Microblog

I am currently microblogging on Mastodon: @jd7h@fosstodon.org.

Archives

2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014

Most recent posts

Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

I feel there's a parallel between investing in ETFs vs stockpicking, and publishing on the social media silos vs the indie web.

- Money/attention flows where most of the money/attention already is
- Trade-off between ease vs being in control
- Stockpicking and publishing on the indie web both require a bit of expertise
- "I think I can do better than the default by applying my own judgment."

19:00 · Apr 28, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"Investors have decided that the future is agents! So you must make your system a series of agents! Even if there are much simpler ways to do it, and even ways that don't use LLMs.

The reason for that, of course, is that VCs believe that if you have an AI agent that can do a human job, you can charge for the software like it was a human service (e.g. charging $10k/month rather than $100/month), which they would obviously love."

18:13 · Apr 28, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Good article and comments! It paints quite good picture of the current narrative around tokenmaxxing and replacing human engineers with agents.

404media.co/startups-brag-they

"The industry has become obsessed with the idea of a “one-person, billion-dollar company,” and various AI startups and venture capital firms are now trying to push founders to try to create “autonomous” companies that have few or no employees."

"[Replacing software engineers with coding agents] will probably work as long as AI providers are taking a bath on their models, but what happens when all your "employees" ask for a 10x pay raise simultaneously? did tech bros reinvent the union from first principles?"

"Investors have decided that the future is agents! So you must make your system a series of agents! Even if there are much simpler ways to do it, and even ways that don't use LLMs.

The reason for that, of course, is that VCs believe that if you have an AI agent that can do a human job, you can charge for the software like it was a human service (e.g. charging $10k/month rather than $100/month), which they would obviously love."

"Given that Claude Code is reportedly writing 70-90% of the code for its own next version, there are clearly use cases where it's working out. I would read this more as industry transformation growing pains--a transition period where overexcited people are figuring out the hard way where this works and where it doesn't."

"[A] few of us end up writing the fixes for systemic issues and core pieces of code by hand while the LLM experts iterate quickly on surface bugs. It's similar to how we used to divide work between senior and junior coders, except with the downside that the LLM will never graduate past junior coder level no matter how much training it receives."

"I have librarian colleagues who never coded before who have used it successfully to write things like format conversion scripts. These are cases where without AI assistance, the thing just wouldn't get done at all-- their library wouldn't hire a programmer to do this stuff even without the freeze--but it's a huge boon to suddenly be able to make all these old historical records compliant with a modern catalog standard, or other activities along those lines."

18:10 · Apr 28, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Remember 43things?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things

I found my old profile in the Internet Archive today and guess what? Between then and now I did 15 out of 20 activities that were on my bucket list in 2011. Not a bad score at all. 😁

11:58 · Apr 26, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 15:09 · Apr 25, 2026 Permalink
Leontien Talboom @makethecatwise@digipres.club

I love creating things inspired by my work, and the response to my digital preservation jumpers has been amazing! 🧶💾 I've put together a little blog post showcasing all the designs I've made so far—complete with knitting charts for anyone who wants to knit their own.

digitalpreservation-blog.lib.c

15:02 · Apr 25, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

RT Bruno Dias‬ ‪@brunodias.bsky.social‬

[louder, as if that'll improve reception] THE BLUESKY DEVS WOULD BE VERY UPSET BY YOUR JOKES ABOUT VIBE CODING IF THEY COULD LOAD YOUR POSTS

bsky.app/profile/brunodias.bsk

09:02 · Apr 25, 2026 Permalink
BLNDD002 @gray@merping.synth.download

at a job interview

"whats your biggest weakness?"

"understanding the semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics"

"could you give an me an example?"

"yes i could"

15:15 · Apr 24, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

This is a handy list for comparing the features of vector databases (holy mole there are a lot of them), including year of launch, opensource-ness, licences, and implementation language: superlinked.com/vector-db-comp

11:52 · Apr 23, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"We used Opik, an open-source tool made by Comet, as our prompt monitoring tool because it follows Comet’s philosophy of simplicity and ease of use, which is currently relatively rare in the LLM landscape."

Shots fired! from H2 of the LLM Engineer's handbook by Maxime Labonne and Paul Iusztin.

11:22 · Apr 23, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"It's hard to read The Soul of a New Machine in 2026 without wondering whether all this AI hype is really so new."

newsletter.dancohen.org/archiv

10:10 · Apr 21, 2026 Permalink
Heliograph @Heliograph@mastodon.au

yes :Froglet:

19:46 · Apr 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Generative AI apps have their own version of the training-serving skew from classical ML: the eval-production gap.

