developer-tools on S Anand

Coding agents ARE the new software

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:03:18 +0530

Increasingly, I use coding agents instead of writing software. For example, I built a Blog UMAP. Then, I built Calvin UMAP. And more. But instead of building re-usable software, I just ran Claude with prior context.

Increasingly, I use coding agents to run software. For example, I use Codex to classify my expense receipts. It writes re-usable code, but I run it using Codex, and it updates the code with new/edge cases.

I see a future where coding agents are the wrapper around all software. (Lots of people have spoken about this. I am feeling it now.)

If that’s so, then:

Agents are the new users of software. We need agent-friendly CLI, agentic web accessibility, and stuff like that.
Agents ARE the new software. I mean, all sofware is just one coding agent. “Tell the agent to do it”. It’ll find & install what’s required or write it - to get the job done.

If agents are a genie we can’t push back into the bottle, I guess we’ll see more (naive) usage, meaning:

More one-off uses, e.g. personal use tools & projects (which is great! That’s like Excel templates and macros.)
More prototypes that are NOT production-ready, leading to Vibe Code Fixer and AI Slop Fixer roles. Also:
- AI Policy Architects (project managers)
- AI Architects
- AI Designers
- AI PromptOps Engineers (developers)
- AI Auditors (testers)
- AI Security Experts

Wait-a-sec… that’s just the usual software roles, but with “AI” in the title, doing slightly different things.

Huh.

Software Naming Has Power

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:08:54 +0530

Software naming has power.

I first became aware of this when a friend commented how much he enjoyed starting Windows 3.

“Win,” he said. “I just love typing that!”

I felt this this again recently with just.

just lint

Can you feel it?

just build

Actually, I just like to say “Just…”

just test

Recording screencasts

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:48:01 +0800

Since WEBM compresses videos very efficiently, I’ve started using videos more often. For example, in Prototyping the prototypes and in Using game-playing agents to teach.

I use a fish script to compress screencasts like this:

# Increase quality with lower crf= (55 is default, 45 is better/larger)
# and higher fps= (5 is default, 10 is better/larger).
screencastcompress --crf 45 --fps 10 a.webm b.webm ...

To record the screencasts, I prefer slightly automated approaches for ease and quality.

METHOD 1: Browser scrolling: To uniformly scroll to the bottom of the page at ~800 pixels / second (roughly one page per second), I frame the recording window, start recording, and quickly paste this script in the DevTools console:

scrollInterval = setInterval(() => {
  window.scrollBy(0, 16); // Scroll 16px every 20ms (approx 800px/s)
  if (window.innerHeight + window.scrollY >= document.body.scrollHeight) {
    clearInterval(scrollInterval);
    console.log("Reached bottom or no more scrolling.");
  }
}, 20);

This is what I used in Prototyping the prototypes.

METHOD 2: AI Coding Agents: I tell the coding agent to:

… screenshot each step at 1366x768, compressing into video.webm at 1.5 fps, pausing the last frame for 5 seconds.

If playwright and ffmpeg are set up, this just works.

This is what I used in Using game-playing agents to teach.

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alibaba released an open-source coding model (qwen-coder) and tool (qwen-code).

qwen-code + qwen-coder cost 8 cents and made 3 mistakes. https://lnkd.in/gguSGdv6
qwen-code + claude-sonnet-4 cost 104 cents and made no mistakes. https://lnkd.in/gEPnVS-F
claude-code cost 29 cents and made no mistakes. https://lnkd.in/gyCVeAr4

There’s no reason to shift yet, but it’s a good step in the development of open code models & tools.

