Jon Atkinson - Blog

The capabilities of an agent have stopped moving.

Some scenarios.

Every week I read another post arguing that LLM coding agents are fundamentally untrustworthy.

When did you last care which chip was in your laptop?

I was talking with a group recently about LLM-assisted engineering.

LLM-assisted coding feels slow at first.

I’ve been playing with GitHub’s spec-kit this week.

I’ve been using Claude Code a lot recently, and I’ve settled on a workflow that’s been producing really good results.

I was a big Notion user.

I’ve been using Bluesky more and more recently.

LLMs are changing how we write software.

I’ve tried three of the newer agentic code assistants this week: OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, and Claude Code.

Working in technology means riding wave after wave of hype.

Like many engineers right now, I’m exploring how LLMs can accelerate workflows.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem is changing quickly.

This is keeping me up at night.

I’ve been using files-to-prompt recently to help query large codebases with LLMs, but I realised this would work just as well for documentation sets.

I wanted to install a Matrix service for my family.

From time-to-time, I’m asked to evaluate a large codebase.

I’ve found myself writing a lot of Claude artifact prompts recently.

I’ve previously used fingerprint authentication on Thinkpads in the very distant past.

Python 3.13 was released today, and it would be easy to overlook this: “dbm.sqlite3: An SQLite backend for dbm.

At work recently, I’ve been working on some code to measure the bandwidth required to display webpages, and from there calculate the approximate energy usage and carbon output.

Ruff’s VSCode extension is nice, and can handle the jobs previously done by black and isort.

I like that iPython can be configured to automatically reload modules.

I wanted to put together a single-file Django application, which could still do ‘useful’ work; that is, define models, operate on them, and setup URL routing.

Similar to my previous post (more than a year ago!)

I was looking for a way to enforce the Conventional Commits pattern for my own commit messages.

It appears that everyone on the internet completely hates 1-2-1 meetings.

Some of these are older links I found languishing, misfiled in my Safari favourites.

Back after a vacation with the ChatGPT special edition.

We are being levelled-down The government has allocated £9.7 billion of levelling up funding since 2019.

It’s a time of year when a lot of businesses are hiring, and layoffs mean there are more candidates in the marketplace.

Amazon is discontinuing its AmazonSmile charity program next month “Amazon emailed participants of the free program about the news on Wednesday.

Microservices are a Big Ball of Mud It’s incredible that we still have microservice defenders in 2023.

A few years ago I used to write these short articles with links to interesting things I found on the internet.

This week didn’t have much consistency.

I captured the momentum of last week, and began this game on Sunday evening.

Introduction Like a huge amount of software people, when I was young I learned how to write code because I wanted to make games.

This will list all registered Django URLs in a project, with their arguments. from django.conf import settings from django.urls import URLPattern, URLResolver urlconf = __import__(settings.ROOT_URLCONF, {}, {}, ['']) def urls(ls, acc=None): if acc is None:

rsync will run in sequential mode by default.

I always forget how to setup new Dokku apps; I do it infrequently enough that it never sticks.

I’ve been thinking recently about Github Marketplace; where it may lead.

In the neverending quest for the ‘right’ development setup, I’ve been thinking about the concept of how to organise and make available my tools.

After hacking yesterday through a few issues with my AWS account (transferred a domain name from one AWS account to another, but didn’t remove the NS records from the original account led to some DNS confusion and AWS couldn’t then verify certificates in…

I’m on holiday this week, and I wanted to use the time to really get to grips with serverless models of deployment.

This is possibly specific to my own super-minimal postfix setup on Void, but to add a new email user: $ sudo adduser someone $ sudo passwd someone Amend /etc/postfix/virtual, as follows: someone@domain.com someone Regenerate the virtual alias table: $ s…

Void Linux uses the very miminalsit service management tool runit.

I recently replaced the keyboard in my Thinkpad X230 with the keyboard from and X220.

It’s reasonably simple to bring up a new KVM system on Arch, assuming your hardware supports VT-x or AMD-V (and almost everything does).