Will Smidlein's Blog

uv: It's Really Good

Basically, they took what was working in pip, rye and poetry, and discarded all the stuff that didn’t work. Then they spent months killing tickets to bring it to an insane level of quality.

This cannot be understated, as such a level of quality and dedication is so extremely rare in software that I usually associate it with things like VLC or sqlite. This is the league I consider uv in.

Always try uv first. If it doesn’t work (which is very rare), go back to what you did before or find a workaround.

If you haven’t played with uv yet, I can’t recommend it enough. Python ecosystem tools come and go but this one feels like it’s got some staying power. Lots of tremendously well thought-out decisions, many of which are laid out in the linked article. No magic, just good abstractions. Such a joy.

I will say I am somewhat confused about who is paying for all of this. Like obviously VCs but uh… why? Definitely not out of the goodness of their hearts. Similar uneasiness around Bun, which I also love.

Harper Reed's LLM codegen workflow

For some reason I say “over my skies” a lot when talking about LLMs. I don’t know why. It resonates with me. Maybe it’s because it is beautiful smooth powder skiing, and then all of a sudden you are like “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!” and are completely lost and suddenly fall off a cliff.

I find that using a planning step […] can help keep things under control. At least you will have a doc you can double-check against. I also do believe that testing is helpful - especially if you are doing wild style aider coding. Helps keep things good, and tight.

Broad strokes this is very similar to my workflow but there lots of nuggets of wisdom in this post. He also goes into a lot of interesting detail about using LLMs in non-Greenfield projects. Just a great read all around.

First time hearing about Aider and repomix, excited to try them out.