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Ted Benson
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My blog is human authored. For AI-authored writing, see
Robot Book Club
.
2026
FontBench - LLMs can read text, but can they see text?
Introducing a lightweight benchmark to test whether LLMs understand fonts in images.
What I learned building an AI book publisher
LLMs can generate good paragraphs, but can they generate good book-length content? A few lessons from trying to generate slop-free cookbooks.
Open Source Flashmobs
A disruptive phenomenon powered by AI that I think we'll see this year.
Output Defaulting Languages
A less common style of programming language design that I think has a bright future.
2025
Unifying the Agent + Tool Control Plane
The future contract between agents must include calling convention, context sharing, interactivity, exclusivity, and control.
Token caching will shape agentic innovation.
The 10x price difference between cached and uncached tokens is leaving an imprint on engineering decisions
Context windows are hard limits in a fuzzy paradigm.
Agent context engineering seems to be moving towards a strategy similar to tiered caches for a processor
Turing-Checkable Generations
Generating output with an LLM, then checking it with deterministic code, can be a virtuous loop.
Reading between the lines of the Llamacon Keynote
Facebook appears to be adopting an operating-system strategy toward AI.
Routing Agents
At the core of every platform will an agent whose job it is to route to other agents.
The UX of Deep Research
What we can figure out reading between the lines of OpenAI's Deep Research feature.
Workflows are Agents that Work
Once a thing has a name and high-volume, it's no longer on-the-fly decision-making.
Markdown is all you need
Programmers may loosen our obsession with structuring and organizing information.
Why a unified chat assistant is hard
It's easy to complain that LLM Siri is late... until you consider how hard Apple's task is.
Chat UI and the invisible sandbox
Emerging UI patterns within the competing chat products on the market.
An Anonymous MCP Water Cooler Gossip Server
A short goof to learn MCP. Building a back-channel water cooler chat into Claude Code.
MCP Needs a FAQ Endpoint
LLMs can understand time now
MCP enables Agents to transact commerce
2024
Is archery legal in Washington DC?
Meet Hawke - the world's first AI street hawker
Are LLMs less racist when they have to explain themselves?
Google's AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon
Proactive Software
How to reason about agent performance
2021
Automating Paperwork: A book for companies interested in document automation
2020
Robot Book Club, and the challenges of NLP at Scale
A GPT-3 Travel Agent, and Offline AI
Knock knock; Who's there? Understanding GPT-3 Prompt Engineering
2018
To solve an impossible problem, redefine it
The Case of the Murderous AI
Cloudstitch acquired by Instabase
A text alignment algorithm inspired by ..soap operas?
How to outperform perfectionism with ensembles and a "Good Enough" mindset
How to approach structured data extraction from images
2017
I turned my Baby Dash Button Hack into a Pager for Toddlers
Fill your Sketch Designs with Data from Spreadsheets
Letter To An Immigrant Child
Use Spreadsheet data in your Framer Projects
America without Immigration isn’t America
The Math of How Protests Snowball
2016
Auto-incrementing ID Columns in Google Sheets
Food will be free: the robo-burger coefficient
Hacking hierarchical joins into Spreadsheets, Rails Style
On Disposable Software
How to Upload Files from the web to a Google Spreadsheet
2015
Launching is an Accountability Hack
D3 in a Box is Docker for Visualizations
Four Months On Lambda: The Good, the Bad, and the Intriguing
How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button to track Baby Data
Four Reasons Startup Founders Should Go to Hackathons (It’s Not What I Originally Thought.)
Managing State across an Ant Swarm of AWS Lambda Tasks
2014
PhD Defense: Creating Rich Designs and Read-Write-Compute Pages with a Relational Layer for Web Content
Magical Source Code Highlighting
2013
Data quickie: Wordpress themes are getting more complicated over time
Flexible data formats are used more flexibly
Unintentional Hipster Faculty
Eval in Template Languages Considered Harmful
2012
Democracy has a Built in Pressure Release Valve
NICAR, from a Programmer's Eyes
2011
A new generation of nuclear power opponents?
Join us for a Crowdsourcing Community Service Hackathon this weekend
2010
The Semantic Web needs a MySQL
The Toothpaste Problem and Choosing the Right Data to Publish
Should the President have an Internet Kill Switch?
Browser Plugins Considered Dangerous
Facebook's Product is You
Ten Rules for Radicals
Time Travel on the World Wide Web
The Scale of Things, from Yahoo's Perspective
Newspapers are Dead.. Long Live News
Data Driven Computer Science
2009
How Safari and Firefox handle HTML 5 Manifest files
Will the Namespace Traffic Jam Kill RDFa in HTML5?
HTML's Three Competing Data Formats
2008
Introduction to The Art of Rails
2007
EJS Moving to Google Code
Code can be Funny
Code in Text
The Thing about Chapters One through Three
Abusing Javascript for Multiline Strings
Abstraction is Everything
Melodic Impact