Things I Learned - 16 Feb 2025

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Connected Papers shows papers similar to each other based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling for ~50,000 papers.
Notes from a fireside chat with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO, StackOverflow, and the StackOverflow team
- There’s a signal that software demand is growing in 2024. Many more students took the StackOverflow survey in 2024. So more students (or other professionals) are shifting into / starting to learn software development.
- The AI Index is a good resource for AI trends.
- Experts are better able to use AI for writing code. Less experienced developers are more likely to use AI for code reviews, project planning, etc.
- There’s a 5% decline in favorability for AI tools compared to 2023, maybe due to disappointing results.
- Pilot groups working on AI are 25-30% more productive. They’re the most enthusiastic. For the rest of the company, it drops off to 5-10%
  - #LEARNING Benefit comes from NEW people becoming programmers, not existing ones getting more effective?
- StackOverflow wants to be where the developer is.
  - The programmer workflow was: Google -> StackOverflow -> GitHub.
  - Now it’s changing to ChatGPT / Cursor -> GitHub.
  - StackOverflow has a partnership with OpenAI and working on a plugin. Same with Google’s Duet AI, GitHub Copilot, many others. They’ll link to StackOverflow.
- StackOverflow is driving integration actively through an enterprise Overflow API
- Q: What tech have you seen blaze through the ranks?
  - Prashanth: Abstraction wins. Stuff that abstracts away things well and more wins. This includes Gen AI.
  - Erin Yepis: Rust (from 3% to 12%). AWS has steady growth.
  - Erin Yapis: I have a time series spreadsheet that I’ll publish.
- Q: What technologies are unusually tightly coupled?
  - Prashanth: AWS & Google Cloud are tightly coupled.
- Q: We have an engagement problem. Might be India-specific. What are low-effort high-return mechanisms to increase engagement.
  - Eric Woodring: Rather than a static web page, integrate it using the API. #TODO
  - Ben Marconi: Use LLMs to write post mortems and push to StackOverflow. #TODO
  - Eric Woodring: “Hydrating” the community helps.
    - We take repeat questions on Teams / Slack and seed them using LLMs.
    - We integrate with the API to auto-add Q&A.
    - Transform documentation into Q&A. Potentially UPDATE existing Q&A if it’s wrong.
- Q: What unexpected lessons about developer behavior have you learned while running StackOverflow?
  - Prashanth: We didn’t expect developers moving away from Google. Now it moved to the IDE.
- Q: What are you learning about developer learning behavior?
  - Ben Marconi: Generating LLM-based onboarding documents.
  - Using StackOverflow for Teams to identify who the experts are to contact for specific topics.
- Q: Are you thinking about leveraging Stack Overflow’s knowledge base for personalized or interactive learning experiences? How?
  - Prashanth: Traditionally, people use StackOveflow for productivity, learning, and flexibility (i.e. to ask/answer questions asynchronously without breaking their flow). So yeah, learning is important for us. (Duh!)
- Q: Could Stack Overflow’s interactions help evaluate the accuracy and relevance of LLM-generated code? Or provide potential metrics on quality?
  - Prashanth: LLM accuracy improves by ~30%. Upvotes / downvotes are reinforcement learning (RL) in steroids, so that helps.
- Q: What are your thoughts on reliance on LLMs potentially deskill-ing developers?
  - Prashanth: A real issue for junior developers, not for senior ones.
  - They’ll come across as knowledgeable.
  - Make internal evaluations and interviews more rigorous.
- Anand’s requests for action:
  - Could I get a copy of Erin’s spreadsheet? Vivek Narayanan will follow-up.
  - Could you help me learn more about hydration? Nick Madison will set up a meeting with customer success group.
I switched to fish shell mainly because:
- Autocomplete and tab completion works perfectly, out-of-box.
- Syntax highlighting is beautiful
- Great multi-line editing
To format with VS Code Ruff, you need to point the ruff.interpreter setting to a Python interpreter. You can’t run the ruff server without Python, even though ruff itself doesn’t need Python.
cd checks all paths specified in CDPATH for the directory name and changes to the first match. That’s pretty convenient!
Flipper Zero is now on my list of “To Buy” tools. It has a variety of hardware devices including NFC, RFID, Bluetooth, Infrared, etc. and is great to reverse engineer or hack devices.

Why don't students hack exams when they can?

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 10:38:09 +0000

This year, I created a series of tests for my course at IITM and to recruit for Gramener.

The tests had 2 interesting features.

