Alex Chesser

that can't be real... can it?

Is there an "Idaho" in the middle east somewhere and I'm misreading? Is it common for the US to allow foreign nations to have "air bases" on US soil?

I'm confused. Google really seems to be filled with AI right now because there's no way this could be real right?!

I'm sure if you scroll through their comments there will be commensurate outrage at the Grand Theft Auto "get your money back from a hooker" feature. Any day now... maybe scroll a little further back? Weird... maybe they said it about GTA4?

@simonwillison.net Hey! 👋 A friend of mine just sent me a link to your Vibe Engineering article: simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/v...

I'd written about similar a few months back: alexchesser.medium.com/vibe-enginee....

I thought you might find it interesting 😀

Absolutely heinous.

Re: Name for project to fix the Republic...

#Reconstruction2026 #Reconstruction2029

The White House official response is going to be "LOL ... He died like a week ago"

Looks like he might have a pretty solid case of "the computer doesn't know WTF to put there so it made it up"

This is like that time he drew on a weather amp with a sharpie.

That's right folk, the most incredible photograph you've seen today was taken by a user who calls themselves "Flesh Banana"

Oh Internet, never change 😂

Does anyone know if Netflix still has "the keeper test" in its core compensation philosophy or did that go out when levels were introduced?

Eventually you fill your dungeon with increasingly complex death traps, automated loot collection systems, bio-disposal, undead minion, kidnapped villagers, etc...

Basically becoming a dark lord of evil in the name of expanding your cozy small business, supplying adventurers on the road to peril...

By digging it out and releasing a few giant rats, you discover adventurers will shop in your store if the dungeon is sufficiently perilous.

You get to upgrade your shop.

You also discover that adventurers who don't make it, drop loot in your dungeon...

I want a new video game. It should be a cozy mix of Stardew Valley, Shopkeeper sim, Factorio, and, Dungeon Keeper.

Start as an NPC running a small, broken down shop in a village where adventures pass through on their way to the dungeon of doom.

Eventually, you discover an abandoned mine shaft...

... By Quan Mills

My favorite time of year!

I thought it was a recreation of this recent take on a classic...

a kitten is sitting on a table with a remote control in the background . ALT: a kitten is sitting on a table with a remote control in the background .

I've recently really enjoyed Chip Hyuen's AI Engineering.

ANY recommendations for industry leading software engineering or business books that have transformed your outlook or professional practice very much appreciated...

What are some of the most transformative books you know about the business and practice of software engineering?

What have you read that has changed the way you think about building software?

My number one is probably Accelerate, followed by Software engineering at Google, then Clean Architecture.

Maybe if I grab a bunch of books from O'Reilly online 🤔🫠 ... Perhaps a bit of professional development will help.

I think the number one problem is that I've got "external" anxiety that is preventing me from engaging in the escapism of enjoying reading.

The whole time I'm reading fiction or nonfiction right now I have a nagging feeling that I should be studying or productive...

Y'all it's been like 2 weeks since I've been able to finish a book 😭 and I've had some proper BANGERS on my phone.

Books that I've legit been looking forward to for months and in some cases over a year.

Haven't finished one.

Such an iconic picture that you know what happened, even if you don't know what happened.

Attention Is the New Big-O A Systems Design Approach to Prompt Engineering

One of my follow ups talks about some ways to beef up your prompts by introducing more structure.

I've learned that there are some inaccuracies around the mechanism, but the changes in behavior you'd want to adopt are solid.

"Good enough for beginners" 😅

alexchesser.medium.com/attention-is...

OK - this went way longer than expected because I got genuinely excited at the opportunity to talk about this with someone.

Thank you thank you thank you for sharing your thoughts and providing gentle & friendly pressure testing of my ideas. I've got a lot to think about and follow up on.

There's absolutely virtually unanimous consensus that structured prompting improves results. So if people take that away and gives them a way of making that point "sticky" then at least it has done some good in the world.

EVEN if I need to go back and do a better job on the "prove it" side 😀

My goal was to try to improve the daily practice of the "15 minute-blogread-with-morning coffee" developer. The sort of mid-market enterprise workhorses who see the hype and want to catch up ... and also need to drive their kids to soccer practice after work then make dinner and put them to bed.

I also made some choices which I knew were "off" in favour of being easier to conceptualize. "Embeddings as a thesaurus" for example. It's quick to say and easy to hold in your head ... I knew what I was doing there at least.

I'm glad I wrote and published AND pretty sure I need to go back to the drawing board and do better.

I do think it lays out a worthwhile, (if inaccurate according to some), mental model to help guide some towards improved productivity and performance with LLM usage.

I do find myself wondering about putting together a sort of experimental design where we try to see how "far behind a frontier model" we can get by upping our prompt game.

Could we get Claude comparable outputs with Qwen3-4B?
(or a gamut of single-card open-weight models)

Prompt Engineering for Generative AI Chapter 1. The Five Principles of Prompting Prompt engineering is the process of discovering prompts that reliably yield useful or desired results. A prompt is the input you... - Selection from Prompt...

Broadly speaking, the references section does cover the backed claims individually, which are also mirrored in the five principles of prompting which comes from www.oreilly.com/library/view...

(also summarized here: generalassemb.ly/blog/timeles... if you don't have an account with them)

Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, ...

I accept your criticism! You're right.

There were even some super interesting counter arguments in the hackernews thread. For example someone pointed me to the fact that "HYENA" is a replacement for Attention from 2023 arxiv.org/abs/2302.10866 I've yet to read it ... what if it changes everything?!