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AlexErrant

1,060 karma · joined November 15, 2022

Building collaborative spaced repetition at https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive
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AlexErrant··on Solid 2.0 RC: The Big <Reveal>
A worthy and pragmatic tradeoff.

I've always appreciated Solid's DX/mental model (I _never_ have to think "when does this re-render?") so v2.0's continued wins on DX are remarkable. I never thought a release could be about how much can we _cut_. Primitives at work!

AlexErrant··on Solid 2.0 RC: The Big <Reveal>
I'm a little surprised that there's no mention of end-user perf and that it's not on the js-framework-benchmark. Not an accusation; just noticing the lack of emphasis (perhaps natural, given how much Solid 1.0 was famous for its speed/minimal bundle size to the point of taking over the whole conversation.)
AlexErrant··on Magnitude 7.4 Earthquake – 5 km S of San José del Palmar, Colombia
Here's what it sounds like on Android https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HQe8e3voRdw

IDK why it's so much more chill than the "child abduction" alerts I get. Those are straight up adrenaline-inducing so I've disabled them.

AlexErrant··on Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK
This quote is why I have my Claude Code "done" notification sound be the sound of a lawnmower revving.

The lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, no matter how clever it sounds. (Actually not that hard with Opus5)

AlexErrant··on Harness engineering for self-improvement
Sure, you can "vibe/auto-retro". But in my experience the retro often results in "higher-order" structural changes.

In starker terms: if you're ok with "vibe principles", "vibe invariants", "vibe lint-rules", "vibe skill updates", and "vibe agent-tooling"... well. That's your call.

Thankfully after a dozen or so retros the low hanging fruit starts to disappear. But until then, you've no idea what's there.

AlexErrant··on Harness engineering for self-improvement
I literally hold a "retro" with my agent after a session.

> Let's conclude with a retro. Did you run into any issues during this session that you think could be improved? Any failed tool calls, confusing docs/prompts, or tricky wording that took you effort to figure out, etc? Any final thoughts that you want to raise? Anything minor you didn't mention? Help make this codebase easier for the next agent to work in.

It has ideas for coding changes, spots unmentioned small bugs, suggests invariants (I have a high-level list of invariants to keep), principles to adopt, lint rules, tooling tweaks (I've built SO MUCH agent-tooling; so many useful bash scripts), skill-file updates, follow up work, all kinds of stuff.

Listen to your agent's whinging.

AlexErrant··on The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)
Even Lean has bugs.

> AI "Proves" Collatz Conjecture with Lean 4 Bug

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101465

AlexErrant··on Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations
You are absolutely right. They should have stayed quiet about it and never published the blog.

/s

AlexErrant··on Show HN: Claude-account – switch Claude Code accounts without logging in again
Doesn't this require pi, which CC famously bans you for using?
AlexErrant··on Show HN: Claude-account – switch Claude Code accounts without logging in again
Sadly incompatible with Claude subs.
AlexErrant··on Claude Is Down
> Claude caches for 1hr

Yep, AFAIK. I have a statusline that tells me how far I'm into the cache lifetime. I tend to have dense prompts and carefully read its outputs, so by the time this outage occurred when I was ~50m into it. Cue frantically spamming "esc esc up enter", and 10m later it's dead Jim.

AlexErrant··on Claude: Elevated errors across all models
Aaaaand there goes my cache. Damnit.

Edit:

> We are currently investigating this issue.

> Posted 1 hour ago

There goes everyone's cache.

AlexErrant··on [dead]
This article is _literally_ a list of bulletpoints and offers no discussion around the current title.
AlexErrant··on How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
I can count the number of times an @ file reference doesn't autocomplete on a hundred hands. Or how a rewind won't reset the "is this file Read" marker. Or how a Branch (forking a convo) takes literally 5+secs to run. Or how a slashcommand that's user-only will not work if its in the middle of a prompt. Or how ctrl-r search will match results that don't include any search terms. Or how you can't resume a branch given its session id.

Yes Boris, tell me more about how "coding is solved".

Edit: literally just now, while writing a claude code hook, opus5 gave me this LOC because apparently the changelog and what's in the transcripts _differs_; great docs d00ds.

    # Present only for a subagent's calls. Both spellings accepted: the changelog
    # names `agent_id`, transcripts use `agentId`, and we need not care which lands.
    agent=$(printf '%s' "$input" | jq -r '.agent_id // .agentId // empty')
AlexErrant··on SpaceX Starship Flight 13 livestream [video]
I apply this mindset to Trump/politics too.

I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.

Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.

