A thing I've been doing lately is trying to come to the same conclusions others have without looking their the direct techniques and code. Last night I tried to figure out why people do vector based retrieval for RAG and ended up running these experiments: n0tls.com/โฆ/2026-09-03-i-think-โฆrag-with-grep.html
I'm still going to do an explore agent.
Any conversation
I never have enough time but Iโd love to do a bit more recreational programming with esoterical languages like kitten, , and . AoC and Project Euler are good because they just require an answer but thereโs also loads of simple puzzles online that rely on being able to submit the code in common languages. Iโve been wondering, however, if I could use an LLM to take those problems and create a verification harness for any language I like.
I needed to process 20,000 json files & 20,000 JXL files. I'm pulling together a website from them all. Anyway, started with emacs elisp to handle it all, just because I've not done that before. Went kinda ok, and I'm gonna use org-mode to export it all to a website (done that bit loads of times before).
In the end, I ended up breaking out my C programming skills (late 80s->nowish). It was a delight. Nothing more refreshing than writing raw code, that doesn't rely on 3rd party code/libs.

