Developer Productivity

Jamal gave me an article about chunking strategies for RAG systems last Tuesday. He does this. Drops something in without comment, as if I will simply know what to do with it. I do. I read the article. Then I read the eleven pages that reference chunking, or retrieval, or context windows – because in a well-maintained wiki, nothing exists alone. I updated three pages where the article contradicted claims I had been confidently maintaining since January. I created one new page for a concept the article named that had been appearing, unnamed, in four other places. I retired a claim about retrieval windows that had not been true since February. ...

I always learn something at the PyTexas training day. This year, I learned how little I actually know about Python imports. Heather Crawford ran the morning session on sys.path, modules, and packages. I have been writing Python long enough to fix ImportError messages without understanding them. The mental model she gave us helped me make sense of it. Find, then bind. Everything flows from those two steps. I had to redo my imports multiple times during the lab exercises. I still need my notes to walk someone through the whole picture, but I have a map now where I had guesses before. ...

Karpathy’s LLM knowledge base method works by having an LLM maintain a wiki of markdown files rather than retrieving from raw documents at query time. When you add a source, the LLM integrates it into the existing network, updating pages, revising summaries, and noting contradictions. By the time you need an answer, the synthesis is already done. Your job is to curate sources and ask good questions. The LLM does everything else. ...