The viral "how many r's are there in the word 'strawberry'?" problem is a great motivating example to experiment with the capabilities of DSPy, an increasingly popular, powerful library for running inference with language models. While the counting letters problem itself is a poor application of a...
I was not planning on writing about this but after reading Sascha's post, I decided it could be interesting because his demonstration on what it takes to build knowledge happened to relate to prompting a language model for a fitness routine: This drives us to one of the most important conclusions...
Claude Code supports custom slash commands. Custom slash commands allow you to define frequently-used prompts as Markdown files that Claude Code can execute. Commands are organized by scope (project-specific or personal) and support namespacing through directory structures.
The .env file and the python-dotenv package are popular conventions in Python for managing environment variables. I often forget or pause when trying to remember exactly which package I need to install (python-dotenv) and how to do the import
When Datadog's magic breaks your API calls
Why I like the Chat Completions API
A short, fast rollercoaster
I've run Thought Eddies as a more dynamic, experimental blog since the beginning of this year. I'd heard about Astro and wanted to put a more personal touch on my web presence.
Using Checkpoints with Coding Agents
Working with Cursor was my first experience with the UX pattern of checkpoints when working with a coding agent. If you're not familiar, it works like this. The user types a message into an agent-based IDE tool like Cursor, Windsurf, or Cline and submits it to the agent. The agent reads files,...
Agents can make progress independently, but they also make messes
I use code agents to help me code in various capacities. Everything from fully "vibe coded" tools to scripts to specific, well described tasks.
The performance costs of thinking and provider defaults
While building Tomo and several prototypes using LLMs, I've experimented with several popular language models. It's generally easier to prototype using the OpenAI chat responses API because most providers support this early API spec (mostly). This approach makes it pretty simple to switch between...
Model Context Protocol servers have become a popular way to expose software services for LLMs. Prior to this post, I'd not spent nearly enough time with them to have a strong opinion of their pros and cons, so I set out to change that.