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In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming". In case you didn't notice, automatic programming produces vastly different results with the same LLMs depending on the human that is guiding the process with their intuition, design, continuous steering and idea of software. Please, stop saying "Claude vibe coded this software f...

I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to economically succeed, I don't care if the current economic system is subverted (I could be very happy, honestly, if it goes in the direction of a massive redistribution of wealth). But, I would not respect myself and my int...

* For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so. * Chain of thought is now a fundamental way to improve LLM output. But, what is CoT? Why it improves output? I believe it is two things...

I’m taking a few weeks of pause on my HNSWs developments (now working on some other data structure, news soon). At this point, the new type I added to Redis is stable and complete enough, it’s the perfect moment to reason about what I learned about HNSWs, and turn it into a blog post. That kind of brain dump that was so common pre-AI era, and now has become, maybe, a bit more rare. Well, after almost one year of thinking and implementing HNSWs and vector similarity stuff, it is time for some wri...

Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer. Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood, and even the most prominent experts in...

Frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 PRO, with their vast understanding of many topics and their ability to grasp thousands of lines of code in a few seconds, are able to extend and amplify the programmer capabilities. If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you are able to accept the back and forth needed in order to work with LLMs, you can reach incredible results such as: 1. Eliminating bugs you introduced in your code before it ever hits any user: I experienced this with Vect...

This is a short story of how humans are still so much more capable of LLMs. Note that I'm not anti-AI or alike, you know it if you know me / follow me somewhere. I use LLMs routinely, like I did today, when I want to test my ideas, for code reviews, to understand if there are better approaches than what I had in mind, to explore stuff at the limit of my expertise, and so forth (I wrote a blog post about coding with LLMs almost two years, when it was not exactly cool: I was already using LLMs for...

Yesterday, it was a very intense day. In Italy it was 1st of May, the workers holiday, so in the morning I went for a 4h walk in the Etna with friends Then at 6PM I was at home to release my blog post about the AGPL license switch, and I started following the comments, feedbacks, private messages, and I learned a few things in the process. 1. Regardless of the different few clauses, that IMHO make a difference, the AGPL vs SSPL main difference is that AGPL is "understood". In general, yesterday ...

Five months ago, I rejoined Redis and quickly started to talk with my colleagues about a possible switch to the AGPL license, only to discover that there was already an ongoing discussion, a very old one, too. Many people, within the company, had the feeling that the AGPL was a better pick than SSPL, and while eventually Redis switched to the SSPL license, the internal discussion continued. I tried to give more strength to the ongoing pro-AGPL license side. My feeling was that the SSPL, in pract...

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News. A student, Christopher Tarry, was able to use cosine similarity against a vector of top words frequencies in comments, in order to detect similar HN accounts — and, sometimes, even accounts actually controlled by the same user, that is, fake accounts used to uncover the identity of the writer. This is the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 I was not aware, back then, of Burrows-Delta method...

Yesterday we finally merged vector sets into Redis, here you can find the README that explains in detail what you get: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/modules/vector-sets/README.md The goal of the new data structure is, in short, to create a new “Set alike” data type, similar to Sorted Sets, where instead of having a scalar as a score, you have a vector, and you can add and remove elements the Redis way, without caring about anything except the properties of the abstract data struct...

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago. Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a statement if AI was just so helpful a moment ago? Actually, there's no contradiction here if we clarify exactly what we mean. Here’s the thing: at this very moment, artificial intelligence can support me significantly. If I'm st...

By multiple accounts, the web is losing pieces: every year a fraction of old web pages disappear, lost forever. We should regard the Internet Archive as one of the most valuable pieces of modern history; instead, many companies and entities make the chances of the Archive to survive, and accumulate what otherwise will be lost, harder and harder. I understand that the Archive headquarters are located in what used to be a church: well, there is no better way to think of it than as a sacred place. ...

It’s not new, but it’s accelerating. People that used to say that LLMs were a fundamentally flawed way to reach any useful reasoning and, in general, to develop any useful tool with some degree of generality, are starting to shuffle the deck, in the hope to look less wrong. They say: “the progresses we are seeing are due to the fact that models like OpenAI o1 or DeepSeek R1 are not just LLMs”. This is false, and it is important to show their mystification as soon as possible. First, DeepSeek R1 ...

We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension. We are destroying software with complex build systems. We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fragile. We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels. We are destroying softwa...

I’m not the kind of person that develops a strong attachment to their own work. When I decided to leave Redis, about 1620 days ago (~ 4.44 years), I never looked at the source code, commit messages, or anything related to Redis again. From time to time, when I needed Redis, I just downloaded it and compiled it. I just typed “make” and I was very happy to see that, after many years, building Redis was still so simple. My detachment was not the result of me hating my past work. While in the long r...

The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack of connectivity, is now resolved by the W variant. The data sheet is excellent and documents every aspect of the chip. Moreover, it is well supported by MicroPython (which I’m using a lot), and the C SDK environment is d...

From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in order to balance LLMs creativity while preserving adherence to the context, different sampling algorithms have been proposed in recent years. Today one of the most used ones, more or less the default, is called top-p: it is a...

My usual process for writing blog posts is more or less in two steps: 1. Think about what I want to say for weeks or months. No, I don’t spend weeks focusing on a blog post, the process is exactly reversed: I write blog posts about things that are so important to me to be in my mind for weeks. 2. Then, once enough ideas collapsed together in a decent form, I write the blog post in 30 minutes, often without caring much about the form, and I hit “publish”. This process usually works writing the ti...

I'll start by saying that this article is not meant to be a retrospective on LLMs. It's clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence: to reiterate that seems rather pointless. Instead, this post aims to be a testimony from an individual programmer. Since the advent of ChatGPT, and later by using LLMs that operate locally, I have made extensive use of this new technology. The goal is to accelerate my ability to write code, but that's not the only purpose. There's also the intent...