Attention Berlin people: On August 10 (next Monday), I'm co-hosting a meetup with Hugo and Jodie @t-redactyl.bsky.social at @jetbrains.com 🚀 Featuring: agents, agentic NLP, coding assistants and lightning talks. See you there! 📆 Mon, Aug 10, 6–9 pm 📍 JetBrains, Berlin ✅ RSVP: luma.com/agmd8ie4

I gave a talk on "Build-to-own AI: Agentic Development for Humans" at PyCon Armenia: how coding agents change the way we build ML systems and why code and programmable interfaces matter more than ever, not less. Here's the whole thing as a thread 🧵 (1/18)

In Yerevan, Armenia, for PyCon Armenia & PyData Yerevan! I'm giving the opening keynote on Friday (tomorrow) and will be talking about "build-to-own AI", agentic development for humans, and how to use AI to build better AI. Looking forward to seeing everyone and exploring Yerevan on my day off ✨

📣 Attention Prodigy users: If you're already using Prodigy for annotation, we've put together a page on how our new tool and platform Ellf can help you scale up and automate your data development projects. beta.ellf.ai/prodigy

Some thoughts on how to do beta testing well, the importance of building things and using your own tools, and what we're currently doing:

Want to be a beta partner of our upcoming product for agentic NLP? We're looking for teams who need help with their NLP projects, especially around tasks like information extraction. Ellf is a virtual assistant for NLP projects – think Claude Code, but with NLP superpowers, or "Vibe NLP" ✨

Open-source projects should stop making the public project repo a Pypi trusted publisher. Configure the public repo's CI to make a release with all the wheels and other release artefacts attached. Then configure a private repo to do the publication. GHA is really easy to mess up and get pwned.

A self-replicating thing doesn’t have to be very smart to cause major problems. Generally we can plan ahead though, and contain the damage. Well, we could do that. In theory. Or we could spice things up a bit. Maybe run some bat-licking ecotours instead. Why not? honnibal.dev/blog/clownpo...

The looming AI clownpocalypse · honnibal.dev

Exploits will soon be cheaper to develop autonomously than they earn. What then?

honnibal.dev

honnibal.dev/blog/suffering

LLMs don't suffer · honnibal.dev

The "LLM welfare" question provokes a lot of uncertainty in people, but it really shouldn't. The analogy between LLM computations and what we view as morally relevant experiences is very loose.

honnibal.dev

I guess my socials are way more tech focussed than my...social, so maybe this take gets kind of a "duh" here. Not sure. But: Why I don't think AI is a bubble honnibal.dev/blog/ai-bubble (basically an argument that LLM progress probably won't plateau. Not a finance guy)

Why I don't think AI is a bubble · honnibal.dev

Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

honnibal.dev

Basic take I know, but "the information stays on ChatGPT" and "the information is used to decide which ads to serve" are not compatible statements.

If your tests ever find anything interesting, Claude Code will challenge you to a little contest-of-wills where it tries to cope, rationalise or lie egregiously to avoid fixing the problem. I call this minigame 'sneaky quokka'. honnibal.dev/blog/sneaky-...

Sneaky quokka: Testing and debugging with LLMs · honnibal.dev

Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

honnibal.dev

Style (and mindset) tips for less experienced developers working with AI honnibal.dev/blog/llm-sty...

Style tips for less experienced developers coding with AI · honnibal.dev

Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

honnibal.dev

I've been working on a post on LLM-assisted coding, and I guess I've built up a bunch of writer's debt, because it turns out there's a bunch of tangents I wanted to write up first. One really concrete thing that came up is try/except usage -- so, here's the post. honnibal.dev/blog/try-exc...

Exception handlers are not general-purpose conditionals · honnibal.dev

Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

honnibal.dev

I feel like my Claude Code got a lot worse after I made some grumpy changes to my system prompt. I was annoyed that it kept trying to condition around invalid data instead of failing and fixing the data at the source, so I added some instructions to the prompt that were maybe too blunt. However...

I'm back from a busy four days in London! 💜 I had a great time at @pydatalondon.bsky.social‬ and you can read my recap and highlights here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Hi Berlin people! @hugobowne.bsky.social is in town & we're celebrating by hosting a meetup together 🎉 This one is all about building with AI & we'll also open the floor for lightning talks. If you're around, come hang out with us! 📆 June 16, 18:00 📍 Native Instruments (Kreuzberg) 🎟️ lu.ma/d53y9p2u

Back to streaming spaCy! Working on Python 3.13 compatibility today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgjQ...

Streaming spaCy (May 19, 2025): Working on Python 3.13 compatibility

YouTube video by Explosion

youtube.com

Another great @pyconde.bsky.social is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and feel very inspired! ⚡ Here are my personal highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

My friend @hugobowne.bsky.social launched new course on Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers! I'll be joining for a guest lecture on human-in-the-loop development and distillation workflows. You can get 10% off with my code + lots of perks: maven.com/hugo-stefan/...

I don't normally write advice columns but this question I got deserved its own post: With all the hype around Generative AI, how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that are better, easier and cheaper? explosion.ai/blog/modular...

So many good events coming up this season. Here's my schedule – hope to see you there! Apr 10: data:unplugged (Münster) Apr 23: @pyconde.bsky.social (Darmstadt) May 31: @pyconit.bsky.social (Bologna) Jun 5: ECONDAT (London) Jun 7-8: @pydatalondon.bsky.social (London) 📆 Details: explosion.ai/events

@explosion-ai.bsky.social Only the best companies will send you stickers if you are a fan and beg for them! Thank you so much, Ines and Matt!!!!

New case study: How Love Without Sound built innovative AI-powered tools for the music industry and law firms, and helped publishers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for artists. explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

Out now: Prodigy v1.18! New features include: ✍️ edit text during span annotation 💬 fully custom UI translations 🎛️ new JavaScript events and functions ✅ various small fixes and docs More details: prodi.gy/docs/changelog

These are the kinds of NLP stories I love! TFW you "accidentally" train a great 2 MB (!) task-specific model 🤯 @strickvl.bsky.social

Look what arrived in the mail today! 🎉 This is the 2nd edition of "Mastering spaCy" by Duygu Altinok and Déborah Mesquita, featuring how to build structured NLP solutions with custom components, and updated content on using models powered by LLMs. You can get it here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVBTX2BL

spaCy development live stream continues today! Today I'll be looking at getting Confection updated, to allow Python 3.13 support and add a file-management feature. Playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEW... The spaCy+PyTorch design has been going well, but we need that file management feature now.

Streaming spaCy (Feb 6, 2025): Updating Confection for Python 3.13 and more

YouTube video by Explosion

youtube.com

Pretty happy with how the spaCy+PyTorch design is coming together. And hopefully I'll continue to get smoother at streaming :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKi...

Streaming spaCy (Jan 31, 2025): Continue exploring PyTorch+spaCy

YouTube video by Explosion

youtube.com

Matthew Honnibal@honnibal.bsky.social · 2y ago

Live again now, doing more design work on what it would look like if we rebuilt spaCy on PyTorch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzFH...

Live again now, doing more design work on what it would look like if we rebuilt spaCy on PyTorch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzFH...

Streaming spaCy (Jan 30, 2025): Continue exploring PyTorch+spaCy

YouTube video by Explosion

youtube.com

Matthew Honnibal@honnibal.bsky.social · 2y ago

Will do another short (~2h or so) stream this afternoon, at 13:00 CET. Last week I was limited in what I could do because the main thing I was working on was build system stuff, and OBS was crashing when I tried to create a desktop view. This week we can look at a more interesting topic.