Grant Slatton's Blog

Solving Quoridor This post significantly improves the state of the art in solving the board game Quoridor.

Every Man a Microservice Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E.

Manufacturing as Maintenance The maintenance spectrum has two ends.

LLM Memory I've been thinking about LLM memory since GPT3 came out.

Claude Code A few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code.

Solution-space taste There's a visual analogy I've been drawing on whiteboards for years to explain a key element of taste in software design.

New Game timer: 0 moves: 0 Controls: Click a cell to select it Click another cell to swap Clicking a selected cell will deselect it

Typo Minimizing Keyboard I'm always frustrated when I make a typo, but the typo is of another valid word, so a spellchecker can't easily catch it.

The curve is bending We've finally crossed an inflection point of model utility where the output is actually worth more than the cost for real dev work.

New Game Cheat remaining: 10 moves: 0 (optimal: 0) timer: 0 Mouseover a puck to select it Click in a direction to slide Pucks stop at walls or other pucks Get the matching puck to the colored X This game is obviously inspired by Ricochet Robots which is t…

Rohit Chess @krishnanrohit tweeted this tonight: 7yo created a new game - The front lines move like King in chess - Large circles in the back like bishop, diagonally - The spiral round thing is the King to get checkmated, though it moves like Queen in che…

AI software I'm surprised doesn't exist yet State of play I'm writing this on 20 February 2025.

Technocapital In this essay, I posit: A technocapital entity will exist That entity will consume an ever-growing percentage of the universe Humanity will be contained to a bounded slice of the universe Within that slice, the only labor that will have value

How to write a good design document This essay is a version of the response I gave to my friend Vik's call for suggestions: had a lot of people ask how they can learn to write design docs, and i didn’t have a good answer besides “work at a place with writ…

Design Patterns A software design pattern is just what the name suggests: a pattern that comes up repeatedly in software design.

How to write complex software Suppose you are implementing some complex piece of software — a database, a word processor, a filesystem, a web browser, whatever.

Bureaulogy I'm fascinated by the formation, evolution, and perpetuation of bureaucracies.

A peasant's plight I recently read the excellent book The Inheritance of Rome.

Every Man his own API We're witnessing the spread of social trend I've been calling API-ification.

Culture is a set of social Schelling points Imagine if I picked 1 person from 1000 disparate tribes from around the planet and put them in a town together.

Portals are Undertheorized I'm not talking about fictional teleportation portals.

Binary IQ I'm defining a term I refer to as Binary IQ, or sometimes Yes/No IQ.

Designing bug-proof engines Suppose you have to make an engine that's going to operate in an environment with a lot of bugs.

Accidental Urbanism In 2020, I got into urbanism unintentionally.

Bootstrapping a town I'm interested in building new towns.

Sports vs Games There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games I don't agree on the object-level of the quote, but the distinction between sports and games is something I've been thinking about f…

Nobody cares N.B.

Lightweight property-based testing at Row Zero Row Zero is the world's fastest spreadsheet.

Rust Macros Introduction In programming, a macro is code that writes code (typically, but not always, at compile-time).

Algorithms we develop software by I recently had a conversation with a distinguished tech CEO and engineer.

Status among whom?

Ghost Escape Early in my BJJ practice, I got really good at this somewhat unorthodox side control escape system.

AI follows auditability A lot of people have predictions about what field will be next to fall to AI.

Onsen Unreality I'm interested in places that fully envelop you — that make you forget the outside world exists.

After visiting Taipei, I've become a road-width extremist I used to be fully anti-car, but now I think if you simply make most roads barely 1 car wide and get rid of on-street parking, it gets you 95% of what you want Taipei has a grid of major 6-8 lane r…

Twitter: high value, or highest value?

Shuttle One of the coolest technologies I have had the pleasure of using recently is the shuttle library.

Quasirandom sequences Pseudorandom points on the left.

Book Review: 'The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World' Executive summary Thumbs up.