It’s terrific to see this. I’m definitely going to give it a whirl. I’ve been working on a specific JavaScript isolate[^1]. This is great source of inspiration for it.
GraalVM is genuinely great -- Native Image and the polyglot story are impressive.
I was put off by the earlier licensing - it was confusing, which wasn't great in a license. The GraalVM Free Terms and Conditions "GFTC" now seems better (curious if people agree?), but I wonder if it came too late.
The decoupling from Java SE was good in many ways, but it also made the future a little less clear too.
Apparently there tends to exist some attrition between both teams, now OpenJDK is having a Python and JavaScript support project, but by integrating CPython and V8, not by reaching out to GraalVM, Project Detroit.
Licensing was why I didn't adopt it, so glad to hear it's improved. Would sure love a non-custom license though. Will have to dive deeper into the GFTC
Just in case you were unaware, there is and was a 100% open source variant of the GraalVM referred to as the "Community Edition (CE)"¹. RedHat built their own distribution based on that source tree called Mandrel². The closed source version is faster in many cases, but the CE release in very capable.
I used to swear at Claude. To be honest, I thought it helped get results (maybe this is "oldschool" LLM thinking), but I realized it was just making me annoyed.
It does send an analytics event when you’re swearing based on a keyword filter (something like is_negative:true), presumably as a signal that the model isn’t performing well this session, but who knows?
I don't disagree that organizations are probably making that tradeoff in an uninformed way.
As a counterpoint -- it's rare I've seen a new UX issue fixed with a PR.
If you valued quality you could feature-flag some different improvements, get feedback and refine. AI is great at this. We have CS directly submitting Pull Requests now... and they're not junk, 95% of the the time they want things fixed/correct. And it's stuff that usually would sit on the backlog forever. The quality has gone up.
Your experience is representative I'm sure - but I do think there is a way to get this right and those that do will see a big upside.
> Were in for the golden age of cyberattacks, let me tell you.
I'm not either. I think it may look "cool" visually but when trying to work with code with those in it, it seems odd, like that it's a single character even though it's not and it just breaks the flow
Because most of those who commented are among those who do not like ligatures, I must present a counterpoint, to diminish the statistical bias.
Some people like ligatures, some people do not like them, but this does not matter, because any decent text editor or terminal emulator has a setting to enable or disable ligatures.
Any good programming font must have ligatures, which will keep happy both kinds of users, those who like and those who dislike ligatures.
I strongly hate the straitjacket forced by ASCII upon programming languages, which is the root cause of most ambiguous grammars that complicate the parsing of programming languages and increase the probability of bugs, and which has also forced the replacement of traditional mathematical symbols with less appropriate characters.
Using Unicode for source programs is the best solution, but when having to use legacy programming languages in a professional setting, where the use of a custom preprocessor would be frowned upon, using fonts with ligatures is still an improvement over ASCII.
A coding font is supposed to help you distinguish between characters, not confuse them for each other. Also, ASCII ligatures usually look worse than the proper Unicode character they are supposed to emulate. The often indecisive form they take (glyphs rearranged to resemble a different character, but still composed of original glyph shapes; weird proportions and spacing due to the font maintaining the column width of the separate ASCII code points) creates a strong uncanny valley effect. I wouldn't mind having "≤", "≠" or "⇒" tokens in my source code, but half-measures just don't cut it.
Try this - For the same task, try the same prompt three times with totally different framing - do it fast, be comprehensive, find stuff I’ve missed, etc.
Then throw away the ones you don’t like.
It also prevents reinforcement of your incoming pov.
I’ve found this has made me way way better at steering.
Okay.But if I need three different framings just to converge on one coherent implementation, I’m still doing architecture recovery by hand. That’s a big part of why I started building something local around the codebase itself.
For me the framing is critical - what is the model saying yes to? You can present the same prompt with very different interpretations (talk me into this versus talk me out of it). The problem is people enter with a single bias and the AI can only amplify that.
In coding I’ll do what I call a Battleship Prompt - simply just prompt 3 or more time with the same core prompt but strong framing (eg I need this done quickly versus come up with the most comprehensive solution). That’s really helped me learn and dial in how to get the right output.
[^1]: https://github.com/jonathannen/hermit
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