Matthew Honnibal

When I'm programming, the text I get from Claude Code after it's done some analysis is not at all bad. But if you tell it to write something, there's nothing it's "trying" to say.

If you tell it "make words exist" it does, but then you look at them and go "this sucks actually". And it does.

You'll laugh but I do get it to test the tests sometimes actually, with this sort of thing: github.com/honnibal/cla... . After it generates the list, I ask another session to introduce the bugs, and check whether the current tests change them.

Why I don't think AI is a bubble · honnibal.dev Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

I guess my socials are way more tech focussed than my...social, so maybe this take gets kind of a "duh" here. Not sure. But: Why I don't think AI is a bubble honnibal.dev/blog/ai-bubble (basically an argument that LLM progress probably won't plateau. Not a finance guy)

Basic take I know, but "the information stays on ChatGPT" and "the information is used to decide which ads to serve" are not compatible statements.

Sneaky quokka: Testing and debugging with LLMs · honnibal.dev Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

If your tests ever find anything interesting, Claude Code will challenge you to a little contest-of-wills where it tries to cope, rationalise or lie egregiously to avoid fixing the problem. I call this minigame 'sneaky quokka'.
honnibal.dev/blog/sneaky-...

Style tips for less experienced developers coding with AI · honnibal.dev Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

Style (and mindset) tips for less experienced developers working with AI honnibal.dev/blog/llm-sty...

Yeah that's definitely a related problem. If you use an LLM to generate a web service, it'll try/except everything and just log an error. If you have something that shouldn't possibly occur it's better to have a stack trace

The gist of it is that it's really easy to write subtle bugs with try/except in Python, and there's a history of bad advice encouraging these bugs. If you're using an LLM coding assistant you're going to need to police its try/except usage carefully, so it's a good time to finally clear this up

Exception handlers are not general-purpose conditionals · honnibal.dev Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

I've been working on a post on LLM-assisted coding, and I guess I've built up a bunch of writer's debt, because it turns out there's a bunch of tangents I wanted to write up first.

One really concrete thing that came up is try/except usage -- so, here's the post. honnibal.dev/blog/try-exc...

It's so hard to tell though, because the context of every task is so different. I feel like I'm accumulating superstitions about what helps and what harms.

Now it feels like sycophancy has skyrocketed? It tells me how 100% right I am every prompt, and it gives me confidently wrong "Job done boss!" assessments like "The tests are all passing" when they're just not.

Have I made it...insecure? Like did I prime a unhappy boss/nervous worker social script?

I feel like my Claude Code got a lot worse after I made some grumpy changes to my system prompt. I was annoyed that it kept trying to condition around invalid data instead of failing and fixing the data at the source, so I added some instructions to the prompt that were maybe too blunt. However...

I'm back from a busy four days in London! 💜 I had a great time at @pydatalondon.bsky.social‬ and you can read my recap and highlights here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Hi Berlin people! @hugobowne.bsky.social is in town & we're celebrating by hosting a meetup together 🎉 This one is all about building with AI & we'll also open the floor for lightning talks. If you're around, come hang out with us!

📆 June 16, 18:00
📍 Native Instruments (Kreuzberg)
🎟️ lu.ma/d53y9p2u

YouTube video by Explosion Streaming spaCy (May 19, 2025): Working on Python 3.13 compatibility

Back to streaming spaCy! Working on Python 3.13 compatibility today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgjQ...

Another great @pyconde.bsky.social is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and feel very inspired! ⚡

Here are my personal highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

My friend @hugobowne.bsky.social launched new course on Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers! I'll be joining for a guest lecture on human-in-the-loop development and distillation workflows.

You can get 10% off with my code + lots of perks: maven.com/hugo-stefan/...

I don't normally write advice columns but this question I got deserved its own post: With all the hype around Generative AI, how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that are better, easier and cheaper?

explosion.ai/blog/modular...

So many good events coming up this season. Here's my schedule – hope to see you there!

Apr 10: data:unplugged (Münster)
Apr 23: @pyconde.bsky.social (Darmstadt)
May 31: @pyconit.bsky.social (Bologna)
Jun 5: ECONDAT (London)
Jun 7-8: @pydatalondon.bsky.social (London)

📆 Details: explosion.ai/events

@explosion-ai.bsky.social

Only the best companies will send you stickers if you are a fan and beg for them!

Thank you so much, Ines and Matt!!!!

New case study: How Love Without Sound built innovative AI-powered tools for the music industry and law firms, and helped publishers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for artists.

explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

Out now: Prodigy v1.18! New features include:

✍️ edit text during span annotation
💬 fully custom UI translations
🎛️ new JavaScript events and functions
✅ various small fixes and docs

More details: prodi.gy/docs/changelog

These are the kinds of NLP stories I love! TFW you "accidentally" train a great 2 MB (!) task-specific model 🤯 @strickvl.bsky.social

Look what arrived in the mail today! 🎉

This is the 2nd edition of "Mastering spaCy" by Duygu Altinok and Déborah Mesquita, featuring how to build structured NLP solutions with custom components, and updated content on using models powered by LLMs.

You can get it here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVBTX2BL

YouTube video by Explosion Streaming spaCy (Feb 6, 2025): Updating Confection for Python 3.13 and more

spaCy development live stream continues today! Today I'll be looking at getting Confection updated, to allow Python 3.13 support and add a file-management feature. Playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEW...

The spaCy+PyTorch design has been going well, but we need that file management feature now.

Pretty happy with how the spaCy+PyTorch design is coming together. And hopefully I'll continue to get smoother at streaming :)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKi...

Live again now, doing more design work on what it would look like if we rebuilt spaCy on PyTorch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzFH...

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI · Explosion How will AI development look in the future? There is a lot we can learn from another groundbreaking technology: the web. This blog post takes a look at what the history of the web can teach us, and wh...

Enjoyed giving my keynote on "What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI" at PyCon+Web. I wrote it up as a blog post because I think there are many interesting parallels and lessons we can learn:

explosion.ai/blog/history...

Here are the most important points 🧵

Okay let's try this again -- Live now!

Streaming software issues hopefully sorted 🤞

More OBS problems. Will try to get live when I've sorted it out 🤞