Sydney is going through that midautumn period where the weather is perfectly moderate (warm days cool nights) and there is just enough rain for the garden to look lush.

Destruction of art, destruction of meaning

I’m trying to create tests for ocgtk that load a Gtk UI and interacts with it, checking that actions and their results render. There doesn’t seem to be anything specific for this on the Linux desktop, but it appears I can get by somewhat with the ATSPI (accessibility API) that GNOME publishes.

Finally think I’ve got ocgtk into a state where I can iterate on small changes easily. I was able to enable constructor generation for classes which throw (I model their return as result types) with only a few lines, minimal duplication, and very little code searching (no LLM required)

Aliasing a module: only linked if referenced Aliasing a class: pulls in class runtime definition in all cases Aliasing a class type: zero cost

Back on my hobby horse (minimising code size in generated OCaml libraries)

I honestly don’t know how economists can carry on with a theory of value that prioritises subjective exchange value, when markets are pricing everything in terms of energy in light of the events of the past couple of weeks.

This is wrong: it turns out relying on structural typing to declare your classes makes some of them consume so much RAM when resolving and getting stuck they eat up so your RAM. The solution was just separate class types and remove the structural typing.

I managed to completely lock up my computer several times with an ocaml build (i9 with 12 cores and 32gb RAM) 🤦‍♂️

Oh no

At an Elden Ring “symphonic performance” and I’m thinking about that final scene in Tàr

Why am I not surprised the fandom of this show can be so deranged? It’s not queer, just a vehicle for BL fantasy, which needs to excavate anything meaningfully queer that would threaten that. www.starobserver.com.au/artsentertai...

Arrggh trying to get opencode to read skills from a custom path

The thing with this approach is you can create really complex tooling that adds little. I’m creating tools from scratch to make sure I really understand how it works and improves things, so you can strip it right back to just what you need for maximum efficiency (wasting tokens just slows you down).

I read an article like this, and it really resonates. I’m picking up bits from levels 1-7, but still finding myself trying to master 4-7 at the same time. www.bassimeledath.com/blog/levels-...

I have been a bit quiet on the ocaml front, but have been working on a private project using miou vif for a website/cms/newsletter/events management thing (are there any robur coop peeps on here?) thats quietly coming along

I'm open to new opportunities at the moment. Founding engineer at a fast-growing finance-based startup and working in startups/scale-ups over the past 10 years. Specialties are DevOps, cloud architecture & observability in product-driven environments. Node/Typescript/AWS/React, also OCaml.

me using Claude to investigate a nasty memory leak

If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...

Made bagels today 🥯 🤤

Soon to be MIT/Linux, because they’ll be vibe porting the GNU toolchain to Rust and it won’t be having a FSF-prescribed license

Discovered only through conversation at a meetup last night that a mutual friend was an Elixir developer in a previous life - apparently there was a small number of Elixir shops in Australia some time back.

Overproofing the sourdough nowadays. My starter is a mutant beast but it only like the good stuff

My slides (and my video, soon to be linked) from last night are here: www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/sydney...

Experimenting with frontier models again because M2.5 can’t follow instructions and misses so many things, as well as being hideously slow. Sonnet (at 10x the price) does so much better, but trying Kimi K2.5 and GLM again in the hope we can find a better medium

I'm speaking at Sydney AI Engineering meetup tomorrow (Weds) night on using niche languages and frontier models with AI coding tools www.meetup.com/sydney-ai-en...

Very excited to see ocaml 5.5 in alpha - relocatable Ocaml fixes so many workflows

Iterating on coding guidelines for OCaml that prevent an LLM from horrible nested blobs of match statements.

Bravely entered the beating heart of the AI hype machine (AgentForce Conference)

The consulting market is going nuts for DevSecOps at the moment, which can only mean every company is cranking out code with AI but they’re desperately trying to uplift their automated testing and deployment processes to catch up

A recruiter asked me about my OCaml experience today as if it was a regular thing that people hire for in Sydney.

The beautiful thing about AI is it’s ability to produce brilliantly written but historically and logically broken walls of text masquerading as think pieces

I was arguing with someone the other day about whether the US ever had social infrastructure / civil society institutions, and my argument is: yes plenty, but only until recently

<laughing nervously to myself while I attempt the same thing (web development) in OCaml> yieldcode.blog/post/farewel...

That Wired piece on the conspiracies of a cabal of gay men in Silicon Valley is awful. Simultaneously investigating it and feeding it with a “wink wink nudge nudge” approach that would be horrific if you substituted any other historically oppressed minority.

I think I'm going to go back to m2 for writing code, maybe use glm-5 for review instead (its not a cheap model in comparison)

Not getting the results I’d like from glm-5 compared to opus on the same task

The LLM projects I need to do because they’d actually improve my life vs The LLM projects that I want to do because they’d actually improve scratch an itch

MY LIFE FOR BROOME. MY LIBERTY FOR WAGGA WAGGA. MY SOUL FOR THE GONG

Saw the Wuthering Heights adaption and I swear Emerald Fennell’s inspirations are Pan’s Labyrinth and The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover

I asked my #ClaudeCode which CLI tools it would benefit from and it wrote a blog post on the subject batsov.com/articles/202... 😁 Funny enough I hadn't even heard of some of tools it suggested.

I’ve found this ‘cognitive debt’ with my own projects that I’ve vibe coded with minimal review, and its a sure bet that anyone or any team building this way has lost control of what they’ve built simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

Many more models tested and catalogued here:

We all know about the Claude spiritual bliss attractor state. But what happens when you let Grok talk to itself for a long time? Answer:

Using opus 4.6 for a large task today and it’s absolutely impressive what it manage on the front end in terms of oneshot complexity, but the code is still awful to read, and still comes out broken on basic bits while working perfectly on others

I really didn’t forsee “Steve Ygge attempts a labour theory of value” on my timeline, but it’s that sort of Friday

Extremely frustrated with the way Claude refuses to use a subagent even when instructed (it’s way too expensive to use opus for everything)

It's Mardi Gras season here and it seems even more appropriate that the AI/LLM community are now talking about harness engineering news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698...

Finally got the stone path effect I wanted in my garden (and to think I was avoiding native violets because I didn’t think they could tolerate the heat)

The newest Claude Code CLI seems to activate agents and planning more readily (on its own), even taking hints on what models you want to use (e.g. demanding Haiku for exploration agents instead of just delegating to the same agent used for coordination)