Reilly Wood

It’s been approximately 1 million years since I last wrote about how I use and think about LLMs.

We moved to a house in Vancouver, which is pretty crazy if you know the local real estate market.

Unite Here Local 40 is a BC hospitality workers’ union: hotels, airports, food service.

It’s been quite a year.

Among people who do a lot of agent-assisted software development, there is some skepticism about whether MCP is useful: A quick experiment makes this clear: try completing a GitHub task with the GitHub MCP, then repeat it with the gh CLI tool.

Giving LLMs access to tools (which turns them into ✨agents✨) is an incredibly powerful way to give LLMs capabilities that go beyond generating text.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a pretty big deal these days.

I want to get something off my chest: attempts to keep the price of urban land down are not necessarily good.

I had an odd experience with this website, and I’m finally writing it up.

Say you’re working on an agent (a model using tools in a loop).

This is a brief post about something that confused me a great deal when I started working with LLMs.

I tried to use Automerge again, and failed.

I started strength training for the first time in January 2024, in my late 30s.

After 13 years of daily Twitter usage, I bit the bullet and switched to Bluesky (urbanism stuff, mostly) and Mastodon (computer stuff) full time.

It feels a bit early to be writing an update to something I wrote 1.5 months ago, but we live in interesting times.

This post has been temporarily taken down while I respond to a fraudulent DMCA complaint.

I find LLMs to be pretty useful these days.

Been a while since the last update, I’ve been busy with the new job.

So, big news: I’m off to a new job at Datadog, working on their CoScreen screen sharing tool 😎.

I reread Robin Sloan’s post about a “home-cooked” app, and it continues to resonate; there’s something special about writing software for very small audiences.

It’s been a good summer so far.

I recently participated in the Handmade Network Visibility Jam and built a tool that I’d been wanting for my own use: Escape Artist in action In a nutshell, Escape Artist shows ANSI escape sequences that are normally invisible.

Here’s a pandemic project that I think turned out pretty well: An 18-piece map of Vancouver above my couch In 1954, Vancouver’s planning department put together a remarkable hand-coloured map showing the age of every building in the city.

I find working on my personal website to be soothing.

I work on a command-line shell called Nushell (Nu for short) with some internet friends, and I think it’s pretty cool.

If you try to do any kind of analysis of Vancouver’s urban planning, you quickly run into a problem: An amusing map by Mike Feaver Vancouver has a lot of zoning districts. 895 of them, to be exact1.

For a long time, my mental model of urban planning was basically “there are written rules about what you can build, and to build something you just follow the rules.”

Like many other people, I unexpectedly found myself stuck at home without much to do in early 2020.

Say you want to host some files in an S3 bucket, under your own custom subdomain with nice short HTTPS URLs.

I’ve joined the Nushell core team.

I’ve been using Rust full time for the last month and a bit while contributing to Nushell (more on that later).

Big shout-outs to @reillywood, who managed cut the CI times for @nu_shell in half!

Nushell Nushell v0.60 is out, and it’s fantastic.

“Work” I’ve been spending a lot of time writing Nushell documentation.

I’m officially unemployed again 😎.

I handed in my notice; my last day at work is next Wednesday.

.NET has been taking huge leaps and bounds in the last few years, and not everyone is aware of it!

I recently spent a bit of time messing around with the Postgres wire protocol.

I recently assembled a tool: It’s a helper for scripting in C#.

Here’s something I’ve been messing around with: Download here or get more info on the MinimalWebView and MaximalWebView repos.

I had a weird week back in October, and it all started when I posted this GitHub issue.

It’s been a while since my last update.

Robin Sloan’s post about “home-cooked” code has been making the rounds, and for good reason.

You might have already seen Jens von Bergmann’s interactive map of Vancouver which integrates a ton of different data sets.

Bret Victor’s talk Inventing on Principle (video, transcript) changed the way I think about computing in 2019.

I’ve been busy for the last month, and I completely forgot to update the blog.

Rust has a really powerful macro system.

I’ve recently been building .NET Core back-end services that run on Linux.

Every now and then, I wonder “Is low-level programming still unpleasant?”

I recently started experimenting with building tooling for ETL systems.