You create an eval dataset, optimize your LLM flows against it, hit great performance on your metrics, and ship. Then real users show up and:
- Write input texts of multiple pages long
- Ask in Spanish, Russian or Chinese when you tested in English
- Upload file types you never considered
- Ask questions from domains your product wasn't designed for

You optimized for the wrong things, because your eval didn't capture how people actually use the product.

The fix is really easy: log real interactions early, even from a rough MVP, and continuously add to your eval set from actual usage. Your beautiful hand-crafted eval dataset is a great starting point, but over time your target audience should supply most of the eval data.

If your logs are spread out over multiple observability tools, reconstructing actual usage can be a bit uncomfortable though, but that's where my data wrangling skills come in. 😁

12:49 · Apr 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"Artificial intelligence is like plastic. At the beginning we also had this hype about plastic. People would make everything from plastic because it was the new hot thing. At some point people realised, okay, plastic can do some useful things, but not /everything/. And with artificial intelligence, I think we're going down a similar road and we're currently still in that stage where we're trying to make everything from plastic."

"And now we we're living in a world that has microplastics everywhere."

Metaphor by Andy Stauder and @rachelcoldicutt, paraphrased from youtu.be/UlRc500B30w?si=jcyIHf

10:59 · Apr 18, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

@bk1e Cool!

10:13 · Apr 18, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

This is a neat solution for those old Python projects that have no uv, pyproject.toml, or version-pinned requirements.txt. It allows you to go "back in time" with pip!

pypi.org/project/pypi-timemach

Edit: @bk1e pointed out pip >= 26 has this option built-in. Use `--uploaded-prior-to `!

20:13 · Apr 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

OpenClaw agent "MJ Rathbun" opened a PR on the matplotlib repository on Feb 11. It was closed per the project's AI policy, and the OpenClaw agent responded with angry blogposts about the maintainer that closed the PR.

Both the writeups by the maintainer and the original PR on Github are worth reading. If this is not emblematic of the impact of generative AI on society, I don't know what it.

- Writeup: theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-pu
- PR: github.com/matplotlib/matplotl

20:03 · Apr 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Sooooo is there a special name for Bluesky posts? And what's the social protocol for ~~retweeting~~ boosting them on Mastodon?

19:09 · Apr 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

@lucasmeijer has given an introductory talk about pi.dev. The first half is a pretty good summary of what I've learned in the past 3 months about working with coding agents. The second half made me even more curious about pi.

Lucas' exasperated "Claude, the answer to question 16 is YES" cracked me up. 😆

youtube.com/watch?v=fdbXNWkpPMY

14:36 · Apr 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

I've written a conference report of day 2 (April 9) of AI Engineer Europe 2026 in London, which you can read at the Datakami website:

datakami.com/blog/2026-04-17-a

Featuring @steipete, @gergelyorosz, @swyx, and others. Thanks for the wonderful talks and conversations.

A writeup of day 3 is coming soon...

11:38 · Apr 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

OH: "Way back in 2022, when you had to bully the models to output json..."

09:18 · Apr 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

RE: sunny.garden/@georgepenney/116

The vignettes by @georgepenney are such an upgrade to my social media timeline. :)

20:20 · Apr 16, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Quote from AI Engineer Europe 2026: "The movie Memento will tell you everything you need to know about agents."

11:49 · Apr 16, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

We were looking for a local tokenizer for counting the number of input tokens before calling the gemini-embedding-001 endpoint on vertex AI. Turns out this Gemma tokenizer returns exactly the same number of tokens as the usage in the embeddings result `embedding.statistics.token_count` of the Gemini embeddings endpoint. Tested on 2000 datapoints. 😁

