The duality of r/math

Warm takes: * Opus 5 wordieness and jargon is *incredibly* frustrating to work with * Fable is too slow without being much better at many of the tasks I do day to day * I've found it difficult to tell apart the Opus models since 4.6 * Sol 5.6 is much more pleasant to work with *but*...

There are plenty of places to host a Git repository, but remarkably few places to host an open-source community GitHub’s moat is its shared identities, conventions and paths to discovery. Any replacement must rebuild that social layer, not merely offer better hosting. lalitm.com/post/github-...

I wrote last month: > (...) open-source projects cannot afford to have a dedicated team doing security scanning for them (...). we’re going to see a lot more innovation in this space, including from the big AI labs. And now, OpenAI announces Codex Security: github.com/openai/codex...

GitHub - openai/codex-security: SDKs and CLI for Codex Security

SDKs and CLI for Codex Security. Contribute to openai/codex-security development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

> The standard in CI today is tests run in the cloud after a commit has been merged Is this really people's experience? Beyond hobby operations, I cannot think of a time where I found a project without at least decent presubmit test coverage. Now I'm wondering if I've been living in a bubble...

Replace Your CI With a Merge Queue - exe.dev blog

Agent development means after-the-fact CI no longer works.

blog.exe.dev

antirez says expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as Linus, with agents as the subsystem maintainers. The part that doesn't work for me is trust. Linus's maintainers spent years proving their judgment. I've given LLMs that chance plenty of times and I keep regretting it.

A senior engineer I mentor asked me how I find problems worth working on. He’d been told to block time to “think strategically,” but hadn’t found it useful. I told him I rarely find good problems by staring at a blank page. Instead, I act like a sponge, listening to people’s day-to-day problems.

git has an experimental git history command as of 2.54/2.55 and it deserves more attention. Fixup, reword, or split a commit buried in your stack, and every branch built on top rebases automatically. It's already in core git, nothing to install. lalitm.com/post/git-history/

Wrote up a blog post going over the "why" in each of the features in Perfetto v57. This is something I plan on doing for each release going forward (including dedicated posts when a feature is big enough to deserve it!) Find it at lalitm.com/post/perfett...

Perfetto v57 is out! github.com/google/perfe... A bunch of new things but the most impactful thing might be a bugfix on Pytorch traces where overlapping events wouldn't be displayed (github.com/google/perfe...)

Release Perfetto v57.1 · google/perfetto

We're excited to share Perfetto v57.1! This release introduces an installable AI skill that teaches coding agents how to use Perfetto, a long-awaited fix for overlapping events in JSON traces (PyTo...

github.com

scattered-thoughts.net/writing/arti... is exactly the sort of article I wanted to see more of when I wrote "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI". Really hope to see even more like this!

I've spent many hours in my early days optimizing performance in places which ended up not mattering so this article really resonated.

When Impressive Performance Gains Do Not Matter

Even order-of-magnitude improvements in performance may not matter.

blog.colinbreck.com

I just published syntaqlite 0.6 (github.com/LalitMaganti...), now supporting SQLite dot commands, a big step forward for usability in the real world. That along with Pyiodide support makes it the most impactful release since 0.1! Wrote about this at lalitm.com/post/syntaql...

Release v0.6.0 · LalitMaganti/syntaqlite

Shell file support: syntaqlite now understands SQLite shell scripts: files that mix .dot commands with SQL. The embedded SQL is extracted and the surrounding shell syntax is ignored, so ast, fmt, ...

github.com

I discovered Iroh (www.iroh.computer) yesterday and it's a really neat project! But from reading discussions on HN/lobsters, people seem really confused on exactly what it is. I wrote up a TIL after investigating a bit: lalitm.com/post/til-iroh/. TLDR, it's like a VPN but at the app layer!

One weird thing I've observed with Fable vs Opus: whenever I get it to do a refactor it seems to reach for writing as-hoc Python scripts instead of directly doing a refactor.

Over the last 10 weeks I've had more security bug reports for Perfetto's trace processor than ever: 17 real bugs, all found by AI. Mostly mechanical, a few nudged overdue cleanups. A year ago none would've been caught. Wrote up how the experience at lalitm.com/post/perfett...

For years I've followed a rule at work I never bothered to write down: when an engineer asks me a "weird" question, I don't answer the first version of it. Wrote about this at lalitm.com/post/dont-an...

I just published a deep-dive into the 250-hour build behind syntaqlite, a SQLite formatter and LSP I built using AI agents. AI agents were the only reason built this after 8 years of wanting but there's a psychological toll to AI-assisted engineering. The post-mortem: lalitm.com/post/buildin...

For a long time, I’ve wanted a reliable, fast formatter and LSP for SQLite SQL. One that actually models SQLite’s weird/specific features, like virtual tables, application-defined functions, and the various flags that change the language. So I started building syntaqlite.

Hit a case in Perfetto where even the venerable binary search was still too slow! I ended up discovering an algorithm that I hadn't heard of before called exponential search. Wrote up what I learned at lalitm.com/post/exponen...

Just wrote up some thoughts after trying out all the "VPS as a service" products which reached the Hacker News frontpage over the past month - lalitm.com/trying-sprit...

I made a venn diagram to help you understand Moiré patterns.

Been quiet for the last few weeks because I was cooking this up! I know it's resolution season, so if you're engineering-minded and want absolute control over your money (handling everything from daily spend to cross-border investments) I wrote a blog post for you! 👇

I’ve been reading a lot of Staff+ advice that says you need to be "fungible," chase executive priorities, and move fast. As a Senior Staff engineer in infra/devtools, I found that advice is a recipe for burnout.

Every quarter, our 45-person eng team stops ALL roadmap work for an entire week. No new features. No meetings. Just fixing the small stuff that's been annoying us and our users.

I'm a bit ashamed to say it's only today I learned what the number in Linux man page titles (e.g. the "3" in `sleep(3)`) is: lalitm.com/til-number-i...

Just sent my latest newsletter rounding up the last week of posts to my blog: lalitm.substack.com/p/when-good-...

When Good Technical Writing Isn't Enough

A response to "Don't Build an Audience"

lalitm.substack.com

After reading a fascinating article called "Don't Build An Audience", I've been doing a lot of soul searching about the type of technical writing I like and how to get people to see it. Wrote down my thoughts in a new post: lalitm.com/on-why-i-wri...

Just sent my latest newsletter rounding up the last week of posts to my blog: lalitm.substack.com/p/castx-as-s...

CAST(x AS STRING) casts to integer in SQLite

Plus TIL: Diátaxis: Systematic technical documentation

lalitm.substack.com

After the nth time of explaining to someone why in SQLite `CAST(x as STRING)` casts to an integer, I decided to write something explaining why so I can just point people to it: lalitm.com/cast-x-as-st...