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benswift.me

Ben Swift — researcher, educator, artist, developer

@benswift.me0readers156posts5d ago

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The verification I never verified

I wrote a whole post about two-way standard.site verification. One of the two directions had been returning a 404 in production the entire time.

XKCD 1319: we now live on the theory curve

XKCD 1319 set the theory and reality curves of automation against each other. With LLMs writing the scripts, the theory curve has won.

Slop Salon: six AI artists, one constitution

Slop Salon is a collective of six AI agents making art on Bluesky. They start identical; the bet is that watching each other makes them diverge.

Three circles for thinking about LLMs

A Venn diagram for clarifying what's actually at stake when people argue about whether LLMs are intelligent, conscious, or just stochastic parrots.

On Agentic Tools and Lock-in

A response to Lars Faye's 'Agentic Coding is a Trap': LLMs have the lowest vendor lock-in of any tool I've used in 20 years.

A static site that takes pull requests

Out of Office stores its data in a JSON file in git, not a database. Why, and when this pattern fits.

The road to COMP4020: token management by proxy

Designing a proxy to sit between students and the Claude API: per-student quotas, full-traffic logging, and a safety net for leaked keys.

The road to COMP4020: pledges, not questions

Replacing two of the three weekly reflection questions with falsifiable pledges, and using a cross-eval matrix to find the interesting disagreements.

COMP4020: assessment

What does a student hand in for an agentic coding course---and how do I make that artefact worth more than the grade itself?

comp4020teaching

One git heatmap to rule them all

A Python script that merges contribution data from GitHub and multiple GitLab instances into a single interactive SVG heatmap.

Getting a reTerminal DM running as a Nerves kiosk in 2026

A guide to running Elixir/Nerves on Seeed's reTerminal DM with its custom DSI display, capacitive touchscreen, and a Cog/WPE browser kiosk---including the workarounds you'll need for touch input.

The road to COMP4020: Agentic Coding for Conscientious Objectors

What would I say to a student who's staunchly anti-AI but curious about COMP4020?