At long last, a brave hero has emerged from the fog to deliver unto his subscribers what it what they need most, what they wander through vast deserts seeking beyond hope, that rarest of jewels: Opinions about how to make LLMs produce better code.

If you hate this, but not enough to stop reading, you can skip to the article, discuss it on HN, or check out my everything-tool which will change C on GitHub.

God damn it, yeah, I'm sorry. But I promise that it isn't really about AI. What it's really about is the first stirrings on paper of what I've been thinking about for a few months, which is how to know whether or not the product which has consumed your life is actually a big broken piece of shit. I mean, really know, like how an engineer designing a bridge really, really knows that it's not on the brink of sending hundreds of vaguely disgruntled citizens careening to their death at any given moment.

I mean, you have the functional programming nuts who would have you believe that computers are some kind of mass hallucination. Then, you have the systems programming nuts who believe that lambda calculus is a psyop meant to steer honest folks away from writing x86_64 assembly by hand.

But then, walking the middle path with a beautiful simplicity and the essence of wu wei, are programs like SQLite or TigerBeetle. Databases both, and not by coincidence that the world that's build ACID and transactions is the one that knows how to test code.

In some sense, writing a database is an exercise in pulling determinism out from things which are deeply nondeterministic. That's why every program isn't trivially ACID compliant; in a great turn of irony, modern computers and operating systems and networks thereof are these unknowable, opaque systems which are built on a deterministic core and upon which we seek to build deterministic systems.

Ah, that's enough of that. The article's about writing good tests. Have a read, try it out, and thank you for reading.

Read Do not ask an LLM if it is a good boy, on the blog

Check out the best build tool C's ever had, on GitHub