Author: Matt Collins
-
First Impressions of Cloudflare’s Code Mode for Building AI Agents
Cloudflare’s ‘Code Mode’ got some attention in the AI developer community recently, thanks to a popular blog post about it. It’s based on the ‘CodeACT‘ pattern for AI agents which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. These are my initial first-hand impressions of using it. What is CodeACT? Most LLM-based AI…
-
AI Splurge
Heard of ‘AI slop’? There’s something else I’m worried about these days and I’m calling it “AI splurge.” What is AI Splurge? AI splurge is the output of AI coding agents when they get overzealous and create more code than you need. It can take many forms, but here are a few I’ve seen a…
-
AI Hallucinations? The Solution Is More AI, Not Less
I’ve heard a few people say that, since generative AI systems can hallucinate, we’re alway going to have to double-check their work in great detail if we want to be confident it’s correct. I disagree. Why? Because AI systems can do much of this checking themselves. And, when the cost/benefit tradeoff is right, I believe…
-
How to Build an AI Fact Checker
Journalists sometimes get things wrong. Wouldn’t it be nice if AI could help us spot when they do? I recently prototyped an LLM-powered fact checker (using web search APIs) to see if it could do just that. It looked promising! In case you’re interested in learning more, I gave a talk to the MLOps London…
-
How to Use AI in Software Product Development Today
It is now clear: AI is transforming how software is developed. Anyone leading software development teams needs to be keeping a close eye on this to understand the tools’ rapidly evolving capabilities as well as their limitations and risks. Here’s a snapshot (as of January 2025) of how I think AI tools currently fit into…
-
How AI Helped Me Create a #1 Product Hunt Tool in Hours
What if AI could help you generate ideas for products and build them? That’s what happened when I used AI tools to create Flowdrafter—a writing app that solves a common problem for writers. (It even became Product Hunt’s #1 productivity tool of the week!) Can AI Coding Agents Help with Marketing? My wife is a…
-
FastHTML: The Perfect Framework for Simple AI-Powered Web Apps?
I heard about FastHTML a few months back and was immediately intrigued by its pitch: “Modern web applications in pure Python Built on solid web foundations, not the latest fads – with FastHTML you can get started on anything from simple dashboards to scalable web applications in minutes.” https://www.fastht.ml/ This sounded like something I could…
-
5 Ways to Make an Agentic AI System More Reliable
Lots of people are starting to explore what can be done with agent-based AI systems. It feels like there’s huge potential in them. But getting an agentic system to work reliably enough to use in practice often turns out to be very hard. Here are a few techniques that can help with reliability. Technique 1:…
-
What the 2023 Hollywood Writers’ Agreement Says About the Use of AI in Screenwriting
As of 27th September 2023, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) has ended its strike with the big studios, having reached a tentative agreement with the big studios that will now be voted on by the WGA’s members. The deal has some key terms about AI and could be a sign of what will be…
-
How to Regression Test Software Built on Large Language Models
[Edit: I wrote this a while ago and I’d now recommend you look at the idea of ‘evals’ as a way to approach this.] A challenge when developing software that makes use of large language models is writing automated tests for it. With traditional software, you tend to know exactly what output you expect to…
