AI

Full disclosure: The chronology is my reading of the Open AI and Hugging Face reports. The ideas and analysis are all mine. AI was used to take my original writing and structure this article and edit/rewrite it for clarity and consistency. If that bothers you, don’t read it. I get annoyed with the way people are describing the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident. Too much of the reporting is using this incident to give AI capabilities it doesn’t actually have and certainly hasn’t demonstrated to create fear that isn’t necessary. And the anthropomorphizing is getting out of control - this is software folks, it’s bits on a computer, floating point math, and API endpoints. It isn’t living, it doesn’t come to life, it doesn’t have feelings, it doesn’t care…it’s just a reasoning engine. A really cool reasoning engine that can do some amazing stuff but it’s still just software, you can just delete it if you want! ...

I regularly hear about how AI driven development doesn’t work. That’s BS. No, you aren’t going to build a full enterprise application with a single prompt. But you can absolutely build good working software with AI. I recently created Pagelively to host Single Page HTML, Markdown, static sites, etc. on Cloudflare without having to handle a git repo, deployments, etc. It makes it super easy and can be deployed entirely from the cloud without needing to know a single CLI command. ...

As I’ve become a more AI-Driven developer I’ve started to realize that our software repos need to change. And a big part of that change is around documentation. Repos were have always been designed around two consumers: 1) human developers and 2) build/deploy pipelines. For the humans, we organized our code, add comments to code, and occasionally left a few TODO files lying around. For the pipelines, we made sure everything needed to independently build the solution was in the repo and had relative references. ...

Will it snow? So this is just a quick post on some fun I had this evening with three of the major AI chatbots: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. I’m in the Northern Virginia area and there is a potential winter storm coming this weekend. It has been getting some wild forecast ranges, from maybe a dusting to the Apple Weather app currently showing ~20 inches. So lets just say no one really knows what is going to happen, which is basically true of every winter storm in the DC area. ...

Why LLM’s will always make mistakes and we shouldn’t call them hallucinations I saw a tweet from Paul Graham a while back about how as LLMs become better their hallucinations will become more convincing. And it makes sense, a smart confident person saying something wrong often sounds more reliable than a less confident person saying the right thing timidly. Even more so, as you get good answers from the smart confident person you become more trustworthy and are less likely to question and double-check their future answers. That’s both a reality of and defect of human thinking. ...