I saw this headline, saw the tweets and missed what this was about.
Then read Simon Willison's breakdown and got the 'Aha!'.
I like what they've done, played with it and immediately started to plan how I'd try to implement it myself.
I guess this will be the way to go, for development setups instead of using a dedicated machine. Especially when mobile clients are created for Sprites.
Try the reverse, get a document that is critical of the US foreign policy, from China, and ask your well known brand LLM, to convert the text from PDF to epub.
It'll right out refuse, citing the reason that the article is critical of the US.
I was able to get around such restrictions pretty easily[0] while the LLM still being quite aware of who we're talking about. You can see it was pretty willing to do the task without much prodding despite prefacing with some warnings. I specifically chose the most contentious topic I could think of: Taiwan.
Regardless, I think this is besides the point. Isn't our main concerns:
1) not having kneejerk reactions and dismissing or accepting claims without some evidence? (What Lxe did)
2) Censorship crosses country lines and we may be unaware of what is being censored and what isn't, impacting our usage of these tools and the results from them?
Both of these are quite concerning to me. #1 is perpetuating the post truth era, making truth more difficult to discern. #2 is more subtle and we should try to be aware of these biases, regardless of if they are malicious or unintentional. It's a big reason I push for these models to be open. Not just open weights, but open about the data and the training. Unfortunately the result of #2 is likely to contribute to #1.
Remember, I'm asking other people to help verify or discredit the WP's claims. I'm not taking a position on who is good: China or the US. I'm trying to make us think deeper. I'm trying to stop a culture of just making assumptions and pulling shit out of our ass. If something is verifiable, shouldn't we try to verify it? The weaker claim is almost trivial to verify, right? Which is all I did. But I need help to verify or discredit the stronger claim. So are you helping me do that or are you just perpetuating disinformation campaigns?
Because of him, I installed a RSS reader so that I don't miss any of his posts. And I know that he shares the same ones across Twitter, Mastodon & Bsky...
Aider does not have MCP support yet. Neither does Jules I believe.
Ampcode I heard of, but I also heard it's very expensive, same for Devin. I also don't know if either of them support MCP.
I'm sure there are others, of varying quality, but realistically, the options you'd want to use are the ones I listed I think.
P.S.: I'd been looking for alternatives by the way, something that lets me use OpenAI models, I've yet to try it but heard good things about: https://block.github.io/goose/
I guess it's hard to switch from a working setup that you've invested time in.
Especially since you might not be familiar with the new one.
Personally, I'm trying out things in VS Code, just to see how they work. But when I need to work, I do it in Emacs, since I know it better.
Also, with VS Code, just while trying it out, simple things like cut & paste would stop working (choosing them from the menu, they would work, but trying to cut & paste with the key shortcuts and the mouse, wouldn't). You'd have to refresh the whole view or restart it, for cut & paste to become available again.
Then read Simon Willison's breakdown and got the 'Aha!'.
I like what they've done, played with it and immediately started to plan how I'd try to implement it myself.
I guess this will be the way to go, for development setups instead of using a dedicated machine. Especially when mobile clients are created for Sprites.