Christopher Smith
@chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social
Software developer and technology consultant in Albany, NY
Used it for a bit and then stopped. Ran into too many issues like VSCode incompatibilities and nested renv environments installed inside each other. You can always use rix or devcontainers if you really need reproducibility.
November 6, 2025 at 4:06 AM
Used it for a bit and then stopped. Ran into too many issues like VSCode incompatibilities and nested renv environments installed inside each other. You can always use rix or devcontainers if you really need reproducibility.
They often take 4-5 days.
November 6, 2025 at 3:55 AM
They often take 4-5 days.
My first reaction when I read the one-paragraph summary this morning was "no", but then I researched it a bit and voted "yes".
November 4, 2025 at 10:24 PM
My first reaction when I read the one-paragraph summary this morning was "no", but then I researched it a bit and voted "yes".
Many thanks to @christophscheuch.bsky.social and @tealemery.bsky.social, without whose support and vision this release would not have been possible.
October 25, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Many thanks to @christophscheuch.bsky.social and @tealemery.bsky.social, without whose support and vision this release would not have been possible.
Answer: a few states (Minnesota, New Jersey) look a little better; a few others (South Carolina, New Mexico) look a bit worse.
But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.
But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.
August 6, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Answer: a few states (Minnesota, New Jersey) look a little better; a few others (South Carolina, New Mexico) look a bit worse.
But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.
But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.
Thanks so much for the plug! I'm working on PDF parsing too, specifically with an aim to integrate it with a Zotero fork!
July 14, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Thanks so much for the plug! I'm working on PDF parsing too, specifically with an aim to integrate it with a Zotero fork!
A few days late, but here's my promised video coverage of the submissions: youtu.be/lQnBPqIpc2A
Chat with the budget bill in five CLI commands with `llm` — mini-hackathon recap, part 2
YouTube video by Christopher Smith
youtu.be
July 9, 2025 at 3:36 AM
A few days late, but here's my promised video coverage of the submissions: youtu.be/lQnBPqIpc2A
Which is to say, this was user error (well, really user laziness, because I knew we needed nullable fields but opted to skip it for purposes of the writeup), rather than model error. :)
July 7, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Which is to say, this was user error (well, really user laziness, because I knew we needed nullable fields but opted to skip it for purposes of the writeup), rather than model error. :)
Good catch. With the abbreviated schema syntax used to generate that output, you can't mark a variable in your schema as optional. That causes hallucinations by forcing the model to output a value when there shouldn't be one. You should instead use a fully specified JSON schema with nullable fields.
July 7, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Good catch. With the abbreviated schema syntax used to generate that output, you can't mark a variable in your schema as optional. That causes hallucinations by forcing the model to output a value when there shouldn't be one. You should instead use a fully specified JSON schema with nullable fields.
Gratitude to the participants, and many thanks to Simon Willison for creating and maintaining this amazing tool!
July 7, 2025 at 1:49 AM
Gratitude to the participants, and many thanks to Simon Willison for creating and maintaining this amazing tool!
*Winner*: The winning project, by Steve Senkus, scraped, chunked, and embedded the entire text of the "Big Beautiful Bill" for semantic search. Which, by the way, you can achieve with just five CLI commands!
July 7, 2025 at 1:49 AM
*Winner*: The winning project, by Steve Senkus, scraped, chunked, and embedded the entire text of the "Big Beautiful Bill" for semantic search. Which, by the way, you can achieve with just five CLI commands!
*Runner-up*: My own pitch was that you can use the help output from any command-line tool to create a prompt template for `llm`, then wrap the template with a shell script to create a purely natural language version of the tool. As proof of concept, I made `nl-repomix`:
July 7, 2025 at 1:49 AM
*Runner-up*: My own pitch was that you can use the help output from any command-line tool to create a prompt template for `llm`, then wrap the template with a shell script to create a purely natural language version of the tool. As proof of concept, I made `nl-repomix`:
*Runner-Up*: Evan Mullen scraped the HTML from Doctor of Credit, a website that aggregates bank deposit bonus offers, and then piped it to `llm` for conversion to a JSON array so he could compute which offers have the best ROI.
July 7, 2025 at 1:49 AM
*Runner-Up*: Evan Mullen scraped the HTML from Doctor of Credit, a website that aggregates bank deposit bonus offers, and then piped it to `llm` for conversion to a JSON array so he could compute which offers have the best ROI.
Event was small (I knew this was a risk on 4th of July weekend), but super fun. Writeup soon!
July 5, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Event was small (I knew this was a risk on 4th of July weekend), but super fun. Writeup soon!
Event page with the location details for those of you in the Albany, NY area: www.meetup.com/coders-colab...
LLMs from the command line: A mini-hackathon!, Sat, Jul 5, 2025, 1:00 PM | Meetup
**Update:** It looks like the creator of \`llm\`, Simon Willison, may join us for a demo via Google Meet! If you'd like to hop on remotely to participate or listen in on de
www.meetup.com
July 5, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Event page with the location details for those of you in the Albany, NY area: www.meetup.com/coders-colab...