Elijah Potter's Blog

Everything Is a Leaky Abstraction* *in machine learning One of my favorite blog posts of all time was written by Andrej Karpathy nearly ten years ago.

A Simple Overview of LLM Sampling Methods Almost all the discourse around LLMs today is centered on the models themselves.

The Best of Om Malik I had never heard of Om Malik before he died.

Proxmox Ethernet Failing After an Upgrade After upgrading my pair of Lenovo M720q machines from Proxmox VE 8 to 9, they randomly started dropping their connection to the internet.

Skill Acquisition Some time ago, I stumbled upon the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition.

Harper’s Architecture — Presenting to ACM @ Mines Earlier this week, I was asked to give a talk to the chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery at Mines.

A Better Popup Arguably the most important part of any Harper integration is the popup window.

Useful Things Agents Can Do That Are Not Writing Code The discourse is abuzz with the wonderful (and horrendous) things you can do when you allow an AI coding agent to write code.

Bytes Are Not Big Enough I apologize for using some relatively technical terminology in today’s post.

Harper for Windows Is Available for Download After several weeks of work, the Harper Desktop app for Windows is finally ready for download, as promised.

Stacking PRs I tried out GitHub’s PR stacking functionality for the first time this week.

Harper for Windows This is a follow-up to a recent post where I discussed the benefits of prioritizing Windows support for Harper Desktop.

Notes on Talkify Matt recently asked me to take a look into Talkify, which is a native macOS app in the same vein as Superwhisper.

Do That Which Makes Your Life Easy I have long been a fan of DHH and 37signals’ various technical and social accomplishments.

Do Not Talk About Large Language Models Plainly, they are boring.

Adios Jeff Dean It is the end of an era.

The Case for Windows Why Adding Windows Support to Harper Desktop Is Sensible Despite all my complaining about Windows Update and how bloated their software tends to be, Microsoft has successfully convinced most of the world to use Windows.

Harper on Better Stack It was a nice weekend treat to see Harper featured on Better Stack’s YouTube channel.

Getting Real While I am on PTO (as I am right now), my mind rarely strays far from Harper.

Harper’s Testing Strategy After spending a few days discussing and learning from Automattic’s Chief Quality Officer (Lance Willet), I’ve prepared a first draft of Harper’s testing strategy.

Dealing with Flaky Tests For the past day or so, I have had my head down, tearing my hair out, trying to debug a significant block caused by many engineers’ arch nemesis: a flaky test.

Neoengineers neoengineer - noun An individual, part of a resurgence, who embraces and respects the craft of engineering.

Slop Paralysis slop paralysis - noun A complete or partial loss of function while reviewing the output of a coding agent.

What Was Radical Speed Month?

Andrew Dunbar Becomes Harper’s First Committer I am pleased to say, with much fanfare, that Andrew Dunbar (known by online moniker hippietrail) is becoming Harper’s first committer.

Zen and the Art of Open Source Maintenance This blog post will not be as long as I wish it to be.

Get Rid of It If you have not already, I highly recommend that you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk.

Hacker News, sans AI I like Hacker News, but I do not love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI.

Wrapping up Our Radical Speed Month I previously posted about our launch of Harper Desktop.

Harper Desktop Is Available for Download Harper Desktop is finally available for download.

Good Agents for Developers The spirit of Radical Speed Month includes an impetus to experiment.

A Quick Update on Harper Desktop This week of Radical Speed Month has been dedicated to putting the disparate components of the Harper Desktop App together.

Product, Product, Product Working this past week with Jason Adams has given me a brand-new appreciation for the category of ideas that we engineers call “product.”

Building a Harper Desktop App Harper is a grammar checker that makes sure that your writing is exactly that: yours.

We Are in This Together Today, Jason Adams joined me and some of the other Automatticians based in the Denver area for a burrito.

Harper 2.0 Hey all!

Outcome over Process For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about I can be more productive.

When (Not) to Use an Agent There are times where it is prudent to use an AI agent (like Codex) aggressively.

Harper’s Policy on PRs Authored by Agents A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at my local chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

My Superpower In high school, I was an insatiable consumer of science fiction.

Do Not Write with an LLM A Growing Trend I have been seeing an increasingly prevalent trend of people showing up in online spaces proudly flaunting that they are writing with the assistance of AI.

Refactoring Slop The term “slop” is rapidly entering the conventional English lexicon.

LaTeX Support Is Coming to Harper It’s been a long time coming, which is why I’m thrilled to say that Harper will soon support LaTeX.

Building Software That Is Good for Humans Earlier today, the European Commission released a report detailing their initial findings that TikTok’s core recommendation algorithm is in breach of the Digital Services Act.

Training a Small Language Model TL;DR: I’ve built and trained an extremely small language model from scratch, specifically designed for short-form sentence rewriting tasks that are highly resource constrained.

Writing in Visual Studio Code I write this blog in Neovim, and I’m aware of a good number of other nerds who do the same.

Finding the Active Voice Last week, Harper hit a stroke of luck.

Linkarzu: Harper Is Getting Better Linkarzu’s recent video about Harper is a great primer on what it can do if you spend a ton of time in Neovim (like I do).

Imagine a Weir Studio This week, I received a message from someone working on a learning management system.

Imagine a Weir Marketplace For context, I maintain an open-source grammar checker by the name of Harper.