FeedCity: Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
14 Sep 20:42 • Armin Ronacher

Interpreting Pangram

Yesterday David Sacks wrote a tweet and within a few minutes people did, what they usually do, and they asked Pangram if it was AI. And Pangram said it’s entirely AI generated. To which David replied that these AI detectors are bogus. Now Pangram has a pretty low false posit...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
12 Sep 20:24 • Armin Ronacher

P(doom)

This week some flavor of “AI is going to kill us all” went viral. In particular one where an employee put his personal probability of that happening above 10%. Which made me go to the Wikipedia page of P(doom) and I realized that Dario Amodei’s apparent probability of some...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
09 Sep 18:09 • Armin Ronacher

Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
05 Sep 13:00 • Armin Ronacher

Latent Powers

A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work qu...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
24 Aug 07:33 • Armin Ronacher

Anger, Anxiety and Agency

Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at work — a post with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the people around you, many of whom have...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
22 Aug 19:57 • Armin Ronacher

Fast and Hard Code

One of the memes on Twitter is that “programming is solved now.” I’m not sure to what degree it is, but one thing is pretty clear: the act of familiarizing yourself with a language no longer matters and some of the friction that mattered for humans does not matter for agent...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
19 Aug 17:21 • Armin Ronacher

What Is Reasoning

A few weeks ago a paper was shared that showed how to extract reasoning traces from closed-weight models. Together with online discussions about tricking models into leaking them, it made me investigate it more out of curiosity. Twitter seems full of half-truths and confus...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
24 Jul 14:48 • Armin Ronacher

Codeberg Divides

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and ...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
14 Jul 16:33 • Armin Ronacher

The Tower Keeps Rising

I feel that some vibecoded software changes somewhat randomly and unexpectedly. That made me think about Bruegel’s “The Tower of Babel” which shows an already quite chaotic depiction of the Tower of Babel. The story is usually told as one about pride and ambition and ultima...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
04 Jul 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Better Models: Worse Tools

A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is ...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
23 Jun 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

The Coming Loop

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different f...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
13 Jun 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Dangerous Technology For Americans Only

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos. Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerou...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
10 Jun 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Gaslighting Openness

I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including experiments in funding it. I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI slop, shifting cont...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
06 Jun 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Communities of Not

There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these communities are not just negative: childfree spaces can be about autonomy, choice and acceptance, anti-car spaces about safer str...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
26 May 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Clanker: A Word For The Machine

In my last post I used the word “clanker1” as an alternative to “agent” quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong ...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
24 May 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Building Pi With Pi

Pi is now part of Earendil, but in the important sense it is still Mario’s project. He has been living with its issue tracker longer than I have, and he has been exposed to the weirdness of the new form of agent traffic in Open Source projects for longer too. This post is ...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
08 May 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Pushing Local Models With Focus And Polish

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There a...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
04 May 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Content for Content’s Sake

Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked in” or “cracked.” I don’t like it, because...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
28 Apr 00:00 • Armin Ronacher

Before GitHub

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was. Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bit...