Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

How Top Programmers Use LLMs to Supercharge Productivity

2025-07-21

Veteran programmer antirez shares his 18-month experience using large language models like Gemini 2.5 PRO and Claude Opus for coding. He argues that current LLMs are best used as powerful assistants, not as standalone project completers. By clearly describing problems and iterating effectively, LLMs can help eliminate bugs, explore ideas faster, engage in pair-design, and even learn technologies outside one's expertise. However, antirez stresses the importance of providing ample context, choosing the right model, and maintaining control over the code, avoiding reliance on automated agents. Only then can code quality be assured and efficiency maximized.

(antirez.com)

Development

Human Ingenuity vs. LLMs: Debugging Redis Vector Sets

2025-05-29

Redis developer antirez recounts a fascinating debugging experience where he pitted his wits against Gemini 2.5 PRO, a large language model. A complex bug in Redis's vector set (HNSW) implementation, stemming from data corruption leading to inconsistent node links, required a solution beyond a naive O(N²) approach. While Gemini suggested binary search, antirez ultimately devised a creative solution involving an XOR accumulator, further refined by incorporating MurmurHash128 and a random seed. This anecdote highlights the power of human creative thinking in tackling complex problems, showcasing how LLMs can assist but ultimately fall short of human ingenuity in generating truly novel solutions.

(antirez.com)

Development

Redis Returns to AGPLv3 Open Source License

2025-05-01

Redis core developer antirez recounts the journey of Redis switching back to the AGPLv3 open-source license. He personally advocated strongly for AGPL, believing that the SSPL failed to gain widespread community acceptance. Redis 8, now officially released, uses the AGPLv3 license, much to antirez's satisfaction. He promises continued improvements to Redis, particularly the new Vector Sets data type.

(antirez.com)

Development

Redis Vector Sets: Replicating Hacker News Account Style Detection

2025-04-16

Inspired by a three-year-old Hacker News post about detecting similar accounts using cosine similarity, Antirez, using the new vector set functionality in Redis 8 RC1, replicated the experiment. He downloaded 10GB of Hacker News comment data, cleaned and preprocessed it to generate a JSONL file containing users and their word frequency vectors. Then, using the Burrows-Delta method, he normalized the word frequency vectors and inserted them into Redis vector sets. Finally, using the VSIM command, similar users with similar writing styles can be quickly found. The project code has been open-sourced, and an online demo website is available.

(antirez.com)

Development Style Detection

The Vanishing Web and the Promise of LLMs

2025-03-16

The internet is slowly forgetting: every year, a significant portion of web pages disappears forever. The Internet Archive (IA) stands as a crucial guardian of this digital memory, yet its survival faces increasing challenges. The author argues that while preserving everything is economically infeasible, the powerful information compression capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), despite inaccuracies, are better than complete loss. Models like DeepSeek V3 already offer a compressed view of the internet. We should support institutions like IA and ensure that publicly released LLM weights are not lost, and that IA is included in LLM pre-training datasets.

(antirez.com)

Tech information preservation

We're Destroying Software (And Our Joy of Hacking)

2025-02-08

Veteran developer antirez warns that we're destroying software! Over-reliance on new technologies, ignoring complexity, unwieldy build systems and dependency chains, and neglecting maintainability and backward compatibility are making software fragile. He argues that avoiding 'reinventing the wheel' stifles learning and innovation, while premature rewrites, frequent language/framework changes, and reliance on existing complex libraries exacerbate complexity. We need to prioritize code simplicity, scalability, and maintainability to rediscover the joy of hacking.

(antirez.com)

Development code complexity