Recently, at work, someone mentioned that a popular generative coding tool, which will remain nameless, introduced a “security review” feature. I expressed some doubt about the value of an LLM-driven “security review” not because I don’t think an LLM can find some security problems, but because I think it’s too easy to think it can find all the security problems. I believe an important part of exposing a tool that claims to do “Security Review” is being very clear about its weaknesses and I suspected that this coding tool didn’t approach this with the subtlety and nuance it deserves.

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I recently set up Prefect to use Modal as its dynamic worker pool, with a custom Docker image registered on ECR. There’s great documentation out there about setting up Prefect and Modal with a git repo, which covers many cases. In my case, I needed some custom installation and setup for the flow I’d be executing, which necessitated the custom Docker image. My organization already hosts Docker images on ECR, so using it for this workflow made sense.

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As you know if you’ve talked to me for more than 5 seconds in the past 6 months, I’ve been working on slime mold simulations. One of my goals recently has been to specify all the behavior of a simulation in a config file, which will let me both re-create a given simulation, and will also let me script simulation behavior to tweak parameters in a systematic way.

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Yesterday, I wrote a tiny class to make it easier to create actor-based programs in p5. I’ve written some variant of this code about half a dozen times in the past few weeks and I realized it was a little silly to keep re-writing it.

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One of my favorite things at Recurse so far has been the weekly “Creative Coding” meetup. Every week a group of about half a dozen of us get together and spend about 90 minutes writing code to respond to two randomly selected prompts. For instance, last week one of the prompts was “tech support” so I wrote a thing that creates a Markov chain from the longest Outlook FAQ I could find, and used that chain to build nonsense tech advice. Other people made very clever animations and even interactive games; it’s really amazing what can be done in 90 minutes!

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