In Search of Ignorance

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. — Carl Sagan, [The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the …

Build to Buy

In our May 2025 meeting the Austin CTO Club took on the theme of “Build versus Buy”. Much of the discussion centered around the trade-offs between the two, with the addition of open source as a third alternative. One participant described a “Build to Buy” strategy that I had not …

A Pianist's Scales

Tyler Cowen will never have the opportunity to ask me his question “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?” but I will answer for the programming realm in my world. I once programmed for a living, but now spend more time building teams and g…

Aider First Impressions

One trend among AI-enabled development tools is tight integration with an IDE. A popular example is Cursor. If you already use a similar IDE this seems very welcome, but not so much if you don’t. Alternatively, Aider provides a rich stand-alone command-line interface, making it e…

Training Data Shortages

A common view holds that the human-generated data set for training LLM models has been exhausted. All of the accessible digital data have been incorporated into training already, and additional data must come from synthetic sources. This may be correct with respect to digital dat…