Everything I know about good API design
Read it on seangoedecke.com Most of what modern software engineers do1 involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from...
Don't feed me AI slop
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the early days of any new technology, the relevant social norms are still being workshopped. For mobile phones, that meant...
The famous "bottomless pit" AI greentext is fake
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many people believe1 this is the best piece of art or humour that AI has ever produced: This was generated three years ago by...
Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Reading research papers and articles about chain-of-thought reasoning1 makes me frustrated. There are many interesting questions...
What's the strongest model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?
Read it on seangoedecke.com What’s the strongest model I can train on my MacBook Pro in five minutes? I’ll give the answer upfront: the best 5-minute model I...
OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5
Read it on seangoedecke.com OpenAI just released its first ever open-source1 large language models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. You can talk to them...
AI interpretability has the same problems as philosophy of mind
Read it on seangoedecke.com If you want to know how a particular AI language model works, the current state-of-the-art approach is to use a “probe”. Pick one...
Why I don't allow AI-generated content on my blog
Read it on seangoedecke.com I will never include any AI-generated content on this website. In general I’m a big AI believer, and I use large language models...
Trying to impress engineers, trying to impress managers
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the first few years of my career, I knew next to nothing about how to do good work in a tech company. The senior and staff...
The refusal problem in AI language models
Read it on seangoedecke.com Everyone’s interested in what language models can do. But what about what they will do? Try giving ChatGPT 4o a menial task that...
Can small AI models think as well as large ones?
Read it on seangoedecke.com An AI trend that’s emerged in the last few months1 is the idea of a “cognitive core”. Instead of trying to build the largest,...
What kind of work I want (in 2025)
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 2021, I wrote this post describing the kind of work I wanted then. Almost five years later, it’s time for an update. What kind...
Do not yell at the language model
Read it on seangoedecke.com A few days ago, the news went viral that Replit’s AI coding agent went rogue and deleted a production database. A lot has been...
The silent AI war inside tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com I recently wrote an article for LeadDev about how software engineers are dealing with the AI hype in practice. Here’s my...
The case for regulating AI companions
Read it on seangoedecke.com In April, OpenAI screwed up by releasing a version of GPT-4o that was overly sycophantic. If you told it that Brian Cox was...
How to actually use Model Context Protocol
Read it on seangoedecke.com Everyone’s very excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short. In a sentence, MCP is a universal protocol for exposing...
Practical notes on getting LLMs to generate new ideas
Read it on seangoedecke.com Large language models struggle to generate new ideas. To AI skeptics, this seems trivially true, since they believe LLMs can only...
Building a RTS where you issue orders to AI agents
Read it on seangoedecke.com I’ve always been interested by the third-act turn in Ender’s Game where the child strategists switch from directly controlling...
The three great virtues of an AI-assisted programmer
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 1991, Larry Wall famously wrote that the three great virtues of a programmer were “laziness, impatience, and hubris”. A...
METR's AI productivity study is really good
Read it on seangoedecke.com I complain a lot on this blog about AI studies. Given that, I ought to give credit when an AI study comes out that I think is...