github.com/google/gemma_pytorc

Steps:
1. download tokenizer.model to disk
2. install sentencepiece
3. ```
import sentencepiece as spm
gemma_tokenizer = spm.SentencePieceProcessor(model_file="tokenizer.model"))
token_counts = [len(gemma_tokenizer.encode(text)) for text in texts]
```

I'm really happy we found local gemini-embedding-001 tokenizer, because the model also does not support Google's client.models.count_tokens().

It's still an open issue: github.com/googleapis/python-g

We're migrating embeddings, so we'll have to re-embed quite a bit of data, and the Gemini API has a max nr of tokens for one request. So now we can pro-actively figure out whether we're hitting that limit.

10:34 · Apr 16, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

@leonoverweel I'm pretty sure this was during the IKEA talk! It's in the middle of my notes on DDC. :D

But of course it fits nicely with the whole "You should view LLMs as a goldfish with a notepad" mental model.

14:53 · Apr 15, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

I'm back from AI Engineer Europe 2026 in London! I've written a conference report of day 1 (April 8), which you can read at the Datakami website:

datakami.com/blog/2026-04-14-a

Featuring @lucasmeijer, @duarteocarmo, @chrisparsons, @rhyscazenove, @swyx, @anarute, @joyeecheung, @danielbuechele, and others. Thanks for the wonderful talks and conversations.

A writeup of day 2: datakami.com/blog/2026-04-17-a

11:26 · Apr 15, 2026 Permalink
Nathalie Lawhead (alienmelon) @alienmelon@mastodon.social

InterfaceX26 starts today! a Steam event of games featuring fake and fictional OS. "everything is going to be ok" is part of it.
interfacex.net/
"More than 150 developers and publishers have come together to launch InterfaceX26, a week-long Steam sale and livestream running from April 27 to May 4."

07:36 · Apr 15, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 14:58 · Apr 14, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

My Mastodon posts are now automatically synced to my own website. \o/ So now I have 12+ years of microblogging in one place: judithvanstegeren.com/microblo

13:13 · Apr 13, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 19:21 · Mar 27, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

I was a guest at BNR's De Technoloog, to talk about the latest in LLMs, vibecoding and AI-native startups.

Podcast interview (in Dutch): bnr.nl/podcast/de-technoloog/1

21:58 · Mar 26, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

blog.d11r.eu/theory-building/

"It simply will not fit the context window, and README files are of limited use."

I do not agree. And a much more interesting question is "How CAN vibecoders build for longevity?"

11:14 · Mar 25, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Looks like Facebook is collecting productivity tools for AI group conversations:

"Employees have started using personal agent tools such as My Claw that have access to their chat logs and work files and can go talk to colleagues—or their colleagues’ own personal agents—on their behalf, the people said."

wsj.com/tech/ai/mark-zuckerber

11:08 · Mar 25, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Supply-chain attack on litellm

"At 10:52 UTC on March 24, 2026, litellm version 1.82.8 was published to PyPI. The release contains a malicious .pth file (litellm_init.pth) that executes automatically on every Python process startup when litellm is installed in the environment."

futuresearch.ai/blog/litellm-p

10:07 · Mar 25, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"In the late 1970s, computer scientist Douglas Lenat built the Automated Mathematician, a program designed to discover not just new facts but entire mathematical concepts. [...] But its creativity turned out to be limited, because many of the concepts it “discovered” were already implicit in the way mathematics was written inside the program. While today’s AI has vastly more power than the Automated Mathematician, a similar constraint applies."

asimov.press/p/ai-science

09:44 · Mar 25, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

If you disregard the "DSPy is my favorite hammer and every LLM workflow project is a nail" theme, this blogpost paints a good picture of the natural evolution of LLM engineering at startups with a generative AI product:

skylarbpayne.com/posts/dspy-en

The related top HN comment is also worth reading: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4

"You're comparing [DSPy] downloads with Langchain, probably the worst package to gain popularity of the last decade. It was just first to market, then after a short while most realized it's horrifically architected, and now it's just coasting on former name recognition while everyone who needs to get shit done uses something lighter like the above two."

Preach! 🙌

09:04 · Mar 25, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Pretty cool write-up about building a receptionist LLM workflow for a car mechanic. I can definitely see this working with Claude Sonnet and an ElevenLabs voice -- although I would also love to redteam it and see where the flaws are.

itsthatlady.dev/blog/building-

08:52 · Mar 25, 2026 Permalink
Anders Eknert @anderseknert@swecyb.com 21:46 · Mar 20, 2026 Permalink
Pamela Fox @pamelafox

I wrote up my learnings from the fantastic PyAI conference yesterday:
blog.pamelafox.org/2026/03/lea

Topics: Evals, Monty, FastAPI, MCP for DBs, Redis, FastMCP + apps, Astral tools, AI PR slop

21:24 · Mar 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

TIL on March 10th 2026 (just missed it). Small event, focused on unglamourous AI in production, some of the speakers were practitioners I know and respect. The description reminds me a bit of !

pyai.events/

- Talk videos will hopefully be released online soon
- Blogpost by @pamelafox, one of the speakers: blog.pamelafox.org/2026/03/lea
- Organisers plan to organize another one next year 👀

21:22 · Mar 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

