Posts from 2026 - Wilfred miniblog

Apr 22, 2026

AI agents (OpenClaw, Hermes Agent etc) seem to be increasingly standardising their design. You have a UI for the markdown files writable by the agent (sometimes just Obsidian) plus a set of CLI tools for performing actions. I've seen so many new CLIs recently too.

Apr 20, 2026

LLMs are surprisingly good at reducing crash samples. I've had success with "this project crashes my static analysis tool with the following command, try to shrink the repro whilst preserving the crash. Commit each smaller version to a branch".

Apr 20, 2026

Has the JS ecosystem reached a point where people agree roughly what a good architecture looks like? I don't see as many blog posts complaining about new framework churn and I'm wondering why.

Apr 3, 2026

Rust and RISC-V both feel like they've reached critical mass and I'd guess that they'll be used more in 5 years than they are today. What other technologies fit this description?

Apr 2, 2026

Some excellent safety improvements in C++26: hardening the standard library against out-of-bounds bugs, and a safer semantics for uninitialised local variables:

C++26 is done! — Trip report: March 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (London Croydon, UK) – Sutter’s Mill

Apr 2, 2026

LLMs have been really helpful for me porting some JS projects to TS. Since the types are erased and annotations are optional, I can go gradually and safely with more minimal human oversight. (I'm not sure if it'll significantly help robustness, but it's lovely for navigation.)

Apr 1, 2026

Reviewing some of my earliest web projects: they have a mix of Postgres, MySQL and Mongo. These days I just use sqlite for all my personal projects. It's really good at my scale and makes deploying very easier.

Mar 29, 2026

The author of rust-analyzer discussing how language features help or hinder fast IDEs. If you allow `from m import *` you can't analyse files in isolation, and it's even harder in Rust.

Against Query Based Compilers

Query based compilers are all the rage these days, so it feels only appropriate to chart some treacherous shoals in those waters.

Mar 23, 2026

My 3.5yo is learning to use a mouse, and it's super interesting. He's mastered clicks and drags, but he hasn't yet figured out lifting up the mouse when run out of mouse pad. That's a tricky case where you deliberately break the relationship between mouse and cursor movement.

Mar 22, 2026

I'm surprised there aren't more tools out there for starting a new project with some default config files. There's `cargo new` but it's Rust specific and very minimal. create-react-app is React specific. The only option I know of is cookiecutter. Surely it's a common problem?

Mar 20, 2026

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Excellent series on Self, both the programming model and the tool chain. I love how opening an inspector on a value (e.g. nil) then shows a link to all occurrences of the value in other open inspectors!

Environment and the programming language Self (part one; environment)

I bring you a message about a language that has been at the birth of many others, but almost no one knows it. A rumor of a graphical environment offering options like no other, but almost no one using it. I also bring information about a virtual machine supporting reflection almost to infinity, reaching almost half of the operating power of C in numerical calculations in its time, yet today forgotten.

Mar 18, 2026

I'm experimenting with imitating window UI elements when showing code snippets on my website. What do you think? Do the familiar dots of the title bar help, or is it just confusing decoration? First image is the current style, the second image has the window UI.

Mar 18, 2026

I've started naming my servers digiocean1.example.com, digiocean2.example.com and so on. I wish I'd done this much earlier. I already have domain names for the actual deployed services, but it quickly gets confusing when you start moving things around.

Mar 17, 2026

I'm adding uptime data to my personal LLM bot. Does this information belong in the system prompt? That was my initial plan, but I'm thinking that a tool would be better. Tools let me see information provenance ("queried the uptime tool"). There's also a small caching benefit.

Mar 16, 2026

I've released difftastic 0.68! A smaller update, but still worth upgrading: * Improved Bash, C, Go, Lua, Nix, Perl, Python, Rust, Scala, Swift and YAML parsing. * Minor display and git compatibility fixes.

Release 0.68.0 · Wilfred/difftastic

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes. Git Support Fixed an issue where git with difftastic would ter...

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Showing 31-45 of 83 posts