cortesi
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
1,011
Submissions
173
Member since
Mar 24
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 months ago
I only had time to use it for a couple of deep reviews of large Rust projects, and a few agentic coding tasks (implement plan X, refactor Y in fashion Z) before my quota ran out. My impression is that the reviews were quite strong - maybe Opus 4.8+ or around GPT 5.5 (for my particular use case) - but very slow. For implementation I found it weaker, it made a few mistakes that I haven't seen frontier models make in a long time.
Comment · 4 months ago
As a developer outside the US I think it's vital to have alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, but sadly this is not it. For $200/month you get < 3 hours of use per week, the API is extremely slow, and the output quality in my tests is nowhere near Fable. It's nowhere remotely near usable as a day-to-day workhorse. Very disappointing.
Comment · 8 months ago
I'm sorry, but we can tell absolutely nothing about Gary Marcus from this. People should have a look at the final data:
https://github.com/davegoldblatt/marcus-claims-dataset/blob/...
Many of the "supported" claims here are vague, banal, obvious, or just opinion. E.g.
"the general public hasn't quite realized what's not possible yet"
"loads of things scale, but not at all"
"To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn't."
"To date, nobody, ever, has given a convincing and thorough account of how human children (and human children alone) learn language."
"A cat holding a remote control shouldn't have a human hand."
"What I didn't see last night was vision" (about Tesla Optimus)
Comment · 9 months ago
Written in Rust, with cross-platform + web visualiser in egui.
Comment · 1 year ago
I have a tiny, relevant weekend project:
https://github.com/cortesi/agentsmd
This is a command-line tool that lets you generate your AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files from common sources. So, for instance, if you have Rust-specific guidance for models, you can define it once, and then automatically include it in any project that contains Rust based on the `lang()` language matcher.
This is one of those small tools I now use many times a day to maintain and update ubiquitous agents files. Maybe other folks will find it useful too.
Comment · 1 year ago
SQLx is great, but I had a long laundry list of issues with its SQLite support so I forked it into a focused SQLite-specific library. It has now diverged very far from SQLx, and the number of small inaccuracies and issues we fixed in the low-level SQLite bindings is well into the dozens. The library is unannounced, but is already being used in some high-throughput scenarios.
Comment · 1 year ago
Nextest is one of the very small handful of tools I use dozens or hundreds of times a day. Parallelism can reduce test suite execution time significantly, depending on your project, and has saved me cumulative days of my life. The output is nicer, test filtering is nicer, leak detection is great, and the developer is friendly and responsive. Thanks sunshowers!
The one thing we've had to be aware of is that the execution model means there can sometimes be differences in behaviour between nextest and cargo test. Very occasionally there are tests that fail in cargo test but succeed in nextest due to better isolation. In practice this just means that we run cargo test in CI.
Comment · 1 year ago
I'd love to say that it's taking off, but it looks like daily active users (as measured by sampling popular relays) has been stagnant at just under 20k for 6 months:
Comment · 2 years ago
We haven't found this to be an impediment. Keep things modular, and share the type definitions of anything you import with the model. As the benefits here become more and more clear tooling will improve and people will adapt their development practices to get the most out of the models.
Comment · 2 years ago
Claude 3.5 Sonnet's coding abilities are incredibly impressive. I think it lets an expert programmer move more than twice as fast. There are limits - to produce high quality code, not copy-and-paste pablum, you have to be able to give detailed step-by-step directions and critically evaluate the results. This means you can't produce code better than you would have written by yourself, you can only do it much faster.
As an experiment, I produced a set of bindings to Anthropic's API pair-programming with Claude. The project is of pretty good quality, and includes advanced features like streaming and type-safe definitions of tools. More than 95% of the code and docs was written by Claude, under close direction from me. The project is here:
https://github.com/cortesi/misanthropy
And I've shared part of the conversation that produced it in a video here:
Comment · 2 years ago
Oh, right! That's just a bit of fun - a random pattern (picked to be vaguely visually pleasing), which is laid out on the Hilbert curve, and then offset by a calculated amount depending on the mouseover. So I'm just shifting the same pattern forwards and backwards in a ring buffer, basically.
Comment · 2 years ago
The mousover always shows a contiguous section of the underlying file. So you're seeing a constant-length section of the space-filling curve centered on the cursor as you move the mouse about. The hex to the right is that same contiguous piece of the file. Sort of neat, actually.
Comment · 2 years ago
There is, but I see it's not visible on smaller resolutions - I should fix that. The default color scheme just classifies bytes into black (0x00), white (0xff), blue (ascii), and low (green) and high (red).
Comment · 2 years ago
Ah, this is an old side-project of mine. Something I should probably make clearer is that files are not uploaded anywhere - the app is completely local, and all analysis is done in the browser.
This version is written in React but when time permits I plan to release an updated version written in Rust, along with a library of fast implementations of space-filling curves and related utilities.
https://github.com/cortesi
https://github.com/mitmproxy