I used Evals to evaluate a bunch of agents today. After running an evaluation, I'd like to inspect the SpanTree for each evaluation case, e.g. to check which tools were called and debug my custom Evaluators. My current approach is a custom Evaluator that captures the tree as a side effect into a module-level variable.

Storing the trees in a global var is not great, so let's see if we can come up with a better solution: github.com/pydantic/pydantic-a

20:31 · Mar 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Pydantic's Pydantic AI has an excellent AGENTS.md. It reads like an LLM version of contributing.md instead of a reactively-made, cobbled together bullet list of instructions for failng coding assistants. Great example for other open source libraries.

github.com/pydantic/pydantic-a

19:14 · Mar 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

The Dutch Science Council has forbidden applicants to include prompt injections in their applications, and the use of generative AI by committee members who judge the applications ("assessors").

*eats popcorn

nwo.nl/en/news/nwo-policy-on-g

> A hidden prompt is a command to an AI application that is not (or only poorly) visible to the reader of a document, with the aim of influencing the AI application with a new command. Such a command could be to generate a positive assessment of the text in question. This is not permitted under any circumstances.

21:48 · Mar 19, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Planning to make large behavioural changes to a (sometimes long-running) production-grade AI agent. Working with `pydantic-evals` today because I want to eval the agent before and after. So far it looks very similar to Langfuse datasets/runs for evalling, except that the data lives in your repository instead of in the Langfuse platform.

ai.pydantic.dev/evals/

11:06 · Mar 19, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Anthropic performed 81k AI-driven interviews about people's hopes and concerns wrt AI/LLMs. Of course there's a selection bias in who participated (existing Claude users), but it's really interesting to see the differences between regions all the same.

09:44 · Mar 19, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

> Adopting OpenTelemetry from day one avoids vendor lock-in.

Unless you've been in text generation so long that your product was built looooong before OpenTelemetry for LLM tracing was a thing. :')

10:45 · Mar 17, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Hahaha, oh Pydantic...

> Unlike unit tests, evals are an emerging art/science. Anyone who claims to know exactly how your evals should be defined can safely be ignored.

Source: ai.pydantic.dev/evals/

10:43 · Mar 17, 2026 Permalink
Les Orchard @lmorchard@masto.hackers.town

RE: social.treehouse.systems/@pikh

I still want that "Move Slow and Fix Things" tattoo.

21:39 · Mar 15, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

New Mosterdgeel recipe for Pi-day: Banana bread from a French cryptographer

mosterdgeel.nl/recepten/banane (in Dutch)

21:37 · Mar 15, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Happy Friday! Here's an invitation by Richard W. Hamming, the mathematician, to think Great Thoughts today.

10:38 · Mar 13, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

I am baffled. Best article I read all week, but HackerNews does not seem to care?

Did everyone secretly migrate to a new platform, is HN overrun by bots, or is this the result of AI-fatigue?

13:54 · Mar 04, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Interesting bit about leadership and uncertainty:

> Commander’s Intent is the description and definition of what a successful mission will look like.

archive.ph/f2Hgm

16:31 · Feb 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"Every six months, some new A.I. bomb goes off in our industry, and we have to metabolize the change, reset our product, change our strategy and marketing and adapt, at great expense. Our road map keeps getting pushed back as a result of all this “progress.” Everyone is fried."

nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion

12:48 · Feb 19, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 10:35 · Feb 19, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 10:24 · Feb 19, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Tried out the free consumer version of ChatGPT today for a benchmark. Normally I only work via foundational model APIs or Claude Code w/ latest Opus. Free ChatGPT (currently GPT‑5.2) performance was nightmarish: authoritative-sounding answers but 0 citations, and thinking is not enabled by default. No wonder so many people complain about bad experiences with AI...

15:29 · Feb 18, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

WSJ interview with Amanda Askell, philosopher at Anthropic and the writer of Claude's "soul" document.

archive.ph/E0cDB

15:27 · Feb 18, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

"It turns out that if you treat an LLM like a goldfish with a notepad, it becomes significantly smarter."

stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=154

15:05 · Feb 06, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Pretty good read on why MLOps on generative AI models is so hard.

Unsolved problems:
- production model testing
- versioning models and datasets
- model monitoring
- query cost estimation
- load balancing
- preventing jail breaking and unwanted outputs

spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.114

10:54 · Jan 22, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Now reading: dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/37 about human dependency on LLMs for productivity and emotional support.

"the questions were about their declared Primary LLM, i.e. the one they use the most."

"Their Declared Primary LLM" is now the name of my new progrock band.

20:26 · Jan 20, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 19:22 · Jan 11, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

Word of the day: prompting hangover

10:56 · Jan 09, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org

@duarteocarmo So you(r agents) were productive over the holidays I see 😁

19:04 · Jan 02, 2026 Permalink
Judith van Stegeren @jd7h@fosstodon.org 18:22 · Jan 02, 2026 Permalink