Ai

A few days ago, there was a trending post on HN called “The CTF scene is dead.” (link), in which the author laments that CTF (capture the flag, “hacking” competitions) are dead due to being mostly solvable by AI, which actually made me want to try it! I’ve actually never done any CTF, so after some research, I ended up doing the first 15 levels of the OverTheWire Bandit game. Frankly it wasn’t super interesting (mostly running find commands with the right flags…) due to it being aimed at absolute beginners. ...

I’ve been in a “space” period lately. Been reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and really enjoyed it, full of surprised and not a page felt like filler. Same as video games, most books bore me easily these days and feel like a waste of time, but this was 100% worse my time. Speaking of games, I’ve been replaying Outer Wilds. Not gonna spoil it or anything, it’s still one of the best game I know. The feeling of getting in the pilot seat, strapping the seat belts and firing the engines, en-route for whatever planet I feel like, is magical every time. ...

Almost the end of January and no blog post yet ! Time to remedy that. One reason for the silence is I don’t have much going on, in the past 6 months or so Claude Code and other coding agents have made such progress that pretty much anyone at my company (former QA, designers etc) is able to contribute new features to our product. It was foreseable and gradual for the past 2 years so it’s not a huge shock, though it came faster than I expected, and last year (2025) caused a big questioning about my career as a software engineer. What value can I add when anyone with minimal experience can contribute to the codebase ? The situation is not so dire yet, I do have some answers at the present (like I’m good at debugging, experience with the whole stack, etc) but nothing that feels particularly future proof. Take debugging, it takes 30 seconds of searching to find a “vscode debugger mcp” that lets agent use VSCode integrated debugging (not that I would trust it enough to install it, but we’re bound to have an official one someday). We’re already at the point where a multiple agent setup can create an app, launch it, interact with it in a browser, and debug the backend, without human assistance. Am I a better debugger than a swarm of Claude-5.2-banana agents running in the background ? I don’t believe so. ...

A programmer says “I have 2 kids, and the sum of their age is 4”. The logician thinks and says “not enough info”. The programmer adds “The eldest likes Bluey”. The logician smiles and replies “Ah ! You must be using vibe coding a lot”. Alright, I’ve been working on a new project, Goxy: an OpenAI proxy that track & limit spending. You can set an hourly limit (say 1$ per hour) and the proxy will return 429 errors when the spend reaches the limit. That lets you release LLM using projects while being confident you won’t get hit with a thousand-dollar bill at the end of the month. ...

So in my [last post about Pilish]({% post_url 2025-08-09-pillmish %}) I mentioned that a follow up to get better results would be to use a LLM with word level tokenization. It’s actually a bad idea in general because the vocabulary size can be huge, and that’s why most LLM these days use BPE or subword tokenization, but I decided to give it a quick try and train a LLM from scratch with word level tokenization. Back in 2023 I used to be quite into finetuning and all that but this year I haven’t done much low level tinkering with LLM so it was a good exercise. ...