This week, I learned:

  • Measuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4 is a framework for measuring developer productivity. It encapsulates other frameworks like DORA, SPACE, and DevEx.
  • Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code? A delightful exploration of how Claude 3.5 Sonnet keeps optimizing and adding features to improve code. My takeaway: repeatedly applying a prompt gives us interesting new directions to explore.
  • Wednesday comes from Wōdnesdæg - named after Odin (or Woden).
  • CLIProxyAPI seems a good way to allow any CLI coding agent (Codex, Claude Code, etc.) to work with any provider (e.g. Gemini, OpenRouter, etc.) The documentation needs a few more examples, but it’s usable.
    • mise x github:router-for-me/CLIProxyAPI -- cli-proxy-api starts a local server that proxies requests.
    • Create a config.yaml, update the keys, and configure your coding agent, e.g. Codex to use it.
    • It’s also a good way to see what prompts are being sent by the various harnesses.
  • smolagents is a new agents library from HuggingFace. It seems simple enough to use.
  • whisper-flow does real-time speech transcription!
  • Switchboard-1 is a labelled audio corpus with ~260 hours of speech. It has ~2,400 calls among 500+ speakers in the US.
  • Cloudflare tunnel is like ngrok but more permanent. It’s a bit more complex, too. But given CloudFlare’s liberal free tier, it’s a good, viable option for long-term local hosting.
  • John Wheeler: “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” A great way to understand how ignorance actually grows as you learn more.
  • justhtml is a fast enough pure Python fully HTML5 compliant library. For a faster, mostly compliant solution, html5-parser with lxml works.
  • There is little reason to use Redis. There are several clones you can use. Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
  • Every few years, something comes along trying to replace relational databases and SQL, and gets absorbed. YouTube
    • Key value stores. People soon realize they need more features, e.g. indices.
    • MapReduce systems. Most MapReduce vendors put SQL on top of SQL. Then the Hadoop market crashed. (But HDFS, S3, distributed storage systems are a good idea)
    • Document Databases. JSON. SQL absorbed that. SQLite 3.45+ supports even JSONB. DuckDB, of course, has JSON.
    • Column Databases. Again, these introduced SQL.
    • Graph Databases. SQL:2023 introduced graph queries via SQL/PGQ (Property Graph Queries). DuckPGQ beats Neo4J
    • Array Databases. SQL:2023 adds SQL/MDA which allows for matrix operations. But specialized databases might make sense in this category.
    • Vector Databases. Every DB is adding support for this.
  • TheAgentCompany is a benchmark of real-world tasks like:
  • Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez - Redis) finds DeepSeek v3 comparable with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. YouTube
    • He also passed a paper and his code to compare them. A useful prompt. YouTube