Machine Learning
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Here's the last in a fascinating series of guest posts by Patrick Nadeau. It's worth saying, at this stage, that this series reflects Patrick's own experience with AI, and is not necessarily representative of the views of his or my employer. We're all on a journey together, and voices like Patrick's are important to make sure we ask the right questions as we travel. This is the final installment in a blog series about agentic coding. After being encouraged to try agentic coding at work, I used it to build a retro game emulator in 36 hours. The whole vertiginous…
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Here's another fantastic guest post from Patrick Nadeau. Enjoy! This is Part 3 of a four-part series on working with a coding agent for the first time. In Part 1, I described how I used a coding agent to build a retro game emulator in 36 hours. Hardware emulation is notoriously unforgiving, and in Part 2, I looked at what made that feat possible: a test oracle that collapsed the AI's degrees of freedom, allowing it to generate code freely, while testing its output against a reference implementation. In this installment, I use a similar approach along a different dimension.…
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We have another guest post today from Patrick Nadeau. Image © Eurogamer.net In my last entry, I wrote about resisting, then finally trying agentic coding for the first time. If agentic coding is the new way, then the new way is going to be fast. I bootstrapped a working emulator — three simulated microchips and a bus, timing included — in 36 hours. But I have to admit: I didn't write the emulator alone. We wrote it. And there was also a hidden third character in that story: the test oracle. The speed enabled by coding agents plays out in…
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Here's one more post relating to what has somehow become a bit of a recent theme on this blog: artificial intelligence. Something has been weighing on me, of late. I've noticed a significant uptick in my site being mined by bots and spiders: once upon a time it would be for search engines trying to find its content, but increasingly it's the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok, coming in and stealing/learning from this blog. There was a time when I'd have shrugged and said "c'est la vie", but given the increasing competency of these models to write code themselves,…
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This is the first part of a guest series by Patrick Nadeau, a member of the Research Engineering team based in Canada. I mentioned it in this recent post. Patrick is a great writer and a very experienced developer who gives a personal, nuanced perspective on his explorations of using agentic coding tools to solve a really interesting programming challenge. When I was a kid, there were only two computing devices in the house: the Intellivision game console and my Apple II computer. Decades later, when I wrote code with a coding agent for the first time, those were the…
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After last week's missive on AI (something I will try not to make a habit of, but we shall see), I felt I had to come clean about something. While I promise never to use AI to write a blog post - mainly because I enjoy writing so much, rather than being from any particular sense of propriety - I used it heavily when moving this blog to it's new, post-Typepad platform but also to make me look a bit older. My blog photo has been the same for quite some time (it's only the third I've used on the…
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Like everyone reading this blog post, I've been thinking a lot about Artificial Intelligence, of late. In the software development domain the AI-assisted coding tools have seen a radical step change since the beginning of 2026, which has made some people very excited and has left others reeling. In this post I wanted to opine a little on this, as there are many things being said and even a few things that seem to have remained unsaid. For those not in the space, what has happened since January? AI-driven software tools have gone from "interesting - I can see this…
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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the news that Typepad has (finally) decided to get out of the blog hosting game, after 22 years. The platform had steadily become less relevant, and from my side I was forever fighting with silly technical issues - mostly related to images, for some reason - so a) I'm not surprised and b) I won't miss the platform at all. The timing was insane, though: they basically gave a month's notice for the remaining blogs to figure something out. Even accessing the old content in the days after the announcement proved to be…
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The class catalog for Autodesk University 2024 has been live for a week or two already, with attendees being able to bookmark sessions ahead of the ability to enroll fully. Well, today's the day that enrollment opens properly, so have at it! Classes often fill up quickly, so doing it sooner can certainly be better than waiting. I also have a few suggestions if you're at a loss for what to choose. These are all classes that I or my research team are involved in, of course. That's just how things work around here. 🙂 It turns out there's one…
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Today is my first day back after a much-needed 3-week break. For most of that period we were up in the mountains, and split our time between snowboarding and snowshoeing with the puppy. We had some unseasonably mild weather in the Alps, over the break, but we did still manage to make the most of what snow there was.During the course of the break, I spent some time thinking back on 2022 and looking ahead to 2023. For me, 2022 has brought a significant amount of change and uncertainty, between changes in role, escalating climate issues or the war in…