Posts tagged with "AI"

I've just published v2.8.0 of BlogMore to PyPI. This is a small update which addresses a bug that Andy reported.

The fix was simple enough, and is another little interesting thing to keep in mind given that BlogMore is an ongoing Copilot experiment. When I first kicked off BlogMore I let it decide which library to use to handle Markdown (I'm more used to markdown-it-py via Textual and so via Hike), and so also let it decide which extensions made most sense given the request. I've honestly never run into the idea of metadata before, only ever dealing with or caring about frontmatter¹.

On the other hand, I will say this: I was cooking dinner when the report came in; I pointed Copilot at the issue and let it figure it out. After eating, clearing things away, and general post-dinner chilling, I dropped into the repo to see what it had made of it and... it had figured the issue out and fixed it.

I guess it was inevitable¹, but yesterday GitHub announced a new opt-out approach to learning from people's interactions with Copilot. I don't have anything novel or insightful to say on this switch, and I'm sure folk with better-informed opinions have already rushed out posts and articles about this, but I did want to jot down just how curious I am to see this roll out.

For starters: for me this feels like one of those things that will get a lot of backlash, and in a day or so GitHub will say they're pausing rolling this out while they reevaluate this approach². Then, eventually, they roll it out anyway after a "period of consultation with the community". That sort of thing.

I've not read further this morning, but before going to bed last night it wasn't a happy time in the comments section of the FAQ. I can also see why some would be cynical about this change, given the tone of some of the questions and answers in that FAQ. I'll hand it to them: they're pretty candid and honest with the FAQs, but kinda yikes too.

Here's the key thing I'm curious about, and which I'll be thinking about and watching for movement on in the next few days: all the talk here seems to be about protecting the privacy of the proprietary code of businesses³. That... is understandable, from a business point of view, from a commercial adoption point of view, from a "we want all software engineering departments to use Copilot" point of view. But how the heck are they really going to manage that?

In the comments in the FAQ this explanation stood out:

We do not train on the contents from any paid organization’s repos, regardless of whether a user is working in that repo with a Copilot Free, Pro, or Pro+ subscription. If a user’s GitHub account is a member of or outside collaborator with a paid organization, we exclude their interaction data from model training.

This seems somewhat unclear to me. Let's walk this one through for a moment: my GitHub account is a member of a "paid organisation". My account is also my account, for my personal code, I've had it a long time and it's filled with a lot of FOSS repos and I keep adding more. So which scenario is the right one here?

1. Because I'm currently a member of at least one "paid organisation" I'm always opted-out of this training no matter how the opt in/out setting is set and no matter what code I work on?
2. Because I'm currently a member of at least one "paid organisation" I can opt in when working on code that is from a repository which is mine, but I'm opted out when I'm working on code from a repository belonging to the paid organisation?

I think it reads like it's #1. But then that seems rather odd to me because, if I go and look at my settings right now, I can elect to opt in/out of this training system. If the correct reading is #1 why not just disable that setting altogether and say below it that I'm opted-out because I'm part of a paid organisation?

Which sort of suggests we should perhaps read it as #2? If that, that raises all sorts of questions. How would Copilot know I'm working on code from such a repository? Sure, it's not impossible to infer if I am working within the context of a given repository, doing some fun stuff to work out the origin and so on, but it feels messy. It also feels like a scenario that could end up being incredibly leaky. It really would not be difficult to run into a scenario where I'm working on some non-Free code but in an environment where the licence isn't clear, or where it appears that the licence⁴ would permit such training.

Or... perhaps there's a #3, or a #4, or so on, that I've not even considered yet. The fact that software engineering departments suddenly have to start thinking about this issue (yes, I know, it's been a background issue for a while but this really drags it out into the open) is going to make for a few interesting weeks, assuming people care about where their code ends up.

Who knows. Perhaps, in some strange way, this is how all software ends up being Free.

I've just pushed BlogMore v2.3.0 up to PyPI. This release has a couple of bug fixes and a couple of significant new features.

The first new feature, which came in as a request, is to add support for control over the themes used for code blocks, including independent control of the themes used for light and dark mode. With these you can specify any of the Pygments styles to use for code blocks. Personally, I prefer to have things blend in, but this now also gives you the chance to have them really contrast (use a light mode theme for dark-mode blog, or a dark mode theme for a light-mode blog).

The other big feature popped into my head earlier today and once I thought about it I had to have it. It's similar to something I had for the photography section of the older version of my website, consisting of a bunch of useless but fun stats and facts about the content.