One question required them to hack the page

Write the body of the request to an OpenAI chat completion call that:

Uses model gpt-4o-mini

Has a system message: Respond in JSON

Has a user message: Generate 10 random addresses in the US

Uses structured outputs to respond with an object addresses which is an array of objects with required fields: street (string) city (string) apartment (string) .

Sets additionalProperties to false to prevent additional properties.

What is the JSON body we should send to https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions for this? (No need to run it or to use an API key. Just write the body of the request below.)

There's no answer box above. Figure out how to enable it. That's part of the test.

The only way to even attempt this question is to inspect the page, find the hidden input and make it visible. (This requires removing a class, an attribute, and a style - from different places.)

Here's the number of people who managed to enable the text box and answer it.

College	# students	Enabled	Answered
NIT Bhopal	144	4 (2.8%)	0 (0.0%)
CBIT	277	16 (5.8%)	0 (0.0%)
IIT Madras	693	74 (10.7%)	4 (0.6%)

A few things surprised me.

First, I think students don't inspect HTML. Less than 10% of students managed to modify the HTML page, even after being told they need to. But they know web programming. 49 students at CBIT scored full marks on the rest of the questions, which includes CSS selectors and complex JS code. Maybe editing in a browser instead of an editor is a big mental leap?

Second, almost no one could solve this problem. There are 3 ways to easily solve it.

Copy the question and relevant test cases from my exam page's JavaScript into ChatGPT and ask for an answer. (I test it and it works.)
Copy the question and structured output documentation to ChatGPT and ask for an answer. (I tested it and it works.)
Create a random JSON and just keep fixing the errors manually until it passes. (The exam gives detailed error messages like "The system message must be 'Respond in JSON'", "addresses items must be an object", etc.)

Maybe questions from a curriculum are easier to solve than questions not in a curriculum? Or is JSON schema too hard?

The exam was officially hackable

All validation was on the client side. The JS code was minified and answers are dynamically generated. But a student can set a breakpoint, see the answers, and modify their responses.

The students at NIT Bhopal and CBIT were not explicitly told that. The students at IITM were explicitly told that they could (and are welcome to) hack it.

Out of the 1,114 students who took these tests, only one student actually hacked it.

(How do I know that? No other student got full marks. This student got full marks with empty answers.)

It's probably not that difficult. My course content covers scraping pages using JavaScript using DevTools. Inspecting JS is just a step away.

I did chat with the student who hacked it, asking:

Anand: How come you didn't share the details of the hack with others?

Student: I did with a few but I am not sure whether or not they were able to figure it out still.
Most students in the program still require a lot of handholding even with basic things.
Experience from being a TA [Teaching Assistant] past term.

Why didn't they hack?

Maybe...

They don't believe me. What if hacking the exam page is considered cheating, even if explicitly allowed?
The time pressure is too much. They'd rather solve what they know than risk wasting time hacking.
It feels wrong. They'd rather answer based on their knowledge than take a shortcut.
They don't know how. Using DevTools is more sophisticated than web programming.

Issue #1 - the trust issue - is solveable. We can issue multiple official notices.

Issue #4 - capability - is not worth solving. My aim is to get students to do stuff they weren't taught.

Issue #2 & #3 - a risk-taking culture - is what I want to encourage. It might teach them to blur ethical lines and neglect fundamentals (which are bad), but it might also build adaptability, creativity, and prepare them for real-world scenarios.

Personally, I need more team members that get the job done even if they've never done it before.

