Viewing profile — mark_l_watson

To be honest, I never give benchmarks a look. I just use the models for whatever I need to work on, so I can't really make comparisons that are useful for other people.

Meta is rocking AI. As of last week I have been using their excellent muse coding harness with their model Muse Spark 1.2. Starting this morning I am running their new local 30B mo…

He did the right thing. The very idea of Claude copying an existing project to answer one of my prompts or a whole project in Claude Code is a nightmare scenario. I have all but gi…

I am retired, so this may not be of general interest: I am working on my fourth AI coding agent, this one written in Racket Scheme: https://github.com/mark-watson/racket-coding-age…

Are you one of the authors? Great job! It took me just a few minutes to install Jolt and build a native executable for the Chess program in my Clojure book. Jolt rocks!!!

Clojure hosted on Chez Scheme (same as Racket). So cool. I tried building a standalone executable for the Chess game in my Clojure book using "jolt build -m chess-game.cli -o chess…

I just saw this - works great to build small self contained apps. (I just tested on macOS, also supports Linux).

I find pi-sandbox works well for me. Did you evaluate pi-sandbox? If not, give it a try.

Same experience, sometimes using Little Coder helps make things faster because it is built on pi and strips out some functionality. Probably best to stick with pi however, adding p…

I am starting to share the opinion in the article. I used to use Claude Code with strong open models, and sometimes pay for Opus. Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s …

No, but a good idea. I want something simple, practical, understandable. I think I will write a short book on this general topic.

Great article! I am currently writing my second harness (first was in Emacs Lisp, using Emacs as UI; second is a command line coding agent written in Common Lisp). If anyone wants …

While I agree with the article, I would carry the idea further: the huge value in AI is improving ourselves. By all means use AI to help design, write tests, and implement code and…

Thanks, you make me feel better for spending the (fun!) time writing my first harness in Emacs Lisp with a ‘Emacs UI’ and later writing a command line harness in Common Lisp. Am I …

Odd results for me. Last month I tested five AI chat sites, with web search turned off, and four of them had a shadow of information about me as a person (what kind of books I writ…

Such great advice. I have been meditating for over 50 years, and while this meditation practice is key to my being happy and content in my personal life, hobbies, and work the tech…

You can buy really good Ramen ingredients online and make your own. If you are not a vegetarian and don’t mind eating pork, you can buy sealed packets containing about 2 or 3 fluid…

Are you using the $20/month subscription? I don't use it much, perhaps two 20-minute sessions a day so I don't get close to using my quota. When it works, it is a great system, but…

I have just had my 3rd session in less than a week when I had to eventually quit Claude Code and do a task using another model/subscription. Am I just unlucky? EDIT: it is working …

This is my experience also: DeepSeek v4 flash is good enough for most of my work and I like the fast response times. I buy tokens mostly from FireWorks.ai in the US, but I also pre…

I toggle back and forth between deepseek v 4 flash/pro on FireWorks.ai using OpenCode. Easy to toggle, I default to flash.

I prepaid for a ton of DeepSeek v4 flash tokens. When I use them I would like to try purchasing Luna tokens for a while. I like cheap and fast models and since I am retired, if I w…

> I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. Right on! For 15 years I worked for two companies that had their offices on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in…

Very good, pairs well with the linked article. I am an old man (mid-70s) and retired now except for personal research and writing, but fifty years in the business taught me to simp…