The 3 Reasons Homer's car from "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" is the perfect metaphor for agentic LLM-coding
1: Homer doesn't know anything about making cars (no domain knowledge)
2: The R&D department of his brother's car company gives him the ability to do kinda anything within the limits of physics (like claude code supercharges me within the world of bits)
3: nobody ever pushes back on his dumb ideas!
My Ridiculous/Silly/Embarrassing/Sloppy Recent Projects
I want more details about the slop
arch-thinkpad is notes/a plan to to put arch on my thinkpad. I gave up because I don't know that I want to be an arch person after all. And right now (fortunately or unfortunately) LLMs are so central to my workflow, and my mac is set up nicely with wisper-flow & other goodies so I don't want to go to all the trouble.
_template is a starter repo for Ralphing, with the basic files all set up.
context-window-research I don't remember what that was.
firehose-db-bench needs attention at some point...I had claude benchmark sqlite vs postgres, with my instructions to "drive sqlite into the ditch" while ingesting the firehose. I think it did it, I need to go thru the results.
fisheye-research is just me asking how that british train tiktok guy gets that angle of his face that's all distorted. Just a gopro turned upside down I think?
jakes-band, jakes-bandv2, looping-app-v{1-4}, composable-synth, piano, mpk-mini...that's all digital synth stuff.
The current iteration is:
rust backend
browser quasi-frontend (raw js)
looping as first-class thing. Componentized so I can layer some things. Takes MPK-mini + microphone as inputs. Heavily, heavily customizing software to match MPK-mini EXACTLY. Have had to remind agent of that many times, that this is bespoke software for one user with one device.
nl-spec-website...that was me thinking how cool it would be to make markdown files I could give to a stranger, including a template they could fill out (think: about section paragraph, list of social links, etc). And the deliverable woudl be something ANYONE coudl trhow to a free LLM and get a legit personal website back. Still interested in this idea!
pod-player...had it try to make an RSS style podcast client for my android. Gave up because I don't want to have to do a bunch of manual stuff on my phone...then back to llm...then back to phone to test manually. Also not at all confident it'd be better than existing apps (I use spotify. I still like the spotify UI a lot. I will leave spotify when I find something where the UI is as good as spotify. idk why I like the spotify UI but I do. )
protocol-browsers...made a nostr and farcaster browser in the style of the many excellent ATProto + ActivityPub browsers. It worked, but then I hit wall where...I don't know those other ecosystems well enough to be able to know what to even ask for/what directions to explore in. Probably will come back to this, maybe with LLM-assisted refactor
ralph-sandbox...research on LLM sandboxing approaches
reorganize reorganizing my computer. Felt dangerous, probably was, but worked very very well + was immediately glad I did it.
simple-music ... sibling of pod-player. Gave up for same reasons.
site-blocker...I have no idea
skyboard-admin...https://skyboard.dev/board/did:plc:aurnkk6uy6axy66uqaq6dqy6/3mej6lm5dmk2e (I know this is public. I am okay with that. Steal my ideas. Please.)
wikisurfer...a weird wikipedia browser that lets you use arrow keys to go article to article by like...most recently edited or least recently edited or a bunch of other stuff. Was slow. Was kinda spamming wikipedia apis. Wasn't delightful so didn't keep iterating. Still an interesting idea there. I love wikipedia and would love a project where I could get more familiar with their internals.
wonder-robots. This one I should just do. I own two wonder dash robots (you can buy them on ebay for $40 ish), they have awesome APIs, they were a fun MCP project a year ago, wanna keep iterating (but again...world of atoms not bits, not ideal for LLMs).
Phew!
And I didn't even mention jklb.social. Or a jpg glitch app I put quite a few iterations into.
I am on a $100/month Claude plan. I've hit my limits, barely, each of the last two weeks.
Working like this is definitely a kind of mania. Tiring in a way you can't quite put your finger on, almost like spending the day playing some obscure sport that requires muscle groups you don't normally activate.
I am no longer coding to make anything lasting. I am now coding to explore ideas and to teach myself how to use these new tools.
Geoffrey Huntley (of the Ralph method) describes working this way as like throwing pottery. While I've never thrown a pot, that metaphor has been in my brain as I've worked, and I see my projects in this directory kind of like pots that I've made learning to practice a technique (none of them are particularly museum-quality or even symmetrical).
LLM hot takes
This blog post has no structure, and I apologize. Here are some hot takes:
RIP Python as super language
Until not that long ago Python was my best friend/favorite/ride or die.
It's virtues:
readability
friendliness to beginners
but also onramp into more high performance/specific stuff for scientists (who may be code novices)
Now, though...you're kidding yourself if you think new-to-code/novices people are not going to use LLMs like crazy. And personally typescript is my go-to LLM language for web compatibility + type safety + tooling. Is there even going to be a new lingua franca language for normies? I think that's an honest question, whether there will be one.
RIP (eventually) traditional open source
What does it mean to collaborate as a heavy agentic coder? More forking? "Have your agent talk to my agent"?
I don't know. I think a good start would be just more dialog (& that's a big part of why I'm writing/streaming/sharing these days). I would very much like to pair program with others who use LLMs differently than I do. Maybe have a conversation that we record and turn into a spec that then we both craft into software, and then compare notes? DMs are open.
Protocols matter more/can be superchargers
Specificity matters so much for prompting. "Make {my stupid app} compatible with the ATProto so users can upload {the stupid thing my stupid app lets them do} to their PDS and share if they like" is kind of an awesome hack for adding a lot of carefully vetted specific engineering secret sauce to your project.