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azhenley

25,168 karma · joined December 4, 2014

Applied science at Microsoft. AI and developer tools. Ex startup, ex professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

http://austinhenley.com

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azhenley··on Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git
I spent nearly a week of my Microsoft internship in 2016 adding support for Source Depot to the automated code reviewer that I was building (https://austinhenley.com/blog/featurestheywanted.html) despite having no idea what Source Depot was!

Quite a few devs were still using it even then. I wonder if everything has been migrated to git yet.

azhenley··on Why agents are bad pair programmers
Writing out hundreds of lines of code is not what I meant by proactive tools…

Where are the proactive coding tools? https://austinhenley.com/blog/proactiveai.html

azhenley··on Why Bell Labs Worked
It was probably auto flagged as dupe because the original was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010
azhenley··on Why Bell Labs Worked
Discussed heavily 25 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010
azhenley··on Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city
Good thinking. I discuss population density, cities near borders, and narrow borders in the last section.
azhenley··on Writing your own C++ standard library part 2
> The post got linked by Hackernews and Reddit. As is usual the majority of comments did not talk about the actual content but instead were focused on two tangential things.

Too true, and this is too good. Start with part 1 (and the comments) if you haven’t.

azhenley··on Is-even-ai – Check if a number is even using the power of AI
You should try Mirror. The LLM-powered programming-by-example programming language I made:

signature is_even(x: number) -> bool

example is_even(0) -> true

example is_even(1) -> false

example is_even(222) -> true

example is_even(-99) -> false

It will take your examples and "compile" to a callable function. You can read more or try it out: https://austinhenley.com/blog/mirrorlang.html

azhenley··on Jules: An asynchronous coding agent
So many agent tools now. What is the special sauce of each?
azhenley··on GitHub Copilot Coding Agent
Looks like their GitHub Copilot Workspace.

https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace

azhenley··on Side projects I've built since 2009
This is beautiful. I think I'll add a similar page to my website. Side projects are what I look forward to!

Right now, I just have my blog + github as a messy portfolio of personal projects, but I like this much better.

azhenley··on I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks)
If you had a blog or YouTube channel where you just went around to open source projects optimizing them down, I’d be very interested.
azhenley··on Visiting Us
Objectively the best podcast. https://www.acquired.fm/
azhenley··on $3 Trader Joe's tote bags resell for more than $1,500
https://archive.is/4vQdu
azhenley··on Chess324 – A Chess Variant to Reduce Draws
Fairly small change, just some changes to the initial piece placement.

“All Kings, Rooks, Pawns are in their original locations as chess but other pieces are placed randomly in their first and last ranks, with no symmetry requirement between two sides, with the only restriction for bishops of each side must be on different colored squares.”

azhenley··on How IMAP works under the hood
An email client for Gmail.
azhenley··on How IMAP works under the hood
I've been trying to get approval from Google for the sensitive scopes to use IMAP, and they classified us as needing "CASA Tier 3 Security Assessment". It looks like it is going to be a long, tedious, opaque, and expensive process.
azhenley··on Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
Oh, do I agree…

Don’t trap me in a chat window https://austinhenley.com/blog/trappedchat.html

Natural language is the lazy interface https://austinhenley.com/blog/naturallanguageui.html

azhenley··on The highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News
My blog is both #142 and #274, nice! (Used to use a university domain.)

The combined score puts me at #71 all time or #31 since 2019 when I started writing. Very cool.

azhenley··on From Languages to Language Sets
Haskell is listed.
azhenley··on Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
Downloading it now. I didn't know about it. Looks like there are a lot of big names!
azhenley··on It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI
If we don't blog, what will the next big AI models be trained on?!
azhenley··on It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI
I think there is a more important reason to blog besides the 3 reasons listed: to force yourself to slow down, organize your thoughts, fill in the holes, and articulate your points.

"Writing is understanding."

azhenley··on My startup journey with BYBE
Wait at least 24 hours and only if it didn’t get many votes.
azhenley··on My startup journey with BYBE
Third time! It’s good. I like reading these kind of stories so I resubmit if they don't get attention.
azhenley··on What Makes a Great Software Engineer (Dissertation) [pdf]
Are/were you a prof at UW?
azhenley··on Ask HN: Physics PhD at Stanford or Berkeley
Carnegie Mellon ;)
azhenley··on Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?
You might be surprised how many people read your blog! If you hang out in techie places, you might even get some, "oh, I read your blog!", comments from strangers.
azhenley··on Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots
Very nice, I didn't know this. I used pyppeteer and selenium for this previously which seemed excessive.
azhenley··on Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools
See my article from January 2023, "Natural language is the lazy user interface".

https://austinhenley.com/blog/naturallanguageui.html

azhenley··on Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
Lately I’ve made working on tools that make it easier to gather context for ChatGPT. For example, copy the relevant code files to my clipboard.

Read about a few of them here: https://austinhenley.com/blog/promptcontext.html

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