What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I got around to adding the mortgage tracking functionality to my partner's personal finance dashboard; it's working? I think? I'll have to ask him to test thoroughly tomorrow to see if the maths are right.

That is the last feature in his original design, so until he can test, I'm free to do whatever?

I downloaded some old Yu-Gi-Oh! games (the Power of Chaos series) and I wanted to get into modding them, mostly adding a cap to the rewards so you can't earn more than a playset of the same card, and also maybe expand the deck pool for the AI opponents.

That said, I'm also part of Timasomo and that's going much worse than planned so maybe I should focus on it...

I'm working on a thing to assert that you're a human or that you've got human content. It's got some block-chain and crypto things in it. It's like proof of ID but still anonymous.

Danger There be talk of 'cool thing" with an LLMs ahead but not written by a toaster. =)

I've been working on a passion project (now small business) coming up on 6 years (guess I can't call it a passion project any more?) making IT management software geared towards MSPs (think settings management, policy validation, config backups, etc across network/servers/workstations) and getting it all packaged on Azure with a pretty interface.

For context I've built out a set of systems to capture and structure device state/config, strip secrets, etc then exposed that info in the UI. Like everyone else, I've been evaluating how/if LLMs have a place in the stack so I created a CLI tool to read from my software which I can give to agents (this abstraction has helped wrangle the LLM to work more rigidly and control access). With everything being structured data, that cuts down on the context of an LLM to see things like "what's installed", "how's it configured", "what ospf settings are in place and what are your neighbors", "what are you plugged into?" etc. Using the CLI just returns narrow json of what's being queried through the CLI.

That's made planning and labbing out changes MUCH easier (esp when used in conjunction with something like container lab). I can now use the CLI/LLM combo to query complex state for things like "show me Fortigate firewall policies at all sites involved with any windows servers running xyz software but only the ones with 10g bonded links" and an agent will use the cli tool to query only the narrow sections of config/state required to answer the question.

Now I've taken it a step further, directing an LLM to review an IT project's requirements and write manifests of changes against the framework of my system change tool and tests against that structured data and feed it back into the system (via that cli tool) which presents a rigid change proposal in the UI. I can then review work against real equipment but with the safety of eyes on the proposed work approving/editing/rejecting changes from the UI with mandatory approvals for any changes. Click the approve button and runners are dispatched to make the changes/run the tests/handle rollbacks.

Needless to say, I eventually got approval for a POC on a real and large client environment to execute a project in this fashion.... and it worked spectacularly well!! Come maintenance windows the process for this particular pilot had become "click the go button and move cables from here to there as told by the UI". I was also able to have cable labels automatically printed to the guys onsite as they moved cables.

I've liked this abstraction of putting software/controls between real equipment and the LLM so it can't directly touch anything. I feel like there's an emerging market to make industry specific tools like this; "Human > LLM > Tool/abstraction/controls > Real thing" where a human can be in the middle to review/approve/audit/etc.

Anyway, I've been enjoying exploring and learning these new (to me) abstractions and wanted to share what I've spending all my time on.

The biggest trouble I've had is wrangling LLMs to be be brief in their verbiage. Change manifests have worked well so far but the amount of exhaustive text they spit out is borderline unusable to a human (which I fear promotes clicking "next, next, next"). What's the answer? A post production agent pass?

Is anyone doing something similar? Has it worked well for you?

A month or so ago I jokingly said I was going to build my own golf game with blackjack and hookers.
Blackjack and hookers are still tbd, but after some contemplation I have decided to actually start working on it.

With copious use of AI agents I now have functional flight, bounce, skid and roll physics that is plausibly realistic, based on published golf physics papers, golf equipment manufacturers' information and finetuning by hand. I have just returned from an afternoon session of miniature golf, but I have never played actual golf, only several different golf videogames over the years, so I've been watching golf youtube instead of TV shows to ensure that I have the right intuition.

The weirdest thing I have involuntarily learned so far is that Donald Trump, even if we account for possible cheating, is genuinely very good at golf for his age, and not only that - in places he almost looks like he's able to enjoy it in a normal, human way, to get actual enjoyment out of something that does not involve bragging or putting somebody else down. That was unexpected.

The game is moving forward well, the most difficult part and the only truly innovative part, which is the course authoring tools that most players will never see, is moving along swimmingly so far, whereas graphics has been a bit of a pain. Even though I'm mostly trying to match the vibe of older videogames like Links LS 2000, which is technologically very basic, getting it actually right to look as comfy and crisp as those old games is a challenge. I wanted to write "especially since I don't want to use generative AI", which I am using here and there for placeholders, but to be honest it doesn't even work well for this graphics style, so it doesn't really matter what I want or don't want.

I only hope that @KilledByAPixel is going in a different direction with his excellent tiny golf game because even though I've had this idea in my mind for a while, it is true that I only started actually working on it after I played his game and realized how fun even a very simple golf game can be. And of course there are clear similarities in my game because I assume we're both using inspiration from the few golf game de facto standards that evolved over the decades. So I feel a bit like a backstabbing golf developer. But I assume our games will turn out different enough.