Tag: AI

  • State of AI tooling (for me)

    I’ve been meaning to write this for a couple of weeks, so let’s get to it – things are moving to fast to reflect too long; which is it’s own risk. In March, I wrote about how I was using AI in coding, which was Codeium (now Windsurf) in VS Code for completions, and ChatGPT…

  • Where I’m up to with AI for coding

    There’s still plenty of controversy about LLMs for coding, and not without reason. But I thought I’d run through what I’ve tried, and where I’ve landed for using AI. Also what the pitfalls are, where it’s useful and how it’s changed my practice. Issues Training data The training data for large language models generally is…

  • Clear explanation of how transformer AI works

    If you’re interested in how generative AI works, check out Ishan Anand‘s Youtube series “Spreadsheets are all you need“. He steps through the basics using an Excel spreadsheet that encompasses most of GPT-2. Just doing that is an impressive (and hilarious) feat, but he also has a knack for teaching, so you’ll come away with…

  • LLM coding question comparison using Ollama

    Now Ollama has made it simple enough for anyone who can use a terminal to run large language models locally, naturally I’ve gone overboard downloading too many to play with. I’m increasingly feeling they definitely have a place in the devops/coding arsenal of tools, but which model is best? If you go on HuggingFace to…

  • Using LLMs for coding

    This post looks at the context for some of my thinking about AI for supporting software development, and where I’ve landed on it for the time being. The landscape I briefly wrote about ChatGPT’s coding ability at the end of 2022. The wide availability of this tool marked the beginning of what I think can…

  • ChatGPT’s code writing

    This week, the internet has been all about ChatGPT, the rather remarkable natural language AI with a very large model. If you’re a twitter user, you were probably amazed, but now eventually tired of seeing examples of it’s output. I’ll add to that with an example of a SwifUI CoreData based todo app it wrote…

  • Using AI to Generate Icons

    Since I have minimal design skills, I went back to Fiverr (the digital gig economy platform) to get some icons done for CodeTrimmer – explaining that I wanted something like a “pair of scissors floating over some computer code”. At the same time I’ve been playing with DiffusionBee – a free Apple silicon version of…