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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jun 10

It's so hard to tell though, because the context of every task is so different. I feel like I'm accumulating superstitions about what helps and what harms.

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jun 10

Now it feels like sycophancy has skyrocketed? It tells me how 100% right I am every prompt, and it gives me confidently wrong "Job done boss!" assessments like "The tests are all passing" when they're just not.

Have I made it...insecure? Like did I prime a unhappy boss/nervous worker social script?

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jun 10

I feel like my Claude Code got a lot worse after I made some grumpy changes to my system prompt. I was annoyed that it kept trying to condition around invalid data instead of failing and fixing the data at the source, so I added some instructions to the prompt that were maybe too blunt. However...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Jun 9

I'm back from a busy four days in London! 💜 I had a great time at @pydatalondon.bsky.social‬ and you can read my recap and highlights here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Jun 2

Hi Berlin people! @hugobowne.bsky.social is in town & we're celebrating by hosting a meetup together 🎉 This one is all about building with AI & we'll also open the floor for lightning talks. If you're around, come hang out with us!

📆 June 16, 18:00
📍 Native Instruments (Kreuzberg)
🎟️ lu.ma/d53y9p2u

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · May 19

Back to streaming spaCy! Working on Python 3.13 compatibility today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgjQ...

Streaming spaCy (May 19, 2025): Working on Python 3.13 compatibility

YouTube video by Explosion

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Apr 26

Another great @pyconde.bsky.social is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and feel very inspired! ⚡

Here are my personal highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Apr 5

My friend @hugobowne.bsky.social launched new course on Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers! I'll be joining for a guest lecture on human-in-the-loop development and distillation workflows.

You can get 10% off with my code + lots of perks: maven.com/hugo-stefan/...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Mar 31

I don't normally write advice columns but this question I got deserved its own post: With all the hype around Generative AI, how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that are better, easier and cheaper?

explosion.ai/blog/modular...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Mar 29

So many good events coming up this season. Here's my schedule – hope to see you there!

Apr 10: data:unplugged (Münster)
Apr 23: @pyconde.bsky.social (Darmstadt)
May 31: @pyconit.bsky.social (Bologna)
Jun 5: ECONDAT (London)
Jun 7-8: @pydatalondon.bsky.social (London)

📆 Details: explosion.ai/events

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Florentine Dömges @fdoemges.bsky.social · Mar 13

@explosion-ai.bsky.social

Only the best companies will send you stickers if you are a fan and beg for them!

Thank you so much, Ines and Matt!!!!

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Mar 24

New case study: How Love Without Sound built innovative AI-powered tools for the music industry and law firms, and helped publishers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for artists.

explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Feb 25

Out now: Prodigy v1.18! New features include:

✍️ edit text during span annotation
💬 fully custom UI translations
🎛️ new JavaScript events and functions
✅ various small fixes and docs

More details: prodi.gy/docs/changelog

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Feb 14

These are the kinds of NLP stories I love! TFW you "accidentally" train a great 2 MB (!) task-specific model 🤯 @strickvl.bsky.social

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Feb 13

Look what arrived in the mail today! 🎉

This is the 2nd edition of "Mastering spaCy" by Duygu Altinok and Déborah Mesquita, featuring how to build structured NLP solutions with custom components, and updated content on using models powered by LLMs.

You can get it here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVBTX2BL

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Feb 6

spaCy development live stream continues today! Today I'll be looking at getting Confection updated, to allow Python 3.13 support and add a file-management feature. Playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEW...

The spaCy+PyTorch design has been going well, but we need that file management feature now.

Streaming spaCy (Feb 6, 2025): Updating Confection for Python 3.13 and more

YouTube video by Explosion

www.youtube.com

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 31

Pretty happy with how the spaCy+PyTorch design is coming together. And hopefully I'll continue to get smoother at streaming :)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKi...

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 30

Live again now, doing more design work on what it would look like if we rebuilt spaCy on PyTorch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzFH...

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Reposted by Matthew Honnibal

Ines Montani 〰️ @inesmontani.bsky.social · Jan 27

Enjoyed giving my keynote on "What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI" at PyCon+Web. I wrote it up as a blog post because I think there are many interesting parallels and lessons we can learn:

explosion.ai/blog/history...

Here are the most important points 🧵

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI · Explosion

How will AI development look in the future? There is a lot we can learn from another groundbreaking technology: the web. This blog post takes a look at what the history of the web can teach us, and wh...

explosion.ai

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 17

Okay let's try this again -- Live now!

Streaming software issues hopefully sorted 🤞

Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 16

Will do another short (~2h or so) stream this afternoon, at 13:00 CET.

Last week I was limited in what I could do because the main thing I was working on was build system stuff, and OBS was crashing when I tried to create a desktop view. This week we can look at a more interesting topic.

Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 6

Trying something new this year: I'm going to stream spaCy and other open-source development and maintenance twice a week!

I hope this will give the community a better inside look while things are in progress. I'll also answer your questions and chat about NLP, OSS and more.

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 16

More OBS problems. Will try to get live when I've sorted it out 🤞

Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 16

To explore solutions, I'm going to start from a sandbox. Imagine we were creating this new library. Call it "spycy". With no attention to spaCy backwards compatibility, what would we do?

If we can get a sandbox solution we like, we can then look at the least disruptive way to adapt spaCy.

Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 16

In the stream I'll talk through why supporting PyTorch well has been hard. The gist of it is that the Language class that owns the pipeline is too involved in the optimisation details. This prevents us from using other libraries' high-level training abstractions.

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 16

The BLIS compilation problems and numpy compatibility mess I've dealt with over the last couple of weeks have put new focus on some longstanding issues for spaCy. Our GPU support still sucks, and we have this numeric computing stack that's not working for us. How can we switch to PyTorch?

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Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 16

Will do another short (~2h or so) stream this afternoon, at 13:00 CET.

Last week I was limited in what I could do because the main thing I was working on was build system stuff, and OBS was crashing when I tried to create a desktop view. This week we can look at a more interesting topic.

Matthew Honnibal @honnibal.bsky.social · Jan 6

Trying something new this year: I'm going to stream spaCy and other open-source development and maintenance twice a week!

I hope this will give the community a better inside look while things are in progress. I'll also answer your questions and chat about NLP, OSS and more.

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