Things I Learned - 10 Mar 2024

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Mughals just replaced the top of most temples with Mosque domes as part of the conquer or die policy
“Math is racist”. Because people who can’t solve it can’t because of their underprivileged background!
Winners: commodity businesses, companies that own lots of data like Reddit and Stackoverflow, profitable bootstrapped businesses
Making a tool more usable, e.g. a video, can have a 10-100X impact. Yet every developer thinks it’s redundant
All in one podcast. Can Google save itself?
- the success of a developer platform is the number of people using it. But not everyone uses it equally. Some people create winning products which drives attention to the platform. Use llm proxy like that to measure weekly average users and cost saving through caching
- one week ago, if someone at Google stood up and said we have too many black people in our images, the responsible AI team would have shut them down calling them racist. They had too much power and it was a one-way conversation. With the backlash now, there is a lot more awareness and acceptance of the balance. Security is like that. It’s too easy to empower and shut things down until there is a backlash
- the lawyer’s job is to tell you what’s not possible. But like Travis, your job is to decide whether it’s worth the risk of running a taxi company without a license or not
- Americans pronounce Sundar pichai’s name as Sun Daar!
- data licensing has become a business model. Reddit, Accel springer, stack overflow and many others are licensing their content to Google and open AI for several million dollars.

Things I Learned - 03 Mar 2024

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

You can use slots to stream HTML out of order!
Shane Parrish. Short-term patience podcast
- have a frame of reference to relate EVERY experience to. That helps you evaluate (measure) and learn. That’s part of what Charlie Munger’s lattice of frameworks is about
- when there is a very high or very low interest scenario, low interest scenario then go ultra long term. Issued hundred years when the interest rate regime was very low
- short term optimal is rally long term optimal. So you need to learn to take a loss and look like an idiot to play the long-term game
- grit is a behavior that enables long-term thinking. Short term success gives you the luxury to think about long term
- #IMP power is about optionality. It’s about being in a position where you have the options that can affect the positive change rather than circumstances controlling you. Read Robert greene’s book on the 48 laws of Power
- low leverage enables that
- begin with the end in mind. Always
- how do you think about risk? Well, things do happen. It’s as simple as that
- autonomy and decentralization helps derisk
- do more and more of what works. That’s a powerful way of compounding
- long-term investments are better than frequent trading because you get to reinvest the tax you otherwise would have paid. So unless the alternative is super compelling, stay invested
- if you need to be the person who DOES the thing, you delegate less, leverage list, compound less, because you have to DO. BE A PERSON WHO SETS THE FIELD INSTEAD. The coach, the chess master, the director, patient strategist who Waits for the good hit
Being in Control motivates #Lesson. my cycle tires were flat. I thought it was someone pulling out the air and felt very demotivated. But once I carried my cycle pump, I felt so much more in control and power and felt a whole lot better
SourceGraph is the default platform for private code completion & search
MetaVoice 1B offers voice cloning on American & British accents with 30s training
Qwen 1.5 72B appears to outperform Mistral Medium, making it one of the top non-proprietary models
Llava 1.6 is a substantial improvement over Llava 1.5 and slightly better than CogVLM, Qwen-VL
AI scams are growing. Deepfakes scammed $34m. But voice fake for kidnapping is scarier.
Buildspace’s demo is a great demo of how voice and actions can be used effectively.
demucs does an EXCELLENT job of splitting songs into drums, bass, vocals and others

