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3 posts tagged with "development"

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You're Absolutely Right: Now Fix Your Harness

· 26 min read

A flawless crystal floats at the center of a ring of stone blocks; on one side the blocks are cracked with glowing cyan seams, and around the ring they give way to new blocks of glowing amber glass while old fragments fall away

Introduction​

RSI stands for Recursive Self-Improvement: an AI system that improves itself, then uses the improved version to improve itself again. It is one of the milestones AI is expected to reach one day. In 1965, the mathematician I. J. Good put it like this:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

I. J. Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, 1965

Text, Structure, Meaning: grep, ast-grep and a Local LLM Classifier

· 18 min read

Three readers looking at the same line of code: one sees letters, one sees a tree, one sees what the line is for

Introduction​

Every codebase eventually needs the same change in many places: a library swap, an API that changed shape, a convention the team agreed on last week. You know the usual options. Find and replace sees only text. Doing it by hand works for ten places and falls apart at three hundred. An AI assistant will happily make all three hundred edits, and then someone has to review each one.

In this blog, we will look at three tools that read code at three different levels. grep reads text. ast-grep reads structure, the syntax tree your editor already builds. A small local model, asked through classif, reads meaning. They are separate tools, each takes the part of the job it can see, and the interesting part is where each one stops.

classif: A Bridge Between Code and Semantic Reasoning

· 22 min read

A bridge between deterministic code and semantic reasoning

Introduction​

In this blog, we will look at how programs make decisions about text, and how that changed once small language models started running on our own machines. Along the way, I will introduce classif, a small command-line tool I built that lets a shell script ask a local model a question and act on the answer.