Assah Bismark

Apr 4, 2026

The Brain Can't Explain Itself

Your brain does something during original thought that science can describe but can't explain.

Human consciousness and originality are deeply intertwined. Your ability to have an original thought is likely the functional "purpose" of being conscious in the first place. Rather than just being a passive observer of the world, human consciousness acts as a virtual simulator. It allows you to bre...More ›

Apr 1, 2026

Hacker News Is High Friction

HN is the best signal source in tech. Reading it shouldn't cost an hour.

Hacker News is where the best technical conversations happen. When a new database gets traction, the thread on HN is where the people who actually built competing systems show up and explain the tradeoffs. When a paper drops, the comments are often better than the paper. The signal is real and it's ...More ›

Apr 1, 2026

Context Is What Makes Code Review Work

AI code review is a systems problem, not a prompt problem. Here is how we built Snif to stay useful.

I spent a month researching every AI code review tool I could find. CodeRabbit, Greptile, the GitHub Copilot reviewer, half a dozen smaller ones. The pattern was the same everywhere: teams install the tool, get excited for a week, then disable it. The comments are generic. The tool flags things that...More ›

Mar 26, 2026

Using Claude Code with any model

Claude Code's toolset works with non-Anthropic models through a local proxy. Here's the setup, the bug, and the tradeoffs.

Claude Code has the best agentic coding toolset available right now. File editing with diffs, bash execution, grep, glob, MCP server integration, subagents, plan mode. It runs in your terminal, reads your entire codebase, and orchestrates multi-step changes autonomously. It only speaks Anthropic Mes...More ›

Mar 21, 2026

You Don't Need Certainty to Build

Curiosity, not complete knowledge, is what creates things.

We live on a small ball speeding around a galaxy. We act like we understand things, but we haven't even seen a quarter of what we're trying to observe. And that's not defeatism. It's just worth being honest about how little of the picture we actually have. The consciousness problem If there are othe...More ›

Mar 19, 2026

AI Shipped Faster Than Anyone Can Verify

AI systems ship at exponential speed. The governance and security infrastructure around them is still moving at human speed. That mismatch is the actual problem.

I've been tracking what's actually happening in the AI space day to day. Not product launches or funding rounds. The pain. What's breaking, what's failing, what practitioners are complaining about. The same five problems keep showing up. Agent overload. AI-generated code debt. OSS maintainer burnout...More ›

Mar 17, 2026

More Agents Is Not All You Need

A Google Research paper tested 180 agent configurations and found multi-agent systems average -3.5% performance. I tested it on code generation and got a different result.

Everyone building AI agent systems right now assumes the same thing: more agents, better results. Split the work across specialized agents, let them collaborate, and the output improves. A research paper from Google Research, DeepMind, and MIT tested that assumption across 180 controlled configurati...More ›

Mar 15, 2026

AI coding agents and the cloud provider gap

Desktop AI coding agents don't work with cloud provider auth. A local proxy fixes all of them at once.

The current generation of AI coding agents ships with a shared assumption: you have an API key from a model provider, and you paste it into a settings field. That works if you pay for a direct subscription. It does not work if you access models through a cloud provider like AWS Bedrock, Google Verte...More ›

Mar 13, 2026

There Is No Single Cause for Anything You Do

To understand any human behavior, you have to trace it backward through time.

To understand human behavior, whether it's an act of violence, a moment of empathy, or just the choices you make on a Tuesday afternoon, you have to overcome one of the brain's deepest habits: the tendency to think in categories. Humans draw artificial boundaries when faced with complex continuums. ...More ›

Mar 10, 2026

Architecture Is the New Product

AI writes the code now. The architecture is what actually ships.

What do software teams actually produce? Most people say features. Ship features, hit deadlines, move the roadmap. For a long time that was close enough. But now AI can generate features. It can scaffold services, write CRUD endpoints, wire up frontends, produce tests. The code itself is approaching...More ›

Mar 7, 2026

The World from Another Point of View

The persistent human ache isn't a flaw. It's a signal.

Spirituality remains one of the most enduring topics of human investigation, yet it often leaves a profound sense of confusion and yearning. For millennia, we have sought to connect with higher levels of existence, giving rise to diverse religions, philosophical systems, and esoteric traditions. The...More ›

Mar 4, 2026

Taste, Judgment, and the Thing AI Cannot Do

AI handles the logic. But logic was never the hard part.

AI has been around since the very beginning of computers. This is not some new phenomenon. Computing has steadily evolved from binary code and assembly language to the high-level languages we use today, all of it trying to bridge the gap between what a human wants and what a machine can execute. Pre...More ›

Mar 4, 2026

There Is No AI Thinking (And You Can't Outsource It)

The machines got faster. The real question is whether we got lazier.

There Is No AI Thinking (And You Can't Outsource It) We have officially entered the era of Inference-at-Scale. The marketing hype surrounding "Artificial Intelligence" has never been louder, bolstered by the deployment of NVIDIA's Rubin) architecture and the rise of Agentic Ecosystems. These systems...More ›

Mar 3, 2026

You Don't Get to Invent Your Purpose

Why the meaning you're looking for isn't yours to create.

