The Patchworks editor is an interesting project using a 3x2 grid of code snippets to try to help developers navigate code more effectively.
30 second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGkGjZI21Mw
Preliminary study: https://austinhenley.com/pubs/Henley2014VLHCC_GC_Patchworks.pdf
In-depth study: https://www.cs.memphis.edu/~sdf/publications/Henley_et_al_VLHCC_2014.pdf
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I've been experimenting with LLM autoresearch. I prompted Sol to make difftastic faster without changing output on the test suite, and log everything it tried:
https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/c6e9c6fed4c71276a8b0e377c92695c3d929dc7f/PERF_RESEARCH_LOG.md
It found some interesting performance tweaks, although it's too tolerant of complexity.
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Compiler error messages is such a deep topic. Even in rustc, a mature compiler that invests effort in diagnostic quality, I find interesting issues every few months.
(The majority have been fixed pretty quickly, so it's really rewarding to file issues.)
nREPL is a really interesting protocol for developer tools. It's extensible, but one of the basic operations is eval().
If your nREPL server doesn't support a given operation, you can just send an eval request to achieve the same result!