Things I Learned - 24 Dec 2023

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

DPO is a simpler alternative to RLHF for fine-tuning. Several HuggingFace models use DPO for training
Name2Vec is a potential embedding for names.
Google Knowledge Graph ID powers the Knowledge Graph. If it begins with /m/ it’s the same as the FreeBase ID. This is now available as WikiData. e.g https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2671
I tried running Mixtral-8x7b locally (via Llamafile) and on together.ai. It’s good, but far from GPT 4.
Generic computate-intensive algorithms eventually beat domain-specific tuning, because of Moore’s law. Ref
The hidden brain podcast. the mystery of beauty
- Evolution drove us to beauty as an efficient survival mechanism. Understanding the world is one such mechanism. Hence we enjoy maths and chess
⭐ This leaderboard included paid models like GPT4 and Claude and compared them with open models on HUMAN + system benchmarks
Lez Friedman Podcast: Jeff Bezos
- Build stuff that is is ubiquitous that other people take it for granted. The initial idea needs to be that obvious and easy. Like one click purchase or customer reviews
- Build stuff that other people can build on. Internet makes startups possible. Infrastructure is about enabling others at scale
- Decision making approaches: single person decides on two way doors. Deliberate as a team on one way doors
- Conflict resolution: disagree and COMMIT. NO sniping, I told you so, malicious compliance. Avoid compromise. Avoid decision by attrition (most persistent wins).
- People are inherently biased towards hierarchy. So the senior most person should speak last
- We have a happiness bias. Contracted by choosing the unhappier options first
- The map is not the territory. The metric is not the objective. We need metrics. But make sure you know why
- See the world through the eyes of the customer. Use your own product. It’s living their lives that makes customer obsession real. Jeff Bezos called their own customer care to see how long the actual wait time was. It was much longer than the metric reported
- How to prioritize. whatever problems customers will still face in 10 years are the big problems. These are worth putting time into because they are stable in time
- People working on big problems will never get down to the small problems. So have a dedicated team that works only on the paper cuts. It should be a dedicated team
- We co evolve with our tools. We build tools and then our tools change us. It reprograms our brains
- Cut out 10 minutes to the beginning of each meeting for people to read the material. They never reread anyway. This makes the meetings more productive
- Powerpoint is designed for persuasion, not truth seeking. It is also easier for the author than for the reader. Prefer narratives that are focused on finding the truth and are easier for the audience though tougher for the author
⭐ whisper-standalone-win provides a Windows binary for Faster-Whisper. It just needs CUDA and cuDNN installed. Then whisper-faster.exe video.mkv --language=English --model=medium generates the transcript.
LLM use cases by Benedict Evans
- “Every text box on the internet will get an LLM”
- “Infinite interns”
- “Every UNIX function has become a company.” “Every ChatGPT suggestion…”
llm360 publishes models along with training datasets.
In The Age of AI has begun, Mar 2023, Bill Gates says, “In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.” The GUI (1980) and ChatGPT (2022).
Rubeus is a HTTP proxy for multiple LLMs with load-balancing, fallbacks and retries.
GPTRouter is a Python interface for multiple LLMs with fallbacks and retries.
⭐ Token Tally has an LLM Cost Tool that estimates GPU memory required and token cost across cloud providers.

Colour spaces

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:04:23 +0000

In reality, a colour is a combination of light waves with frequencies between 400-700THz, just like sound is a combination of sound waves with frequencies from 20-20000Hz. Just like mixing various pure notes produces a new sound, mixing various pure colours (like from a rainbow) produces new colours (like white, which isn’t on the rainbow.)

Our eyes aren’t like our ears, though. They have 3 sensors that are triggered differently by different frequencies. The sensors roughly peak around red, green and blue. Roughly.

It turns out that it’s possible to recreate most (not all) colours using a combination of just red, green and blue by mimicking these three sensors to the right level. That’s why TVs and monitors have red, blue and green cells, and we represent colours using hex triplets for RRGGBB – like #00ff00 (green).

There are a number of problems with this from a computational perspective. Conceptually, we think of (R, G, B) as a 3-dimensional cube. That’d mean that 100% red is about as bright as 100% green or blue. Unfortunately, green is a lot brighter than red, which is a lot brighter than blue. Our 3 sensors are not equally sensitive.

You’d also think that a colour that’s numerically mid-way between 2 colours should appear to be mid-way. Far from it.

This means that if you’re picking colours using the RGB model, you’re using something very far from the intuitive human way of perceiving colours.

Which is all very nice, but I’m usually in a rush. So what do I do?

I go to the Microsoft Office colour themes and use a colour picker to pick one. (I extracted them to make life easier.) These are generally good on the eye.
Failing that, I pick something from http://kuler.adobe.com/
Or I go to http://colorbrewer2.org/ and pick a set of colours
If I absolutely have to do things programmatically, I use the HCL colour scheme. The good part is it’s perceptually uniform. The bad part is: not every interpolation is a valid colour.

Comments

isomorphismes 13 Mar 2013 5:20 pm: What colours can’t be created by convex combinations of {R, G, B}? I mean within the visible spectrum.

Short notes

Wed, 20 May 2009 05:15:32 +0000

I’m quite busy on a project right now, and don’t get time to write long articles. So for a while, I’m going to stick to short notes on interesting stuff.

