Llm on Max Halford

Will agents replace scripts?

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am in favor of coding agents. They’re here to stay, so we might as well figure out enjoyable ways to work with them. I’m aligned with Charity Majors’ Make AI Boring Again piece. I’m also increasingly convinced they won’t replace techies, because the non-techies still need us.

I stumbled on this Slack thread at work:

At work, we log the hours we spend on each customer, and we report them weekly. It’s tedious and error-prone. But it’s useful: we want to know where time is going, what to improve, and how to price our services.

Autonomous web scraping with Claude Code

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Andrej Karpathy’s autoresearch project made a lot of ripples. I guess it’s exciting because a program that modifies itself feels like actual AI. The concept of autonomous programs is not new – see genetic programming – but what we’re witnessing now is somewhat more convincing. We just got a bit closer to Neuromancer’s world, with a Turing Police that’s in charge of stopping AIs from rewriting themselves.

While we wait for AI to become self-conscious, there are mundane problems that can be solved with autoresearch. Web scraping is one of these. Indeed, turning unstructured data into knowledge is an excellent problem for LLMs to solve. But there are nuances to have in mind:

Solving Détrak with brute force

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Détrak is a simple board game. There’s a 5x5 grid, and players need to place 12 domino-like pieces to cover the grid completely. The domino symbols are determined by rolling two dice. The dice are six-sided, and their rolls are shared by all players. Points are scored based on adjacencies of matching symbols.

The goal is to find the optimal placement of the pieces to maximize the score based on the rolled symbols. What makes it competitive is that everyone has to work with the same rolls. This involves logical thinking and spatial reasoning. But you also have to juggle luck and risk, because you can’t predict the dice rolls.

Do LLMs identify fonts?

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Spoiler: not really

dafont.com is a wonderful website that contains a large collection of fonts. It’s more comprehensive and esoteric than Google Fonts. One of its features is a forum where users can ask for help identifying fonts – check out this poor fellow who’s been waiting for over two years and bumped his thread. I thought it would be interesting to see if an LLM could do this task, so I scraped the forum and set up a benchmark.