Journals for 2024-07

Learning

Today I read StateFlow: Enhancing LLM Task-Solving through State-Driven Workflows. This paper talks about using state machines to explicitly model the problem that an agent is trying to solve. They got great results, and I agree that it's a good way to go about solving a problem, but I'm not sure what's really new here. Maybe it's just my background, but using state machines to direct the high-level behavior of your agent feels like a very obvious thing to do, and a lot of people in the LLM space have been talking about it for a while now.

Learning

Today I presented a review of The Landscape of Emerging AI Agent Architectures for Reasoning, Planning, and Tool Calling: A Survey at the Latent Space paper club. While it wasn't recorded, my slides are published on Google Slides.

Building

• Fixed some issues with svelte-maplibre and Mapbox's Draw plugin today. Both of these turned out to be general incompatibilities with Maplibre, where the Mapbox plugin (understandably) assumed the presence of certain Mapbox CSS classes. I released v0.9.9 of the package which includes some new CSS which allows the mouse pointers to work properly in Maplibre. And an example is also now up on the website.

One of the best parts about tools like Phind is you can ask it a question, follow up with "I'm on a Mac and this didn't work" and it will just tell you why.

Turns out Mac tools often use libedit instead of readline, so your keybindings need to go in .editrc instead of .inputrc.