Tying in benchmark evals into LLM RF seems to be making the latest models very good at convincing me that it was successful at completing my ask. I have to look pretty carefully to notice the logical leaps or bad assumptions.

I'm just excited about how much easier it will be to diagnose user issues now that we can open up the prompts that it used.

Visual Studio Code@vscode.dev · last yr.

Today, we're announcing plans to make VS Code an open source AI editor. We believe AI development should stay true to VS Code's core principles: open, collaborative, and community-driven. Let's build the future of software development together. aka.ms/open-source-...

AI in code editors opened up so many new feature possibilities that I finally managed to think up a useful vs code extension that didn't already exist: Generate debug log point messages with Logpoint Generator. marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...

love these new completions.

Visual Studio Code@vscode.dev · last yr.

Introducing the next evolution of completions in GitHub Copilot: Next Edit Suggestions (preview). Learn more: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/02/12/next-edit-suggestions

I'm still working through the "Crafting Compilers" book. I spent at least an hour trying to figure out why my C program was returning something like 3.67e-307 for every value I was trying to store in a byte array. After adding a bunch of printf statements to debug, it just suddenly started working.

PSA - 6 years old is a great time to be introduced to Star Wars. I'm through the original trilogy and episode I with my daughter, and she is loving it. Seeing her reaction to "I am your father" was very satisfying.

Give Copilot another shot if you already used up your trial period early on. It has improved quite a bit and a free tier is now available.

Visual Studio Code@vscode.dev · 2y ago

Announcing GitHub Copilot Free! A new free tier for GitHub Copilot, available for everyone today in VS Code. No trial. No subscription. No credit card required. Learn more in our blog: aka.ms/copilot-free

Me trying to step away from #AdventOfCode to regain several hours of my day.

I don't understand why rust gets such an exceptional amount of love in those SO dev surveys. The learning curve feels so steep with all that syntax and the ownership restrictions. I'm still willing to slog my way through as I learn it, but why does it appeal so widely?

I finished #AdventOfCode day 13, but damn, I don't remember linear algebra being that tricky

I love when the #AdventOfCode problems become time constrained because you see how powerful optimization can be - My solution went from not finishing after waiting for around a minute to 71 ms after optimization. my solution: github.com/amunger/adve...

I really appreciate it when humor is mixed into technical books, and Crafting Interpreters delivers well on that.

I'm through part 2 of Crafting Interpreters and I even added arrays to the language for the jlox tree-walk interpreter as the final challenge exercise. I wasn't sure how much I was picking up while reading through, but adding my own feature really helped cement the material in my mind.

If you want copilot auto-completions for the tedious stuff, but don't want it when thinking through your #AdventOfCode solution. You can make a keybinding to toggle it on and off with the "Toggle" extension from @rebornix.com

#AdventOfCode day 5: modified bubble sort to the rescue!

Are there stats for how far people make it through advent of code each year? I'd be interested to see the trend as AI tools become more ubiquitous

I was initially disturbed by importing functions in typescript and using them as if they were local but have grown comfortable with it. Now I can't stand seeing a class member used within the class without using prefixing with "this".

You sometimes discover that a "bad practice" in software can actually be perfectly suited for a specific case. The latest one for me was using exceptions for control flow to implement return statements while reading Crafting Interpreters.

If a command isn't doing quite what you would expect in vs code, but you can't convince the developers to change the behavior, you might be able to adjust it yourself by combining commands in a custom key binding.

So we have this VS Code extension API for building Copilot Chat extensions: code.visualstudio.com/api/extensio... and a bunch of chat extensions have been published over the past 6 months. Sweet! 💯

Chat extensions

A guide to creating an AI extension in Visual Studio Code

code.visualstudio.com

A top QOL improvement for working on a11y features is NVDA's speech viewer: right click the taskbar item -> tools -> speech viewer. Not being a screen reader user myself, I find the audible narration incredibly distracting, and this way I can turn the narration volume to 0 and still test a11y.

I still remember my first post on Reddit, replying to an r/explainbothsides post about UBI. It seemed pretty innocuous, but the OP apparently looked through my profile and replied with "What a strange first post!" and I still can't figure out why.