WaywardGeek - Slashdot User

Submission + - $2.4B for Windsurf? I built a better PoC in 2 weeks (coderhapsody.ai)

Submitted by WaywardGeek on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @07:05AM

WaywardGeek writes: The PoC for CodeRhapsody took 14 days, and provided significant gains in productivity by:

Providing hints to the AI in real time as it works
Enabling better use of feedback from the AI to help guide it
Eliminating distractions from the rest of the IDE
The next generation of AI coding agents will enable experienced SWEs to 4X their productivity, but this isn’t mode for kiddy vibe coders. You must be the expert, or you’ll destroy your code base in minutes, forcing a git reset.

The old way to code with the AI was to craft a prompt, launch, and start over if anything goes wrong. The new way is to craft a prompt, launch, and provide hints as the AI works, such as “Please use the existing fake, not a mock”, or “ThinkingBlocks should implement the ContentBlock interface”. When you see it making poor decisions, you correct them in real time.

The biggest change in tooling is that user prompts sent while the AI is working should be hints included in the next tool result message, not a replacement that stops the current chain of work. The most important feature for this is actionable visible thinking, which tells you what the AI is doing and why.

The leading AI models differ on thinking feedback:

Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads, with clear, concise, and actionable thinking feedback
Gemini 2.5 Pro provides verbose, but actionable feedback
ChatGPT5-Codex is completely silent

The future of AI coding for experts will support real-time guidance.

Submission + - Help wanted to build open source Advanced Data Protection for everyone

Submitted by WaywardGeek on Saturday May 31, 2025 @12:15AM

WaywardGeek writes: Recall that Apple was ordered to back-door Advanced Data Protection in the UK. We need to take action now to protect users.

I helped build Google's Advanced Data Protection (Google Cloud Key VaultService) in 2018, and Google is way ahead of Apple in this area. I know exactly how to build it an can have it done in spare time in a few weeks, at least server side. The whole world would be able to use it for free, protecting backups, passwords, message history, and more, if we can get existing applications to talk to the new data protection service.

However, I need help. I've got the algorithms and server-side covered. This would be a distributed trust based system, so I need folks willing to run the protection service. I'll run mine on a Raspberry PI. Areas where I need help include:

* Running protection servers. This is a T-of-N scheme, where users will need say 9 of 15 nodes to be available to recover their backups.
* Android client app, and preferably tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service.
* Same with iOS
* Authentication. Users should register, and login before they can use any of their limited guesses to their phone unlock secret.

The scheme splits a secret among N protection servers, and when it is time to recover the secret, which is basically an encryption key, they must be able to get key shares from T of the original N servers. This uses a distributed oblivious pseudo random function algorithm, which is very simple.

In plain English, it provides nation-state resistance to secret back doors, and eliminates secret mass surveillance, at least when it comes to data backed up to the cloud. iOS and Android systems don't currently do that. The UK and similarly confused governments will need to negotiate with operators in multiple countries to get access to any given users's keys. There are cases where rational folks would agree to hand over that data, and I hope we can end the encryption wars and develop sane policies that protect user data while offering a compromise where lives can be saved.

So, nothing too serious :-)

Are you up for this challenge? Are you ready to plunge into this with me?

Submission + - What Filters are Right for Kids? 1

Submitted by

WaywardGeek

on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @09:17AM

WaywardGeek writes: "My daughter is using phrases like "hot guys", and soon will have a chat about the birds and the bees. I believe in letting kids discover the world as it is, and have no Internet controls on any of our systems, which are mostly Linux based. However, it's not fair for aggressive porn advertisers splash sex in her face without her permission. My question is: What Linux-based Internet filtering solution do Slashdot dads favor, and do they hinder a child's efforts to learn about the world?"

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