Chris Chua

Software Engineer. Interests in: Web, Data, Visualisation. Day job: Developer Platform

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

A lot of my friends that I want to discuss stuff with aren’t on any particular social media platforms.

IMO learning in public and having public discourse on difficult topics would be a great use case for these platforms.

Social media isn’t working? 🤔

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

Exciting!
Check it out if you’re in USA.

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

We're shipping @ImpulseLabs_

After four years of company-building and a lot of engineering, manufacturing, and compliance work, customers are getting units. Huge thanks to everyone who pre‑ordered since January 2024 and stuck with us. You made this moment happen.

[Ritwik Pavan @ritwikpavan]

Hardware Nation Ep. 3: Impulse Labs is redesigning kitchen appliances from the circuit board up.

@ImpulseLabs_ built an induction cooktop so precise and powerful, we deep fried a turkey indoors.

See the behind-the-scenes look at the product and the vision.

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

"The Prompt Engineering Playbook for Programmers"

My free write-up: https://t.co/kH09dwYBHa ✍️

The difference between a vague "fix my code" request and a well-crafted prompt can mean the difference between generic, unhelpful advice and precise, actionable solutions that accelerate your workflow.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@poppacalypse Just felt this yesterday. It’s real.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@eshear @scekker If it was a multiplayer graph where prompts and responses create new nodes.
And there was some way of merging nodes.
🤔

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

If only someone is doing this for Bazel 🤔

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

I'm writing evals for Next.js.

If you have examples of AI models generating incorrect Next.js code, I'd love to hear.

For example, the model output the wrong API or syntax. I want to fix them all 🫡

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@derrickko Agree. Now for the Sg version of this…

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@ASvanevik Highly recommend https://t.co/u2BDwb9vbk

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

UX flow looks good. I think this will be common (no-)coding workflow. Similar to dependabot type of PRs but more powerful and flexible.

Seems like something any OSS repo could use.
I’m also looking forward to GitHub’s own version of this.

[Grant♟️ @granawkins]

I’m building Mentat with @biobootloader, @ja3k_ and @plutobyte.

We’re 18 months deep. First we had a cli product, then a vscode extension, then rawdog and a bunch of other experiments, achieved SOTA on swe-bench, then we finally settled on a GitHub bot.

WHY A GITHUB BOT?

It’s all about async.

With Claude 3.6 we found that our agents could finally start doing long, difficult tasks (@ja3k_ had the foresight to skate toward this puck several months in advance).

We initialize them by either writing an Issue and tagging it (it’ll push a PR when it’s finished) or tagging it on a comment on your PR (it’ll push a commit).

At this point you want
- many agents working at the same time, so you don’t get stuck on Twitter
- a good interface for reviewing complex changes (PRs).
GitHub provides the best UI for both of these (for now 😈)

SO HOW GOOD IS IT?

Well, right now it’s Claude 3.7. 🤷‍♂️

We’ve developed a toolset and a set of prompts that let it view and edit files, use a shell, pull or stream context from GitHub, and some more little tricks.

We’re on about our 11th context-selection system which is hilariously simple but better than anything else I’ve used. (Don’t event talk to me about embeddings)

We follow every new model and feature release and, if the vibes are good, we push it to prod, usually within a couple days of release.

Here are some things I’ve used it for recently:
- Build a widget on our admin dashboard to view Leads. One-shotted it.
- Move all the online styles into a .css file and standardize them on a pet project. One-shotted, but I’m particular about styles so did some tweaking.
- Pushed a commit for parsing webhooks and had it write tests and test data. Broke at first, but our GitHub actions failed, it saw the failure and pushed a fix.

I will comfortably say it’s as good as any AI coding agent on the market. (Let’s be honest they’re all Claude 3.7 anyway)

CALL TO ACTION

1. Go to our website: MENTAT DOT AI. Login with GitHub. Install it on some repos, we’ll give you $30 of credits, write an issue and tag it.
2. Go to our discord and raise hell. (Link on homepage)
3. Reply to this post and raise hell.

Thank you for your attention.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@tim_cook My prediction:
Air tag 2.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@tim_cook My prediction:
Air tag 2.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

A recurring thought:
I worry that the brightest minds alive are stuck in whatever hype cycle industry they graduated from school into.

—

But as LLMs commoditize intelligence, it might be less of an issue.
Scientific discovery can occur in many fronts even those less hyped.

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

a glimpse into the future

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

We’re cooking — and I genuinely think we made something super special @ImpulseLabs_

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@sdamico Congratulations! 🥳

Can’t wait for it to be available globally / in Singapore.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@ASvanevik @notafedtrustbro Maybe someone can simplify this.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@ASvanevik Hit this a while back.
Moving USD within Sg is expensive no matter how you do you it.

I’d keep it in USDC up until you need to exchange it.

Cheapest way I’ve found was to go through StraitsX to do the currency exchange then withdraw SGD.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

Sometimes I think about this

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@rakyll @Dieter_be Would love to see tech to keep design docs up-to-date over time. Perhaps using GenAI and with links to commits.

[Chris Chua @chrisirhc]

@petergyang What did they replace it with?