It is safe to argue that humans have existed for millennia. The cosmos and the galaxy are far beyond our reach. We can speculate about life on other planets, probe the edges of what is observable, send signals into the void. But the core idea of meaning does not leave the human heart. It is a long q...More ›

Jan 30, 2026

Windows ONNX Runtime Linking Errors

Solving LNK2019 errors when building Rust projects with ONNX Runtime on Windows CI.

Windows ONNX Runtime Linking Errors: A CI Debugging Story I was setting up a GitHub Actions pipeline for a Rust project that uses for embedding generation. Linux and macOS built fine. Windows? Not so much. What should have been a straightforward cross-platform build turned into a deep dive into how...More ›

Jan 21, 2026

The Infinite Software Crisis

What Happens When AI Writes Faster Than We Can Think

The Infinite Software Crisis: What Happens When AI Writes Faster Than We Can Think There's been a lot of talk lately about what's being called the "Infinite Software Crisis". It's not a new observation - people have been warning about this for a while - but it's been circulating more in engineering ...More ›

Dec 16, 2025

Streams, Parallelism, and the Quest for Speed

A pragmatic exploration of Java streams and parallelism.

I've always been fascinated by the relentless pursuit of performance in software. It's a game of optimization, a constant dance between elegance and efficiency. Lately, I've been diving deep into two concepts that feel like they're at the heart of this pursuit: streams and parallelism. They're not n...More ›

Nov 1, 2025

Solving the Context Problem - A Local RAG System for Code

Building Local Semantic Code Search - 11ms Queries Across 7,620 Files

Solving the Context Problem: A Local RAG System for Code Yesterday I was using Kilocode to help refactor some authentication code in a 7,620-file Java codebase. The AI agent kept giving me generic advice because it couldn't see the actual implementation patterns in the project or some constraints. I...More ›

Jun 3, 2025

Mastering Keycloak Configuration with GitOps and keycloak-config-cli

Automated IAM Configuration with Git and keycloak-config-cli

!current image in my mind. current image in my mind. In the realm of Identity and Access Management (IAM), Keycloak stands out as a powerful, open-source solution. Yet, managing its configuration—especially in complex, multi-tenant environments—can quickly become a significant bottleneck. Manual cha...More ›

Mar 20, 2025

How to Read Hacker News Threads with Most Recent Comments First

Learn how to read HN threads in reverse chronological order.

Hacker News displays comments in a tree structure, which can make it difficult to track the latest updates in a conversation. To address this, I explored three different methods to sort and read Hacker News comments by most recent first. Here's how you can do it, starting from the simplest approach....More ›

Jan 7, 2023

Rust concurrency with Mandelbrot Set

Exploring concurrency in Rust programming.

Rust excels in concurrent programming by enforcing rules that prevent memory errors and data races. For example: - Mutexes: Rust ensures you only access shared data when holding the lock and releases it automatically. In C/C++, this relationship is often left to comments. - Read-Only Data: Rust prev...More ›

Jan 6, 2023

intercept fetch requests in JavaScript

How to intercept fetch requests in JavaScript.

I'm learning service workers. I wanted to start with one that intercepts calls to a and returns "Hello World". Here's the initial recipe I came up with. contained this: This is using the service worker registration boilerplate from MDN. Then my service worker script itself in just does this: You ...More ›

Jan 5, 2023

How to use cURL to interact with GraphQL APIs.

Running GraphQL queries from the command line using can be made simple and readable. Here's an example of how to query the GitHub GraphQL API using , tested in both and . Replace with your GitHub API personal access token. This command constructs and submits a GraphQL query encoded in JSON, using...More ›

Jan 4, 2023

How to retrieve a GraphQL schema from an endpoint.

The GraphQL schema language is a concise way to represent the available schema provided by a GraphQL endpoint. It looks something like this: You can retrieve a JSON version of this from the GraphQL server itself using the query at the bottom of this document. But... if you want it back in readable t...More ›

Jan 3, 2023

Deploying Python web apps as AWS Lambda functions

Guide to deploying Python web applications.

AWS Lambda can host functions written in Python. These are "scale to zero" - my favourite definition of serverless! - which means you only pay for the traffic that they serve. A project with no traffic costs nothing to run. You used to have to jump through a whole bunch of extra hoops to get a worki...More ›

Jan 2, 2023

Programmatically Access Postgres

How to access Postgres programmatically from your application.

The db-to-sqlite tool can connect to a PostgreSQL database, export all of the content, and write it to a SQLite database file on disk. This guide demonstrates how to integrate this process into a GitHub Actions workflow, allowing programmatic access to a Heroku PostgreSQL database. Overview Heroku p...More ›

Jan 1, 2023

jq Array of Array Object

Example of handling arrays of array objects in jq.

Input: I want an array of objects. Here's what I came up with, using jqplay.org: This outputs: If you remove the outer and and use the "Compact output" option you get back this instead:More ›