Things like which hour of the day I tend to post during:

Or the day of the week:

Or the month of the year¹:

This is designed to be turned off by default -- I can imagine most folk would not want this sort of thing on their blog -- but it can easily be turned on with with_stats. The location of the stats can also be controlled using stats_path.

Last night, while tinkering with another BlogMore feature request, I ran into the sudden rate limit issue again. As before, there was no warning, there was no indication I was getting close to any sort of limit, and the <duration> I was supposed to wait to let things cool down was given as <duration> rather than an actual value.

So this time I decided to actually drop a ticket on GitHub support. Around 12 hours later they got back to me:

Thanks for writing in to GitHub Support!

I completely understand your frustration with hitting rate limits.

As usage continues to grow on Copilot — particularly with our latest models — we've made deliberate adjustments to our rate limiting to protect platform stability and ensure a reliable experience for all users. As part of this work, we corrected an issue where rate limits were not being consistently enforced across all models. You may notice increased rate limiting as these changes take effect.

Our goal is always that Copilot remains a great experience, and you are not disrupted in your work. If you encounter a rate limit, we recommend switching to a different model, using Auto mode. We're also working on improvements that will give you better visibility into your usage so you're never caught off guard.

We appreciate your patience as we roll out these changes.

So, in other words: expect to be rate limited more on this product we're trying to get everyone hooked on and trying to get everyone to subscribe to.

Neat.

I especially like this part:

We're also working on improvements that will give you better visibility into your usage so you're never caught off guard.

You know, if it were me, if I wanted to build up and keep goodwill for my product, I'd probably do that part first and communicate about it earlier rather than later.

I guess this is why I don't hold the sort of position that gets to make those decisions.

I've just bumped BlogMore to v2.2.0. This release adds post counts to the archive page.

The overall count appears at the top of the page, with further counts broken down for each year and each month. I've tried to ensure that the counts appear subtle enough, but still readable.

Also, serving the same purpose, but giving more information at a glance, I've added the same counts to the table of contents that appears to the right of the archive if you're on a suitably wide display.

This means I can easily see that I've posted more times this month than I have in any other month since I started this blog. In fact, I've posted more times this month than I have in quite a few individual years in the past.

So... that's today's "I thought I'd added everything but oh look here's another thing to add" feature. Which goes some way to explain why there are so many posts this month, I guess.

It's been a couple or so days since I last made any changes to BlogMore -- mainly because I've been messing with blogmore.el -- but yesterday morning I decided to make a change I've been wanting to make for a wee while.

Ensuring fenced codeblocks were handled was one of the things that was important when I started planning BlogMore and, while the result was looking good (thanks to Pygments), the way the block itself looked in the page wasn't quite to my taste. So yesterday I wrote out how I wanted things to be changed and tasked Copilot with getting the job done.

I'm pretty happy with the result.

(defun greet (name &optional (greeting "Hello"))
  "Prints a greeting to standard output."
  (format t "~A, ~A!~%" greeting name))

For the sake of any future reader, should I happen to tweak this even more at some point in the future, here's what the above looks like at the time of writing:

As you can see: the language for the block is now shown to the left, and there's a handy "copy to clipboard" icon to the right. I'm still not sure I'm loving the subtle border around the sides and the bottom, I think I'm going to live with that for a few days and see how it sits with me.

I'm also wondering if I should tweak the name of the language a little too, so that it's capitalised correctly. Of course, I could just get into the habit of writing the language name in the start of the block with the correct casing...

def greet(name: str, greeting: str = "Hello") -> None:
    """Print a greeting to standard output.

    Args:
        name: The name of the person to greet.
        greeting: The greeting to use.
    """
    print(f"{greeting}, {name}!")

but given how many code blocks I've got in my blog by this point, where I've typed them in lower case... it's probably easier to just tweak it when presenting it. Moreover, I do want to try and keep my Markdown sources compatible with as many rendering engines as possible and I can't be sure that all of them would downcase before doing the language lookup (although you'd hope they all would).

Meanwhile... given how much more I like how code is looking now, I'm going to have to find more reasons to include code, and Pygments supports so many languages too! Even ones from my distant past...

Function Greet( cName, cGreeting )
   If cGreeting == NIL
      cGreeting := "Hello"
   EndIf
   ? cGreeting + ", " + cName + "!"
Return NIL

As an aside: I also just noticed that they list FoxPro, Clipper, xBase and VFP as aliases for xBase-type languages, but no Harbour! I might have to see about doing a PR for that...

