shared mutual appreciation of virtio-vsock, and it made me wonder something. How do virtual machines on Linux actually work? I know it involves qemu and the kernel’s KVM virtual machine implementation, but exactly how do they interact? How does the kernel get qemu to do emulation tasks as required?

qemu is several things hanging out together in a trench coat, but one of those things is software which can configure Linux’s built-in KVM virtual machine functionality to run a virtual machine, and then handle emulation of the devices that virtual machine is attached to which cannot be represented with actual physical hardware. This part of qemu is called a “KVM client” in the Linux kernel documentation. Its called that because if we ignore the emulation part for now it is just literally a client calling established APIs to the Linux kernel.

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