Community

I came across this really interesting project that aims to ensure that the JavaScript libraries are keeping dependencies up to date and that features available in the LTS versions of Node area being used. JavaScript is infamous for fragmented and poorly maintained libraries so this is a great initiative.

But even better I think is Jazzband, a Python initiative that allows for collaborative maintenance but also can provide a longer term home for participating projects.

Digital sovereignty

With the US deciding to switch off defence systems there has been an upswing in interest in how and where digital services are provided. One key problem is that all the cloud services are American every other Western country has let US companies dominate the space and many of the services they offer are now unique to them.

This is probably impossible to solve now but the article linked to above is a useful starting point on how more commodity services could be provided by local providers.

There was also an announcement of an open source alternative to Notion funded by the French (and other) governments. The strategic investment in open source that can be run in the service capacity that European states do have seems a key part of a potential solution and helps share costs and benefits across countries.

Editors

I have been trying out the Fleet editor again, this is Jetbrain’s take on a VSCode style editor that has the power of their IntelliJ IDE but without a lot of the complexity. It’s obviously not as powerful or fully featured as VSCode with all its plugins.

I liked the live Markdown preview but couldn’t get the soft-wrapping that was meant to be enabled by default to work. It was also frustrating that some actions do not seem to be available via the Command Palette and that the Actions aren’t the default tab when hitting Ctrl-Shift-P.

LLMs

I experimented with AWS’s Bedrock this month (via Python scripts), the service has a decent selection of services available with a clear statement of how interactions with them are used. If you’re already an AWS user then access to them casually is effectively free (although how viable that is in the long run is an interesting question) making it a great way to experiment.

I thought have the AWS Nova models might help me write code to interact with Bedrock but they turned out to not really be able to add more than the documentation and a crafty print statement told me.

The Mistral model seemed quite capable though and I’ve used it a couple of times since then for creating Python and Javascript code and haven’t had any real problems with it although it predictably does much better on problems that have been solved a lot.

An alternative to Step Functions

Yan Cui wrote a really interesting post about Restate and writing your own checkpointing system for repeatable AWS Lambda invocations. Step Functions are very cool but the lack of portability and platform-specific elements have been off-putting in the past. These approaches seem very interesting.

When it comes to Lambdas Yan’s newsletter is worth subscribing to.

Reading links

• Some helpful pieces of good practice in Postgres although some things (soft deleting in particular, view use) will be context specific
• Defra’s Playbook on AI coding offers a pragmatic view on how to get the best out of AI-led coding
• Revenge of the Junior Developer, man with a vested interested in AI software developer is still angry at people struggling with it or not wanting to use it
• AI Ambivalence a more sober assessment of the impact and utility of the current state of AI-assisted coding and a piece that resonated with me for asking the question about whether this iteration of coding retains the same appeal

There was an interesting exchange of views on LLM coding this month; Simon Willison wrote about his frustration with developers giving up on LLM-based coding when he has been having a lot of success with it. Chris Krycho wrote a response pointing out that developer’s responses weren’t unreasonable and that Simon was treating all his defensive techniques fro getting the best out of the approach as implicit knowledge that he was assuming that everyone possessed. It is actually a problem that LLM’s suggest invalid code and libraries that don’t exist.

Soon after that post Simon wrote another post summarising all his development practices and techniques related to using LLMs for coding that makes useful reading for anyone who is curious but struggling to get the same results that people like Simon have had. This post is absolutely packed with interesting observations and it is very much worth a read as a counterbalance to the drive-by opinions of people using Cursor and not being able to tell whether it is doing a good job or not.