Friday, 28th March 2025
I was there at the first Atom meeting at the Google offices. We meant so well! And I think the basic publishing spec is good, certainly better technically than the pastiche of different things called RSS.
Alas, a bunch of things then went wrong. Feeds started losing market share. Facebook started doing something useful and interesting that ultimately replaced blog feeds in open formats. The Atom vs RSS spec was at best irrelevant to most people (even programmers) and at worst a confusing market-damaging thing. The XML namespaces in Atom made everyone annoyed. Also there was some confusing “Atom API” for publishing that diluted Atom’s mindshare for feeds.
— Nelson Minar, Comment on lobste.rs
Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer. Every now and then a log file or a tool I'm using will spit out a bunch of JSON that terminates unexpectedly, meaning I can't copy it into a text editor and pretty-print it to see what's going on.
The other day I got frustrated with this and had the then-new GPT-4.5 build me a pretty-printer that didn't mind incomplete JSON, using an OpenAI Canvas. Here's the chat and here's the resulting interactive.
I spotted a bug with the way it indented code today so I pasted it into Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking mode and had it make a bunch of improvements - full transcript here. Here's the finished code.
In many ways this is a perfect example of vibe coding in action. At no point did I look at a single line of code that either of the LLMs had written for me. I honestly don't care how this thing works: it could not be lower stakes for me, the worst a bug could do is show me poorly formatted incomplete JSON.
I was vaguely aware that some kind of state machine style parser would be needed, because you can't parse incomplete JSON with a regular JSON parser. Building simple parsers is the kind of thing LLMs are surprisingly good at, and also the kind of thing I don't want to take on for a trivial project.
At one point I told Claude "Try using your code execution tool to check your logic", because I happen to know Claude can write and then execute JavaScript independently of using it for artifacts. That helped it out a bunch.
I later dropped in the following:
modify the tool to work better on mobile screens and generally look a bit nicer - and remove the pretty print JSON button, it should update any time the input text is changed. Also add a "copy to clipboard" button next to the results. And add a button that says "example" which adds a longer incomplete example to demonstrate the tool, make that example pelican themed.
It's fun being able to say "generally look a bit nicer" and get a perfectly acceptable result!
Slop is about collapsing to the mode. It’s about information heat death. It’s lukewarm emptiness. It’s ten million approximately identical cartoon selfies that no one will ever recall in detail because none of the details matter.