From 38873bde8c5230ba3424c2ff118a93b6e13eb8b7 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Firehose Bot Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2026 13:39:09 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] will it blend - live --- Makefile | 6 ++- .../engineering/2026/10-08-will-it-blend.md | 50 +++++++++++++++++++ .../static/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg | 40 +++++++++++++++ scripts/.gitignore | 1 + 4 files changed, 96 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) create mode 100644 app/priv/blog/engineering/2026/10-08-will-it-blend.md create mode 100644 app/priv/static/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg create mode 100644 scripts/.gitignore diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile index a368b87..fb37d7c 100644 --- a/Makefile +++ b/Makefile @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ # Makefile for Firehose monorepo -.PHONY: check precommit deps compile test format +.PHONY: check precommit deps compile test test-elisp format # Common check target that runs all static analysis check: @@ -23,6 +23,10 @@ test: @make -C app test @make -C blogex test +# Run Emacs Lisp tests for roam-export-blog (requires emacs on PATH) +test-elisp: + emacs --batch -Q -l org -l ox-md -l scripts/roam-export-blog.el -l scripts/roam-export-blog-test.el -f ert-run-tests-batch-and-exit + # Format code format: @make -C app format diff --git a/app/priv/blog/engineering/2026/10-08-will-it-blend.md b/app/priv/blog/engineering/2026/10-08-will-it-blend.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..44700c7 --- /dev/null +++ b/app/priv/blog/engineering/2026/10-08-will-it-blend.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +%{ + title: "Will It Blend?", + author: "Willem van den Ende", + tags: ~w(AI pi.dev ComprehensionMaxxing), + description: "Will it Blend was a series of videos promoting a blender brand, in which various unlikely objects were put in a blender to see if they would blend.", + image: "/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg", + published: true +} +--- + +**Problem** You find something interesting, but don't completely understand it, or are not sure where to start. + +**Solution** Point your coding agent at the thing you read (a blog post, research paper, product announcement) and build something so that you can play with it. + +Will it Blend was [a series of infomercials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F) promoting a blender brand, in which various unlikely objects, such as tablets, were put in a blender to see if they would blend. + +![will-it-blend](/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg) + +I like it as a _metaphor_ for trying to get something to work that you have just come across. I often use it when reading about the new hot AI thing of the week (say decision models a couple of weeks ago). I’ll go and look for an open source implementation and have a play with it, asking my coding agent for help installing it and coming up with a micro project I can do with it. + +Worst case I lost half an hour to an hour, and put the idea back on the backburner. But more often than not, I get something out of it that I can take forward: working software and better, more grounded, understanding of a topic. + + +## Examples of when I used this + +I use this all the time now. And so do other people, it is not that original. I want to encourage you to see if things blend too, only takes half an hour or so. + +### Decision models +For instance, a day after [Jev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jev_(AI_model))came out, Laya popped up on Reddit. I cloned the repository, opened Pi and asked some questions about what you could do with it. Then I had a look at the example code on the Laya page, used my coding agent to run it, had a chat about how I could use it in a coding agent, and had the agent make some sample questions with sample data. I also wondered why it was taking so long to start, got the coding agent to reduce startup by 40 times (28 seconds to about 0.6 seconds or so), and I learnt in the process that this was a BERT model with some pre-training. I had seen BERT’s but not played with one in the wild before. This enabled me to write some comments on LinkedIn, and learn, indirectly, about my mistakes :-). Not bad for an hour or two on a sunday afternoon. + +### Getting started with a local model in an open coding agent +Another example would be John Nolan , who my blog post on a local coding agent on Mac OS through his coding agent to get Pi + local llms set up on his machine. TODO source needed (LinkedIn). I liked this, because this is also how I got started with making my own coding agent, and later installing Pi. With a coding agent in hand, and some vigilance or sandboxing, this is not much time well spent. + +## Background + +I learnt this in the spring of 2025 through Julia Turc, probably from her video on [Mixture of Experts: How LLMs Are Getting Smarter Without Getting Slower](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yR5ScbK1qk). In this video, Julia takes a 1991 research paper on mixture of experts, pulls it through ChatGPT (this is several hundred AI summer years ago) and creates an executable Collab Notebook out of it. + +I wrote a comment at the time: + +> +1. I was wondering if llms would make it easier to implement papers (something I haven’t done in a while), and later that day, youtube surfaced this video with a live demo. I came for the mixture of experts explanation and stayed for the implementation and paper reading. It is insightful to see what you look at in a paper. + +I was primed for this by Katherine Breslin’s talk at Agile Manchester 2025 (spring, this is important in AI summer years), in which she mentioned making a voice assistant in an afternoon on her own, something which had taken the Alexa team (on which she worked) 150+ people and multiple years. + +## Your turn + +Do you have research papers, blog posts or videos that leave you wondering? Wonder no more. These days I often start with putting my question in a (gemini) notebook, getting a summary, finding more sources, and asking questions. Then I take a summary document to my coding agent, refer to that in an initial prompt and then it usually works. I create a new git repository for every project, making small commits as I go. Often [with tests](/blog/engineering/synthetic-tdd): they make it easy to get started, express expectations, and keep going if the experiment is a success. + +If you want specifics on what I use now: I use [Pi](/blog/engineering/tag/pi.dev) as coding agent. Models that I can run on a 64GB mac (e.g. Qwen 3.8 27B or 3.6 35B) are usually plenty. When I want it faster, or with less fan noise, I use a hosted GLM 5.3 Flash. + +I hope you find this useful and will see if something you are curious about will Blend. Happy blending! diff --git a/app/priv/static/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg b/app/priv/static/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..67f4362 --- /dev/null +++ b/app/priv/static/images/blog/2026/will-it-blend.svg @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ + + + + 54A6CC16-5A6F-4B83-8812-39D101FB1C1D + Drawing exported from Concepts: Smarter Sketching + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/scripts/.gitignore b/scripts/.gitignore new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c531d98 --- /dev/null +++ b/scripts/.gitignore @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +*.elc