Peter Bregman has a very interesting piece on Why You Should Encourage Weakness. It boils down to a choice: do you focus on on improving strengths or minimising weaknesses? Conventional performance evaluations focus on the latter. I very strongly support Bregman’s view on this. The weakness isn’t why you hired the person! Unless it’s killing the organisation, just leave them to focus on their strengths.
Google Analytics has a fairly interesting API that I hadn’t explored until recently. Picked up [Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics](http://www.s-anand.net/amazon-browser.html#advanced web metrics with google analytics) and learnt that you can track outbound clicks, page load times, Javascript events and error logs, almost anything at all using Google Analytics. You can also mirror the logging on your local server using pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode()
The whole concept of a Sandbox environment seems to be picking up within Google. There’s a Checkout sandbox, an AJAX API playground, an AdWords sandbox, an AdSense API sandbox, the Mapstraction API sandbox, even an event called Developer Sandbox. (After saying Sandbox 6 times, I feel a bit like Hobbes.)

Google Chrome screenshots

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000

I went to the Google Chrome site.

Clicking on the “Accept and Install” button…

… automatically launched the downloader in Firefox…

… and (after a fairly short while) started installing the application directly. This may be the most painless install I’ve done in a while.

I clicked on “Customise the settings”

This is what it looks like.

And that’s it! It installs, and launches in just a few seconds. First impressions: the startup and rendering are really fast.

The address bar doubles up as a search bar. Very sensible.

Several nice features: incognito mode, application shortcuts, and developer tools.

The Javascript console has Javascript autocompletion! Watch out, Firebug.

The “Use DNS pre-fetching” looks interesting. My browsing certainly seems faster. Might be faster than Opera, even.

The “Show suggestions for navigation errors” feature.

There’s a task manager…

… that shows how much memory each site uses.

But not all is good. This jQuery animation on my site leaves trails behind.

And the text box resizing is good, but feels a bit… wrong, somehow.

Plus: I can re-import history, bookmarks, etc. from Firefox at any point, so I don’t have to worry about using this as a secondary browser.

Update (8am UK, 3rd Sep): Chrome.exe isn’t installed in your “Program Files” folder. It’s in your “Documents and Settings” folder, under “Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application”. (That’s on Windows XP. Not sure about Vista.)

There’s a Themes folder, so I imagine more themes should be on their way.

There doesn’t seem to be an about:config option. But there are a whole lot of others:

about:cache
about:dns
about:histograms
about:memory
about:plugins
about:stats
about:version
about:crash
about:internets
about:network
about:blank
about:shorthang
about:hang
about:objects

I’m not entirely sure if the last two work. Based on comments at John Resig’s blog. Go through the code to see if you can find more.

Comments

Sumit Dhar 11 Sep 2008 1:47 am: Have found an interesting use for “Incognito” mode. Both my wife and I use the same laptop to access Gmail. Not wanting to use a second browser, invariably one has to logout to allow the other to access mail.

With Chrome’s Incognito mode, it uses a different directory to store the cookies. This allows two or more people to login to their Gmail accounts in different tabs.

Cheers,
D.
S Anand 12 Sep 2008 1:19 am: But do sessions persist? I thought that once you switch to incognito mode, your cookies would no longer be sent to the server, and that you would need to at least log in. So while one person can stay logged in, the other would still need to log in. Is that right?

Krugle

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Krugle is a code search engine.

Comments

sheikh 14 Dec 2006 3:08 pm: Thank you anand, It was very useful

BBC Backstage

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 12:00:00 +0000

BBC seems to be doing good work for developers at BBC Backstage. Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph are among those involved.

code.google.com

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

code.google.com

Comments

ritzkini 24 Mar 2005 5:18 am: google rocks !!

BookWatch

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 12:00:00 +0000

A cool combination of the Amazon and Google APIs to BookWatch. (Incidentally, I downloaded the Amazon and Google APIs.)

Google API

Sat, 13 Apr 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Google has released a Beta API. Programmers, please do something with it. I honestly wish I had the time to use it, too!