My 2025 in production in review
Jeune fille lisant une lettre à la bougie, Jean-Baptiste Santerre, 1700 Machine learning engineers spend their lives alternating between two states: staring...
I want to see the claw
I respect quality software and the people who write it. And, I’ve invested years of my life in working on becoming one of these people (even if the journey...
Walking around the app
There is a very vigorous debate happening online right now around what shape evaluation for LLM-based products should take. I don’t want to rehash all of it,...
How big are our embeddings now and why?
A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings. At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more...
My favorite use-case for AI is writing logs
One of my favorite AI dev products today is Full Line Code Completion in PyCharm (bundled with the IDE since late 2023). It’s extremely well-thought out,...
20 years of YC
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I...
Everything I did in 2024
I want to get back into writing more regularly this year, so in light of that, here’s my last year in review. Evaluating LLMs Like many of us in tech, I...
Write code with your Alphabet Radio on
There is a lot of debate in the software community around whether LLMs can replace developers. Part of the reason is the way we formulate the problem of what...
Why are we using LLMs as calculators?
We keep trying to get LLMs to do math. We want them to count the number of “rs” in strawberry, to perform algebraic reasoning, do multiplication, and to...
Dead Internet Souls
In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few...
Don't worry about LLMs
Happy Monday from Florence, where I gave a keynote at PyCon Italia on Saturday. The conference was wonderful and the city is wonderful. I wrote up my talk...
We've been put in the vibe space
Jakob’s Law of UX goes something like this. I, as a user online, spend my time on many sites. As such, when I come to your site, I am already used to the way...
How I search in 2024
We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding...
Redis is forked
Hey friends. I need to do a better job keeping this newsletter up to date instead of posting random links on five million social platforms, each of which now...
What's new with machine learning in production
Image with some help from Dingboard Original post here. In 2023, I wrote two pieces on machine learning engineering for The Pragmatic Programmer. (Part 1 and...
My favorite books of 2023
[Vicki's note: a bunch of people have reported this email going to spam and links also as spam. I'm working on resolving this by routing through my own...
Why if TYPE_CHECKING in Python?
Blog post here I saw this tweet over the weekend and wanted to dive into the fundamental question behind this: Given this potential error, why do we use...
Hello it's Normcore again
Hello friends, You're receiving this because you at some point signed up for Normcore Tech. Normcore Tech was a ZIRP (zero-interest rate phenomenon)...
What we don't talk about when we talk about building AI apps
Every day I open my LinkedIn and Twitter (and Mastodon and Bluesky and Threads....) and am innundated with the same messages: LLMs are sent to us from above,...
Naming things
"The beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names. " - Confucius. As a writer, I've always been fascinated with names. How people...