In 2014 while I was an intern on the Dart Language team, Google hired Erik Meijer as a consultant to work on Dart’s async / await compiler. Erik is an world class expert in this domain, but was unfamiliar Dart, so they had a senior member of the team sit next to him all day to smooth over the bumps that people usually hit when learning a new language and codebase. I think the senior dev also did much of the typing, but I’m more fuzzy on that.

Recently I’ve been using LLMs to write code for some algorithms research. I chose Rust even though I haven’t used it in ~8 years, and with the AI assistance, the workflow is close to what I imagine Erik had. I’m still reviewing and making modifications to the LLM-generated code, but almost all of my labor is at a layer above the programming language.

It’s fun, and certainly a productivity boost, but it’s not how I want to do every project. I still like programming by hand because I enjoy the process of learning and refining my craft, and in the past few weeks, I haven’t learned much about Rust. The code Claude has written seems fine, but I wouldn’t vouch for its cleanliness or correctness, which is fine in a research setting, but wouldn’t cut it for code that I would feel comfortable running in production.

In the hopes that I’ll start regularly blogging soon, I decided to use a real static site generator instead of the cobbled-together mess of Makefiles and pandoc that I used before.

Less than a day into using it, I’m already regretting the decision to go with hugo. I built a hugo “shortcode” that pulls comment-delimited content from external files into the markdown files in order to keep source code in the blog posts up to date. It works pretty well!

The main downside is that I can’t figure out how to dedent the code that is being imported this way, so if you pull in an OCaml function that is defined inside of a few nested modules, all the code keeps the original indentation, causing the alignment to be very ugly. If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know!