Pretty dang common. OS X and macOS (and maybe iOS and iPadOS, though I'm not certain) have been autocorrecting "--" into "—" for over a decade. Windows users have been using Alt codes for them since approximately forever ago: https://superuser.com/q/811318.
Typography nerds, which are likely overrepresented on HN, love both em dash and en dash, and we especially love knowing when to use each. Punctation geeks, too! If you know what an octothorp or an interrobang are, you've probably been using em dashes for a long time.
Folks who didn't know what an em dash was by name are now experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon en masse. I've literally had to disable my "--" autocorrect just to not be accused of using an LLM when writing. It's annoying.
> the person writing the prompts knows what a quality solution looks like at a technical level and is reviewing the output as they go
That is exactly what I recommend, and it works like a charm. The person also has to have realistic expectations for the LLM, and be willing to work with a simulacrum that never learns (as frustrating as it seems at first glance).
> To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.
> Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is.
Those of us building are having so much fun we aren't slowing down to write think pieces.
I don't mean this flippantly. I'm a blogger. I love writing! But since a brief post on December 22 I haven't blogged because I have been too busy implementing incredible amounts of software with AI.
Between Christmas and New Year's Day I was on vacation, so I had plenty of time. Since then, it's only been nights & weekends (and some early mornings and lunch breaks).
RatatuiRuby is pretty new still: its beta launch was Jan 20. Octobox's TUI is built on it [0], and Sidekiq is using it to build theirs [1].
I believe they'll be maintainable long-term, as they've got extensive tests and documentation, and I built a theory of the program [2] on the Ruby side of it as I reviewed and guided the agent's work.
I am getting feedback from users, the largest of which drove the creation of (and iteration upon) Rooibos. As a rendering library, RatatuiRuby doesn't do much to guide the design or architecture of an application. Rooibos is an MVU/TEA framework [3] to do exactly that.
Tokra is basically a tech demo at this stage, [4] so (hopefully) no users yet.
> Friction_cost is the energy lost to errors, retries, and misunderstandings when actually using the tool. [...] if the tool is very low friction, agents will revel in it like panthers in catnip, as I’ll discuss in the Desire Paths section.
This is why I think Ruby is such a great language for LLMs. Yeah, it's token-efficient, but that's not my point [0]. The DWIM/TIMTOWTDI [1] culture of Ruby libraries is incredible for LLMs. And LLMs help to compound exactly that.
For example, I recently published a library, RatatuiRuby [2], that feeds event objects to your application. It includes predicates like `event.a?` for the "a" key, and `event.enter?` for the Enter key. When I was implementing using the library, I saw the LLM try `event.tilde?`, which didn't exist. So... I added it! And dozens more [3]. It's great for humans and LLMs, because the friction of using it just disappears.
EDIT: I see that this was his later point exactly! FTA:
> What I did was make their hallucinations real, over and over, by implementing whatever I saw the agents trying to do [...]
[0]: Incidentally, Matz's static typing design, RBS, keeps it even more token-efficient as it adds type annotations. The types are in different files than the source code, which means they don't have to be loaded into context. Instead, only static analysis errors get added to context, which saves a lot of tokens compared to inline static types.
[1]: Do What I Mean / There Is More Than One Way To Do It
I'd love to hear more about those inconsistencies. Would you be willing to share?
I built RatatuiRuby recently, and I'm currently building Rooibos, its MVU framework to compete with BubbleTea. I'd love to avoid repeating Charm's mistakes.
What do you recommend if I've been regularly producing blog-length posts in Slack for years, no LLM present? It's where I write man...should I quit that out? I try to be information dense...
Typography nerds, which are likely overrepresented on HN, love both em dash and en dash, and we especially love knowing when to use each. Punctation geeks, too! If you know what an octothorp or an interrobang are, you've probably been using em dashes for a long time.
Folks who didn't know what an em dash was by name are now experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon en masse. I've literally had to disable my "--" autocorrect just to not be accused of using an LLM when writing. It's annoying.
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