Ai

Last night, I presented a session titled MCP or Connecting our Apps to LLMs at DevRomagna, our local developer’s community, and I think it went well. I had intended to record the audio with the idea of transcribing it with MacWhisper and then publishing it here on my site, but I forgot to do so, which is a pity. The session lasted almost two hours (I had thought it would take less time), during which I deviated somewhat from the script, using slides as a guide that were essentially an adaptation of the notes I had taken during my experiments. I showed the code for the MCP servers I created (stdio and streamable HTTP transports), demonstrated the various ways to link them with LLMs (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and VS Code), and then shared my thoughts on the entire matter. ...

In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else. – Sam Altman

I’m just back from watching Mastering Claude Code in 30 Minutes, a talk by Boris Cherny, who, I learned, created Claude Code. I was struck by Boris’s reply to one question from the crowd: Hey, why did you build a CLI tool instead of an IDE? Yeah, it’s a good question. There are two reasons. We started this at Anthropic, where people use a broad range of IDEs. Some people use VS code. Other people use Zed, Xcode, Vim, or Emacs. And it was just hard to build something that works for everyone. And so the terminal is just the common denominator. The second thing is that at Anthropic, we see firsthand how quickly the model is improving. I think there’s a good chance that by the end of the year, people won’t use IDEs. And so, we want to prepare for this future and avoid over-investing in UI and other layers on top. Given the way the models are progressing, it may not be practical to work on them soon. ...

Despite what tech CEOs might say, large language models are not smart in any recognizably human sense of the word.

Since yesterday, Claude Code has been included in the Pro subscription we’re signed up for. I’d been wanting to try it for a while, and now nothing was stopping me. Only yesterday (a curious coincidence), I read AI Changes Everything by Armin Ronacher, which gave me a glimpse of the potential and made my hands itch to try it. The initialization of Claude on the repository surprised me; the analysis (reported in CLAUDE.md) is thorough and reveals a good understanding of the project, including both the code and the general functioning, strategies, techniques, technologies and libraries employed. ...

Today’s Armin Ronacher’s AI Changes Everything strongly resonates with me1. I may not be using Claude Code as a daily driver as he now does, but I’ve slowly and steadily introduced large language models (LLMs) into my routine, and I’m reaping the benefits. It wasn’t the purpose of his article, but I wish Armin had gone into the details of how, why, and when he delegates tasks to Claude Code. Update: Armin later a follow-up. ...

Run Your Own AI by Anthony Lewis is a concise tutorial on how to run large language models on your laptop from the command line via llm-mlx. It focuses on Macs M-series, but it’s also suitable for other hardware. Saving it here for a friend.

It’s raining a lot these days, and during my early morning walk, I see many earthworms popping out of the ground and filling the sidewalks and the streets. I observed this behaviour many times in similarly wet conditions. So I asked Claude: Why do earthworms appear on wet roads? When it rains heavily, streets fill with earthworms for several reasons: Earthworms breathe through their skin, which must remain moist. During heavy rainfall, their underground tunnels flood, forcing them to surface to avoid drowning. ...

I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy1. On this occasion, I discovered a new use for ChatGPT and LLMs. ChatGPT and I chatted about the themes, especially the correlations and connections between the three short novels that comprise the volume. It was an alienating and revealing experience. For the first time, I am reasoning about a book with a machine, not a person. Because it knows everything about the text and draws on the shared global knowledge, it can give more satisfaction than most people do (also, it’s not easy to find someone around with whom I can talk about all the books I read!) Yes, it is wordy and repetitive, but it can stimulate and enrich my analysis2. ...

Kara Swisher, a dean in digital and classical journalism, has an interesting article in the New York Magazine. As a witness and protagonist she recounts how in the last 30 years digital has eaten away at traditional media and how today, with the advent of AI, there is a risk of it happening all over again. Above all, she reasons why it is essential for journalists not to surrender their weapons and lawmakers to step in and finally harness an industry that always had free reign and no regulation, as it is considered inevitable. ...