Thoughts on data science, software engineering, and technology
One thing that I've gotten pretty interested in recently is "agent engineering" or "agentic architectures" or "agentic system design" (I'm not sure there's a canonical name for it). Of course there is a lot of interesting work on "how do I use an LLM to solve some contained inference or …
The other day I ran across a blog post on how to build a coding agent. But it was very long and I didn't read it. (Sorry!) Instead I asked myself, what's the simplest coding agent I can build.
So I put on my PM hat and thought about it …
As I started to think about my meme-generating agent, I figured that I might want to allow it to ask clarifying questions. That makes it not just a multi-turn conversation (which just requires maintaining a history) but more like a ReAct agent with a "human in the loop" tool for …
As my next project, I thought it would be fun to use AI to generate memes. For many years I have used imgflip to generate memes. And they have an API! Unfortunately, they don't have an official Python library (that I could find, I found a bunch of one-GitHub-star unofficial …
"How do you know if someone does Crossfit?"
"They build a RAG system about Crossfit!"
As my next project, I wanted to build a non-trivial RAG system. To do that, I needed a non-trivial dataset.
Every day for 20+ years, Crossfit.com has published a Workout of the Day ("WoD …
A few years ago we went on an Alaska cruise, and we sprung for a cabin in the private/exclusive part of the ship (which is the way to go!) which had its own restaurant, its own lounge, and so on. The lounge had board games, one of which was …