Ai on Brett Smith

Maybe Non-Deterministic Behavior is What We Want When Writing Code

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:28:00 -0700

I had always seen the non-deterministic behavior of LLM’s as the shortcoming with code generation, but this comment really had me realizing that doing things incorrectly and unconventionally is how you experiment and come up with new ways to build things

Non-deterministic behavior is not only the path for innovation, but it is also how nature works. Maybe the machines will use this natural non-deterministic nature of building to create software we couldn’t imagine in our tightly controlled box of deterministic code writing.

What is Gas Town

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:43:00 -0700

Gas Town is an interesting endeavor by Steve Yegge. Steve has long been warning that the IDE as we know it will be obsolete and replaced by AI Coding Agent Orchestrators. Gas Town is the result of several iterations into a workable orchestrator.

It is an extremely complicated workflow with a comprehensive article to help explain. Here are some highlights:

The focus is throughput: creation and correction at the speed of thought.

Checking Out exe.dev

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:34:00 -0700

Finally took a look at David Crawshaw’s new project exe.dev , a slick new service for spinning up virtual machines in seconds. It’s a subscription service that gives you access to VM’s with persistant disks for a really great price. Enough is enough and I am slowly iterating through creating my own end to end agent orchestration system where I can manage projects as a HOTL (Human on the loop; shoutout Geoffrey Huntley ).

Vibe Coding Videos w/ Remotion

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:08:38 -0700

My first ever attempt at vibe coding a video. Had to start off with some Tron Lightcycles.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

I saw a post from @trq212 about how you can vibe code videos using remotion. I immediately had to give this a try for myself.

My Workflow

First, I went straight to the docs and had Grok 4 give me a detailed document on how to use remotion. This was critical to getting my ai agent, Amp, to know what it was dealing with here.

Chasing that Flow State

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Geoffrey Huntley’s post on X about how addictive coding with AI is 100% true. The flow state is highly addictive. Before using LLM’s, when I would be working on a bug, I didn’t want any distractions. I would wait until I knew I had a block of time to solve it, which inevitably led to procrastination because I couldn’t find the “perfect time”. It would take so much effort to enter that flow state, but once I did, it felt incredible. I think that’s what we are all chasing when we fall in love with coding. The flow state.

Building FullStackBrett

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 16:37:50 -0700

Hey there! I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Create a personal site for a blog, that is. I have had multiple false starts over the years. Hopefully this isn’t a continuation of the pattern. What has motivated me is a desire to have better notes about the things I am learning. It is a crazy time in the life of software engineers with AI sweeping across the industry. I want to have a low stakes place to record my thoughts, and in the process maybe provide someone else with a few useful ideas too.

Repomix

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 16:37:26 -0700

I have been using RepoMix on and off for projects on Github, but I never knew they had a CLI for it. It’s extremely useful and easy to setup. I was using a custom python script but the repomix cli is much easier to work with.

There are a bunch of useful commands. Here is a quick overview:

# Install using npm
npm install -g repomix

# Then run in any project directory
repomix

Pack specific files or directories

Can anyone build an AI Agent from scratch?

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve been following Thorsten Ball for a while now and recently discovered his YouTube series with SourceGraph, where he’s working on an AI Agent called Amp . Thorsten did something unique: he shared a video of himself pair programming on the actual SourceGraph product, walking through his thought process for building the agent. It wasn’t a polished video with fancy editing or transitions—just an authentic look at him coding. While watching, I realized this wasn’t some insanely complex technical feat. Even someone like me could give it a shot (famous last words, I know). Inspired, I started building my own AI agent as a VSCode extension. A few days in, I’m hooked and can’t stop working on it.