One of the first homework assignments when I learned C back in '83 was after a long lecture on how the string functions are fundamentally broken, and the class introduction to writing C was fixing all of them.
It's a shame we never got a package manager for C (or C++).
EDIT: perhaps I should have been clearer; by not having one early on, we now have multiple competing package managers, with no clear winner. Responses prove that point.
I worked at a shop where we used Boost in a C++ code base that the only use of C++ was the harness to use Boost. After that, it was all C, object-styled C, as that code base started before C++ compilers were not a template overlay on C.
I'm running Qwen 3.6 27B Q5 K M GGUF on a Tesla P40 and koboldcpp using pi.dev as the harness, I gotta say I am impressed. Took some setup and configuring but I already have some code it has made commited and pushed. It can be slow on my hardware at >50k tokens, but the fact I bought this one P40 for like $150 back when the LLM trend started I can't complain. (I have a second one too but I couldn't physically fit the card in my server unfortunately.)
The setup I had to do was important and I had to compile koboldcpp with a few special params for my hardware, I mostly just had Claude figure it out. I don't remember everything I did now but it was very slow and would often stop mid task, it seems it was mostly a parsing issue. It made the model seem broken/dumb, but once I had all that settled I actually am able to use this how I use Claude Code. Disclaimer, I am pretty explicit with requirements, I imagine this fails more when you leave it to figure out things on its own but for my flow its pretty rad.
Currently setting it up as an automated agent now to pull Trello cards, create PRs for them, and move the card to be reviewed.
Command I am using to run:
python koboldcpp.py \
--port 61514 --quiet --multiuser --gpulayers 999 --contextsize 262144 --quantkv 2 \
--usecublas normal --threads 4 --jinja --jinja_tools --jinja_kwargs '{"enable_thinking":true, "preserve_thinking":false}' \
--skiplauncher --model /data/models/Qwen3.6-27B-Q5_K_M.gguf --smartcache 5
Thanks!! I had disabled that previously while debugging, I can confirm this is helping accuracy from what I can tell so far. (And speed since the cache is preserved more often!)
I'm using the pi-mono coding agent (open source, free) without any extensions and very simple prompts. The 3.6 27B model (BF16, 250k context) uses 67GB VRAM on an RTX PRO 9000.
It's very capable on almost any coding task I've thrown at it, and very good for easy-to-medium hard scripts, new code bases.
It struggles on some complex tasks in larger code bases, e.g. using to debug and fix bugs in llama.cpp it gets close to working code but often introduces errors. For such tasks its still very useful as a search/explore tool and drafting fixes.
We have a distinct poverty when it comes to secondary considerations and long term ramifications - which used to be manageable when progress was slower. Now, we're on a very steep acceleration/progress curve, and any shortsighted mistakes cause extremely large ramifications. Which are then compounded by both more short sighted non-fixes and our rapid acceleration/progress curve layering in additional confusion, misunderstandings, omissions of critical information.
it's on your end, works fine here and i go out of my way to piss google off.
with that being said, both my extremely liberal doctor of political science friend and myself (i lean authoritarian and center) find it to be ... underwhelming.
This is a critical communications issue that is becoming what I believe the defining characteristic of "This Age": nobody knows how to discuss disagreement, and because it cannot even be discussed communication ends, followed by blind obedience, forced bullying, retreat and abandonment. This is going to be a hell of a ride, because nobody can really discuss the situation with a rational tone.
Maybe this is relevant? I worked in animation and VFX for an Academy Award winning VFX studio and several well known animation / game studios, starting around '90. I formally left the industry around '04 to work on my own tech startup. When I left, there was a lot of R&D work surrounding the huge amounts of data that an animation studio generates and works with; I was one of those people creating early deep learning systems for production forecasting.
Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media.
That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.
I remember, my older brother wanted to be an Eagle Scout, and I was of the age to initially join. Some respected counter culture person, I don't think I was him, but someone like George Carlin, started talking about the boy scouts being where men scouted boys. That was it, the boy scouts were instantly "uncool".
This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."
Yes, because the current pro-AI leaders, CEOs, politicians etc. are anything but authoritarian, right? Think of the rights of the freedom-loving billionaires and their world-scale network of power! What you should really worry about is this imaginary authoritarian anti-AI figure I just came up with.
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