AlexErrant··on The arguments against open source AI are bad
I'm in favor of open source AI... however:

> It's theoretically possible for a bad actor to embed hidden adversarial behavior in a model. But if this happens, it serves the interests of responsible actors to find these exploits as soon as possible, and the best way to do this is to let anyone who wants to inspect them.

This is a bad argument. It isn't trivial to tell if the weights have poisoned:

``` https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/microsoft-how-to-spot-a... https://futurism.com/future-society/easy-poison-open-weight-... https://semgrep.dev/blog/2026/ai-supply-chain-problem/ ```

I'm not arguing in favor of closed-AI; I'm simply saying poisoning may be subtle.

I was gonna say that at least the frontier labs may be motivated to not-poison their own models, but then Anthropic just attempted to poison Fable's LLM training capability so... sigh. I'll try not to derail.

AlexErrant··on Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA
$20 users don't get access to Fable. It's $100+ tier only.
AlexErrant··on Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max plans
I used Fable all the time on my 2 Pro accounts. It's great. I'm just very careful with subagents/workflows, and it's quite usable.

I'm off to Codex land I guess, which is sad because I do appreciate Anthropic's spine when they told off the DoW.

AlexErrant··on LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
No one is saying you can't have an opinion and you can't express it.

I'm just saying there's a predictable result when you express it with the level of detail and amount of effort that you _did_. And frankly, your comments are no better than pre-reasoning era LLM rage-bait.

What level of engagement are you looking for here; support for your lack of citations, or "yeah that's also my personal experience rah rah"?

I'm having a meta-level discussion, if you can't tell. I'm not "putting words in your mouth", I'm trying to discuss: the quality of your discussion. I'm discussing the quality of your arguments and your evidence. If you think that "racial profiling" is too hot, substitute in something else; that's not the point.

AlexErrant··on LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
My man, if your comments can't be distinguished from a bot's, you're no better than one. Also if you can't tell that your comment's unsubstantiated bait, you really need to go touch grass.

Everyone has an annecdote. "it's common enough to be recognized as a trend" is equally justification for racial profiling, and at least racial crime statistics are easily citable. And you still haven't even put forth that modicum of effort.

AlexErrant··on A new way to reflect on how you use Claude
> If you can't generate a report, it may be because you don’t have Memory turned on.

Has anyone found success with memory and Claude Code? I found Opus's 4.8 memories largely lacking value. Memories are too verbose/specific/yet-generic for the value captured.

Instead, I've been holding "retros" with the agent immediately after a session, and _those_ responses have been typically fantastic. It has ideas for coding changes, spots unmentioned small bugs, suggests invariants, principles to adopt, lint rules, tooling tweaks, skill-file updates, follow up work, all kinds of stuff.

AlexErrant··on I Like Small Keyboards
Hah, 2 minutes before my remark. I feel like if anyone has 2+ ergomech keyboards, they should really try something with a pointing device. It's clear they don't mind having an expensive hobby :D
AlexErrant··on I Like Small Keyboards
For people who like small keyboards, why do you NOT have an integrated trackball/pointing device? E.g. I love my Charybdis, but I rarely see people advocating for a keyboard with a pointing device. Does a trackball disqualify it as "small"?
AlexErrant··on Superpowers 6
I heckin love his /grill-me skill. Terse, to the point, and delivers outsized results.

Gonna take a moment to share my own generic "retro" prompt, which has found many areas of improvement IME.

> Let's conclude with a retro. Did you run into any issues during this session that you think could be improved? Any failed tool calls, confusing docs/prompts, or tricky wording that took you effort to figure out, etc? Any final thoughts that you want to raise? Anything minor you didn't mention? Help make this codebase easier for the next agent to work in.

It's somewhat doc-focused since I'm currently working on fairly dense design docs... but you can easily customize it for your own needs.

This prompt reveals how absolutely _ass_ the Claude Code harness is (so many stupid tool call failures), but not much I can do about that.

AlexErrant··on Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning (2021)
Yeah it's public domain, originally https://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/
AlexErrant··on Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning (2021)
http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

1st video is ~1minute long and puts you in the right mindset.

AlexErrant··on Is Fable 5 Back?
I love this status page. Every time I see the absolute rainbow of colored bars, I think to myself: "Coding is Solved."
AlexErrant··on On Rendering Diffs
Feature request; `git diff --color-moved` uses colors to display moved chunks of code. Scanning https://diffs.com/docs it isn't obvious that yall support that; please add it :)
AlexErrant··on Claude Opus 4.8
My claude notification is literally lawnmower sounds.

Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower. It will cut off your foot, given the chance.

AlexErrant··on Use the Claude Agent SDK with Your Claude Plan
You can no longer use your Claude subscription with apps that use the Claude Agent SDK, e.g. claude -p, Conductor, T3code, etc.
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