Thursday, 2nd July 2026
I saw Geoffrey Litt speak at AIE yesterday, and one framing he used particularly resonated with me:
Understand to participate
Geoffrey was talking about the challenge of collaborating with coding agents as they construct increasingly large and sophisticated changes, and the need to avoid taking on cognitive debt as your understanding drifts from how the code actually works.
His argument is that you need to understand the code to a depth that enables you to participate further with the model:
You can learn what the agent is doing to make sure you can be an active participant in the creative process. [...]
You need a rich set of concepts in your mind to think creatively and fluently about how to move something forward. If you're lacking that fluency, your ability to participate in the project is meaningfully limited.
The AIE talks are all recorded - all 300+ of them! - and should be trickling out over the next three weeks. Geoffrey's is one that I recommend catching on YouTube.
Geoffrey also published a thread version of his talk on Twitter.
One of this morning's AIE keynotes covered dspy, which reminded me I've been meaning to see if it could help me improve the system prompt used by Datasette Agent - so I fired off an asynchronous research task in Claude Code for web using Claude Fable 5:
Pip install the latest Datasette alpha and datasette-agent and dspy - then figure out how to use dspy to evaluate and improve the main system prompts used by Datasette Agent for the feature where it can execute read only SQL queries to answer user questions about data.
Fable chose to test using GPT 4.1 mini and nano, and identified several promising looking directions for improvements. I particularly like this one:
The schema listing gives only table names; the "don't call describe_table if you already have the information" advice caused column-name guessing (page_count, o.order_id, first_name) and error-retry loops in baseline traces. Either include column names in the prompt's schema listing or soften that advice.