Well... I thought I was done with all the major changes with BlogMore, but then a fairly simple request came in and that kicked off a whole load of changes (which in turn ran into one or two problems with GitHub Copilot).

I dived into this because I liked the idea anyway and I think it's time that I, as much as possible, moved the layout of my blog to clean URLs almost everywhere. I can't reasonably do it for actual posts because a) lots of posts point to other posts so there's a whole editing job to do there¹ and b) there are some links out there that point to my blog posts².

The result is BlogMore v2.0.0.

Anyone who's been following the experiment with BlogMore might wonder that the version number is up to v2 already, given it's barely a month old. The answer to that is pretty simple: I'm using semver for the version number and there's a breaking change in this release with no real way of maintaining backward compatibility.

So what's changed? First the simple ones: I added some more *_path configuration options to control the locations of:

• The archives (with archive_path)
• The categories cloud (with categories_path)
• The search facility (with search_path)
• The tag cloud (with tags_path)

All of those keep their default values from before, and so can remain backward compatible. Personally, I've updated the configuration for this blog so that I'm using:

archive_path: "/archive/index.html"
categories_path: "/categories/index.html"
search_path: "/search/index.html"
tags_path: "/tags/index.html"

which, combined with:

clean_urls: true

results in cleaner URLs for all of those site features.

Another thing that came to mind was what to do about pagination. Things like the date-based archives, categories, tags, and so on, can all run to multiple pages and so all generated pages of content using a pagination scheme. This needed its own approach. I decided on adding a setting to control the first page of content (page_1_path) and a setting for all subsequent pages (page_n_path). But there was a problem here: to keep this approach backward compatible I'd need to have different settings per area of the blog. That would mean something like tags_page_1_path, tags_page_n_path, year_page_1_path, year_page_n_path, month_page_1_path, month_page_n_path, and so on; the reason being each one would need its own set of variables so the user can set where {tag} goes in the path, or {year}, or {month}, but one of those is no use in another context, and so on.

All of this would have been total overkill and an unnecessary explosion of things that can and might need to be modified in the configuration file; it would also be a nightmare to document.

So I decided this: the page_1_path and page_n_path settings simply describe what goes on the end of any other URL in the blog, and because of that the defaults would have to be incompatible. I think the result is a lot tidier.

This also felt like a good time to make this change because, aside from one other blog out there, I don't think anyone else other than me is using BlogMore at the moment.

This change did mean that I'd need to edit some of the posts in my blog to update for the slightly changed layout, but it was a small enough job with minimal impact so it was worth it. I also used a tweaked setting for page_n_path:

page_n_path: "/page/{page}/index.html"

so that any paginated page has a URL that ends something like .../page/2/. This holds for any page on the blog that has multiple pages.

This is the point where I'd say something about how I think that's all the big changes in this project done... but I'm starting to suspect this isn't the plan the coding gods have for BlogMore.

I don't know if it's just that GitHub Copilot is having a bad time at the moment, or if I've run into a genuine problem, but all isn't well today. After merging last night's result I kicked off another request related to a group of changes I want to make to BlogMore. It's a little involved, and it did take it a wee while to work on, but mostly it got the work done.

Again, as I said in the earlier post, I won't get into the detail of these changes yet, but they're fairly extensive and do include some breaking changes, so it's probably going to take a wee while to have it all come together. Claude's first shot at the latest change was almost there but with the glaring bug that it did all the work but didn't actually add the part that reads the configuration file settings and uses them (yeah, that's a good one, isn't it?).

So I asked it to fix it. It went off, worked on the issue, and then suddenly...

This surprised me. After the past few weeks I've had sessions where I've requested it do things way more frequently than this morning. I'm also nowhere near out of premium requests either:

While the error, as shown, might be valid and might be down to my actions, it's massively unhelpful and doesn't really explain what I did to cause this or even how I can remedy it. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that it seems to be saying I need to wait <duration> to try again. Yes, literally a placeholder of <duration>. O_o

One thing is for sure: this is another useful experiment in the current experiment. It's worth having the experience of having the tool screw with the flow. It doesn't come as a surprise, but it's a good reminder that using an agent that is hosted by someone else means you fully rely on their ability to keep it working, the whims of their API limits, and perhaps even your ability to pay.

Yesterday evening, after dinner, but just before loading up a game released just a few hours earlier, I decided to kick off a change to BlogMore. Part of the ongoing experiment is this convenience aspect: where I can get some work going and then go and do something entirely different.

The nature of the change itself isn't important (I'll write about it when I release an update), but something that happened is. As usual, I did the prompt as an issue, and assigned it to Copilot. The first thing that was curious was that, after around 5 minutes, despite it having added the 👀 reaction (which it seems to use to indicate the agent has seen it has work to do), nothing happened. I didn't see an agent kick off doing the work. Eventually I gave up waiting and opened a Copilot session and asked it to set about dealing with the issue I'd raised.

It did as I requested, but apparently alongside another agent which had suddenly started doing the exact same work. Thinking it was a glitch (it's not like GitHub hasn't been having some trouble of late) I stopped the newest one and let the "original" go about its work.

A wee bit later, just before I started up my game and the stream, I checked in on how it was doing. It had finished, but in a quick test, I noticed a small bug. I prompted it to fix the problem, closed the tab, and went about the real business of killing bugs.

Fast forward a couple of hours, I was done with getting my arse kicked on Klendathu, I packed away my controller and headset and opened GitHub again to see where Copilot was at. It wasn't good:

@davep The model claude-sonnet-4.6 is not available for your account. This can happen if the model was disabled by your organization's policy or if your Copilot plan doesn't include access to it.

You can try again without specifying a model (just @copilot) to use the default, or choose a different model from the model picker.

If you want to contact GitHub about this error, please mention the following identifier so they can better serve you: 79b81d32-e26a-4898-bd41-4bba088d08f6

Wait... what? I've been using this for weeks now, as best as I can tell I've generally been making all the changes and improvements using Claude Sonnet 4.6; there's never been an issue. Then, suddenly, in the middle of a PR, I don't have it?

Quickly checking elsewhere, sure enough, I had access to almost no models. I can't remember what there was, but it wasn't much and all the Claude ones had disappeared. Even if I tested in the Copilot CLI¹ I saw a very limited set of models.

Around this time I had two reactions: one was something like "cool, this is an important part of the experiment, knowing how it goes if your models are taken from you", the other was a curious "but Claude and I have an understanding about this codebase I can't trust some other model I've not been using".

As it was getting late into the evening and I still wanted to watch an episode of Stargate SG-1 (yes, I'm doing a full rewatch given it's on Netflix) I closed the MacBook and decided to check in on the issue in the morning.

Fast forward one SG1 episode later and, just before I headed to bed, I decided to do a quick search. While it could be a problem with my own account, it felt like it was more of a general issue. It was more of a general issue. At that point (around 23:20 UTC), checking in the GitHub app on my phone, I could see that some, if not all, of the models I was used to seeing, had come back.

As of this morning, as of time of writing, it's all looking back to how it was.

All of which is a great reminder, and something useful in the experiment: what does happen when some third party takes away the models you're using to get your work done? In the time I've been building up BlogMore I've come to trust the quality of Claude Sonnet (in the sense that I know when and where I have to pay closer attention to what it's done, and where it'll very likely have done a pretty good job²), so finding that I'd possibly have to switch to some other model that I've had no experience with... I genuinely had a moment of concern about how and where I was going to take BlogMore.

Ultimately it's not actually a serious concern for me: while I aim to maintain it for a very long time to come (it is how I'm creating the site for this blog after all), BlogMore isn't that critical. Moreover, I know I could cease using Copilot to create and maintain it and I could tidy up the code and hand-update and hand-manage it. There's a reason why I decided to really dive into this using a language I'm extremely confident with.

But for those applications some might now be relying on, developed by someone keen but as yet unskilled, what way forward for them if such a situation were to happen and not be resolved?

Prompted in part by the changes I made yesterday, I've made another small release of BlogMore today. The stuff to do with human.json made mention of having a /ai page, something I remember as being part of the slash pages moment. While I've never leaned into it myself, I do consider it a fun idea and, given the current experiment, I did think it made sense to have a /ai page for this blog, at least¹.

Yesterday's changes, to allow modifying the path used for pages, and also to apply the clean_urls setting to them too, meant it was easily doable now. But I also got to thinking that someone might not want the page to appear in the sidebar; perhaps they just want the page there but not obviously linked to.

So with today's release I've added an optional pages: configuration setting. If it's omitted, BlogMore works as it always did (listing every page in the sidebar). If it's included, only the pages in the given list appear in the sidebar.

Personally I think I'd prefer to have the /ai page visible in the sidebar, and that's what I've gone with. But if anyone wants the option of having better control over this, it's there now.

While I was tinkering on sidebar things I also added a setting for overriding the title of the links list. Again, I think Links works fine for my purposes, for this particular blog, but I can see the need to want to customise it.