Notes

Configuring jujutsu

12 June 2025

Collection of useful tips from akshay for configuring jujutsu. I particularly like the tug alias, which advances a bookmark on the current branch to one behind the current working copy revision.

tug = ["bookmark", "move", "--from", "heads(::@- & bookmarks())", "--to", "@-"];

AI is the beginning of an answer

26 May 2025

A common concern I hear from people when I mention how much I use generative AI is “But how can you trust the answer?” Well, I don’t.

I use AI to research and answer questions, but the response I get is a starting point for solving my task. I might ask ChatGPT to take a list of my son’s football games and create events I can import into iCal, or research a three month forecast for the rainfall in my local area.

I can import the events into iCal but I’ll scan down the list to make sure it appears correct against the official list. This takes a bit longer, and if I’m going to check them why not enter each one myself? If I did, I’d check it anyway. I can make mistakes, too, particularly entering a list of similar, repetitive data into a calendar.

For a research task I’ll take a look a the cited sources in the response. Do they look credible and current? I’ll click to read a couple of them to get a better understanding of the response and understand the viewpoint for the sources.

The previous way I’d do this was a Google (or, now, Kagi) search. Even though Google increasingly includes answers with the search results, I generally expected I’d need to click a couple of results and read a few to find my answer.

Using an AI assistant takes this step further, but I consider the response to be the beginning of an answer, rather than the conclusion.

erlang-red is a flow-based environment for Erlang

20 May 2025

Another example of a flow-based programming environment. Based on Node-RED, and there are Elixir helpers available.

There are acceptance nodes, too, which are used for unit testing: flows can be created and verified they work as expected. This is worth exploring more as testing is often an overlooked challenge with visual programming environments.