Direnv env var additions, overrides, and removals
I use direnv to overlay folder specific configurations in projects when I cd into them.
Today I Learned
Reviving a Raspberry Pi with Claude Code
Sometime in 2021 (I think), I got a Raspberry Pi 4 and played with it a little and then it started collecting dust on my desk. Every time I looked at it, I saw lots of fun possibilities and lots of unfun software updates that I would need to work through before those fun things would be possible.
Embeddings with sqlite-vector
About a year and a half ago I wrote about using sqlite-vss to store and query embedding vectors in a SQLite database. Much has changed since then and I'm working on a project that motivated another pass at querying embeddings on a local system for smallish datasets. The sqlite-vector project seemed...
Debugging DSPy token usage and prompts
As I've experimented more with DSPy, I've attempted to dig further into the details of the specific LLM I am using to better understand things like token usage, reasoning, and the specific prompts being sent to the model. While, DSPy's abstraction is one of the more lightweight for LLM frameworks,...
Intro to DSPy
The viral "how many r's are there in the word 'strawberry'?" problem is a great motivating example to experiment with the capabilities of DSPy, an increasingly popular, powerful library for running inference with language models. While the counting letters problem itself is a poor application of a...
Claude Code Custom Slash Commands Hierarchy
Claude Code supports custom slash commands. Custom slash commands allow you to define frequently-used prompts as Markdown files that Claude Code can execute. Commands are organized by scope (project-specific or personal) and support namespacing through directory structures.
Running `uv` with Environment Variables
The .env file and the python-dotenv package are popular conventions in Python for managing environment variables. I often forget or pause when trying to remember exactly which package I need to install (python-dotenv) and how to do the import
Datadog and the OpenAI API Spec
When Datadog's magic breaks your API calls
Why I like the Chat Completions API
With MCP, Dates are a Footgun
Model Context Protocol servers have become a popular way to expose software services for LLMs. Prior to this post, I'd not spent nearly enough time with them to have a strong opinion of their pros and cons, so I set out to change that.
Gemini 2.5 Uses Thinking By Default
It started because I was using the OpenAI completion API to try several different models while building Tomo.