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gptoptout, fixit2, continue, typograms, and throwing away your code

14 Aug 2023

GPTBot opt-out

OpenAI now offers a method of stopping it’s web crawler from using your website as training material. You can see an example of it running for dorktips here: robots.txt.

Documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

Fixit2

Meta has published the first(?) auto-fixing linter. It’s a python linter that is heavily based on flake8 and it will automatically fix some of the issues it finds. It also let you setup custom rules and fixes which they showcase in the release announcement. There is a link to the pypi package at the end of the announcement.

Release announcement: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/08/07/developer-tools/fixit-2-linter-meta/

continue

For those on the waitlist for the VSCode Github Copilot Chat public beta. There is now an alternative. continue is a VSCode extension that exposes OpenAI’s LLMs as an in-IDE chat window. You can access the gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 models freely at first but then need to use an API key.

Repo: https://github.com/continuedev/continue

Typograms

Google’s hat in the ring for typographic images. Mermaid seems to have been taking the world by storm and while I quite like it, there are some things that are still annoying (I’m looking at you, inability-to-enforce-node-positions). As such I’m excited for some competition in this space. On the documentation what they say about Mermaid is

Unlike libraries like mermaid, typograms are defined typographically (WYSWYG), rather than semantically (a transformation from a high level description to graphics), which picks a different trade-off: it gives you more control over the rendering (expressivity) at the cost of making you type more (productivity).

Let’s try it right now. Here is what I shoved into this post:

<script src="https://google.github.io/typograms/typograms.js"></script>
  <script type="text/typogram">
  +---+                        .---.
  |   |---> Welcome, dorks <--*|   |
  +---+                        '---'
</script>

and here is the result.

Looks pretty good. It’s also available as a node package.

Link: https://google.github.io/typograms

Opinion: throw away the first draft of your code

This author argues that when starting a new project, it is worth the time investment for engineering teams to:

  1. prototype for a few days
  2. literally delete all of the code
  3. actually start building the project

I won’t try to summarize much further but this is a good (and short) read. Sounds scary but I am interested to try this with one of my projects soon!

Article: https://ntietz.com/blog/throw-away-your-first-draft/

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