Ai on Brandon Pugh's Blog

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs can’t stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

A fun new attack vector in the age of AI.

“What a world we live in: AI hallucinated packages are validated and rubber-stamped by another AI that is too eager to be helpful.”

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Keynote: AI without the BS, for humans

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Keynote: AI without the BS, for humans - Scott Hanselman - NDC London 2025

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Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned about Chain-of-Thought Prompting which is a technique to get potentially better results from an LLM where you craft your prompt with an example of the chain of thought or steps in reasoning to solve a complex problem.

This gives a good explanation: https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/cot

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Use ChatGPT to help you write architectural decision records

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been discovering recently that ChatGPT is actually pretty good at helping write Architectural Decision Records (ADRs).

Like most writing tasks, I’m finding ChatGPT is good at giving me a nice starting point instead of staring a blank template.

Even with as simple a prompt as “write an architectural decision record on why we chose to go with react instead of angular”, it’ll give a decent list of pros and cons on the topic in a common ADR template. I can also refine it further by saying “write it using the following template instead…”

I really like ADRs for capturing why we made a particular decision and the important points we considered and which things might have been deal breakers - which ChatGPT obviously can’t do for you but it’s a quick way to list out some points and occasionally it’ll even mention something I hadn’t considered.

I also like asking it to argue the reverse like: “write an architectural decision record on why we chose to go with angular instead of react”

Interestingly, it will show the result in the UI as the rendered markdown but when you click the “copy” button it will copy the source markdown which is nice.

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Use ChatGPT to explain bash scripts

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today I learned that chatGPT is pretty good at explaining cryptic bash scripts and commands. I was trying to understand exactly how a git prepare-commit-msg hook was working so I asked chatGPT to “explain the following git hook to me” and it did a pretty good job.

For example, it returned tidbits like:

[[ $BRANCH_NAME =~ $BRANCH_REGEX ]]: This conditional statement checks if the branch name matches the BRANCH_REGEX pattern. If the branch name starts with one or more digits, this condition will be true. and: sed -i.bak -e "1s/^#${BASH_REMATCH[1]}: //I" $1: This line uses the sed command to replace the branch number (captured by the BRANCH_REGEX pattern) and a colon at the beginning of the commit message with an empty string. The I flag makes the replacement case-insensitive. The -i.bak option creates a backup of the original commit message file with a .bak extension.

Bonus TIL: the BASH_REMATCH variable is automatically populated with the matched string in bash when using the =~ regex operator

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