Sunday, 27th July 2025
Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs. Geoffrey Litt compares Copilots - AI assistants that you engage in dialog with and work with you to complete a task - with HUDs, Head-Up Displays, which enhance your working environment in less intrusive ways.
He uses spellcheck as an obvious example, providing underlines for incorrectly spelt words, and then suggests his AI-implemented custom debugging UI as a more ambitious implementation of that pattern.
Plenty of people have expressed interest in LLM-backed interfaces that go beyond chat or editor autocomplete. I think HUDs offer a really interesting way to frame one approach to that design challenge.
TIL: Exception.add_note
(via)
Neat tip from Danny Roy Greenfeld: Python 3.11 added a .add_note(message: str) method to the BaseException class, which means you can add one or more extra notes to any Python exception and they'll be displayed in the stacktrace!
Here's PEP 678 – Enriching Exceptions with Notes by Zac Hatfield-Dodds proposing the new feature back in 2021.
The many, many, many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade (via) Extraordinary piece of writing by Jamie Birch who spent over a year putting together this comprehensive reference to JavaScript runtimes. It covers everything from Node.js, Deno, Electron, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and Bun all the way to much smaller projects idea like dukluv and txiki.js.