Flux
Comprehension Debt: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code

Comprehension Debt: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering. There’s a cost that doesn’t show up in your […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Quoting Bryan Cantrill

Quoting Bryan Cantrill

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Gemma 4 audio with MLX

Gemma 4 audio with MLX

Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with gradio \ mlx_vlm.generate \ --model google/gemma-4-e2b-it \ --audio file.wav \ --prompt "Transcribe this audio" \ --max-tokens 500 \ --temperature 1.0 Your browser does not support the audio element. I tried it on this 14 second .wav file and it output the following: This front…

Simon Willison's Weblog
SQLite 3.53.0

SQLite 3.53.0

SQLite 3.53.0 SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me: ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK constraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this. New json_array_insert() function and its jsonb equivalent. Significant improvements to CLI mode, including result formatting. The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
ChatGPT voice mode is a weaker model

ChatGPT voice mode is a weaker model

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't. If you ask ChatGPT voice mode for its knowledge cutoff date it tells you April 2024 - it's a GPT-4o era model. This thought inspired by this Andrej Karpathy tweet about the growing gap in understanding of AI capability based on the access points and domains people are using the models with: [...] It…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Agents don’t know what good looks like. And that’s exactly the problem.

Agents don’t know what good looks like. And that’s exactly the problem.

Luca Mezzalira, author of Building Micro-Frontends, originally shared the following article on LinkedIn. It’s being republished here with his permission. Every few years, something arrives that promises to change how we build software. And every few years, the industry splits predictably: One half declares the old rules dead; the other half folds its arms and […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML