Dot Net Perls Blog

Ten years ago it was an accomplishment to write functions and build a program. Today, with people using AI agents (or even chat bots) it seems like less of one. I sense this even with simple programs I maintain myself.

AI Achievement

When an LLM generates most of the code, it is fair to consider it a lesser accomplishment than something a huma...

Code that is written by AI (generated by LLMs) has had a bad reputation—it has bugs, is unreliable. And vibe-coded software has been thought to be even worse: it is felt to be unusable slop. But while AI coding does have drawbacks, it can be used to create high-quality software.

AI Code

When I first started trying to use AI, I ended up with some pret...

I have some Rust code that is hot and I have spent time hand-optimizing it in the past. It frustrated me because I could not make it any faster. Recently I decided to try a new approach—using Crouton Alpha to write a new loop structure for the code.

Crouton Alpha

The first attempts did not work completely, but they showed promise. Finally I got the <...

Today I ended up spending more time than I should have chatting with Crouton Alpha (a stealth model) on OpenRouter. This is a new, free model. It does not show its thinking so it is likely from an AI lab that hides thinking (in other words, not DeepSeek or GLM, possibly Meta).

Confident AI

I prodded Crouton Alpha for some optimization tips in ...

Yesterday I was looking at some utility functions that I had in my Rust program. The code was reading files and writing files with a str reference argument. So a Path would need to be converted to a str—through the to_str function—before I could use it.

Rust Path

It turns out that file-handling functions like fs read, write, metadata (and File open) accept ...