RSS Parrot

Bad code is kudzu

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/09/01/bad-code-is-kudzu/

Published: September 1, 2026 00:00

Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can overtake sidewalks, houses,…

Write for people

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/08/12/write-for-people/

Published: August 12, 2026 00:00

Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we are automatically generating more and more…

Running local models is good now

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/running-local-models-is-good-now/

Published: June 15, 2026 13:00

I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used Mistral 7B Gemma 3 OpenAI OSS-20B Qwen 3 MOE, as well as a number of other Qwen variants…

We should be more tired than the model

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/05/28/we-should-be-more-tired-than-the-model/

Published: May 28, 2026 00:00

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but none of the internal processes that happen when we…

Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/05/18/tagging-my-blog-posts-with-bertopic-and-llms/

Published: May 18, 2026 00:00

I recently added tags to my blog using BERTopic and a mix of LLMs. You can see the tags in the sidebar to the right (or in the footer on mobile). I’ve done this before in 2023, with GGUF Mistral using llama-cpp, but never finished the project. Now, because…

Build yourself flowers

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/04/20/build-yourself-flowers/

Published: April 20, 2026 00:00

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded myself giving a version of this talk…

Build yourself flowers

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/04/18/build-yourself-flowers/

Published: April 18, 2026 00:00

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded myself giving a version of this talk…

Mechanical sympathy

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/04/13/mechanical-sympathy/

Published: April 13, 2026 00:00

Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design. Product design can roughly be designed as the…

On Programming Joy and Octocat

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/04/06/on-programming-joy-and-octocat/

Published: April 6, 2026 00:00

While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility, I’ve been thinking about how the internet used to be. Not the internet people talk about from the 90s, but the internet that we used to have even 10-15 years ago. This was the heyday of…

NASA Elements of Engineering Excellence

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/04/05/nasa-elements-of-engineering-excellence/

Published: April 5, 2026 00:00

I stumbled across this report from NASA, “Elements of Engineering Excellence”, published in 2012, The inspiration for this paper originated in discussions with the director of MSFC Engineering in 2006 who asked that we investigate the question: “How do…

Antidote

https://vickiboykis.com/2026/03/04/antidote/

Published: March 4, 2026 00:00

If you love building things, and the process of building is just as important to you as the result itself, it’s not unreasonable that you’re in a slump these days. The world is telling you that your thinking process is extraneous, unnecessary, and must be…