Posts on Beyond the Prior

Why LLMs (still) lack taste

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Frontier LLMs are really smart, and they’re becoming particularly good at software development. It feels like every week there’s a new model release that achieves SOTA scores on a handful of benchmarks. I use LLMs to build software every day, and they’re incredibly useful, and getting better. But I’m still frequently surprised by the types of mistakes they make.

I don’t expect LLMs to be perfect. Even smart humans make mistakes! But LLMs often make errors that a human with a similar depth of knowledge would never make. Their capabilities feel jagged; they’ll brilliantly pull together thousands of error logs into a coherent analysis that would’ve taken me hours, but then use blatantly flawed reasoning to derive the root cause. So why does “PhD-level intelligence” make these kinds of mistakes?

Getting CMD+F Working in CodeMirror 6

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I use a lightweight CodeMirror setup for an editor that has some custom inline badges to represent variable interpolation. Over time though, I noticed that the browser search (Cmd+F) wouldn’t find text in the editor. Finally, I looked into it some more, and realized that it’s due to CodeMirror’s use of virtual DOM for rendering the editor content. This makes a lot of sense for performance reasons, but for my case it wasn’t really needed (I was editing at most ~300 lines).

Toby

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the future, artificial superintelligence will make human creativity obsolete. But there’s still hope. Human creativity is what makes us unique and allows us to thrive in an ever-changing world. It is the source of our hope and the driving force behind our progress.

Without human creativity, we would be lost. We would have no new ideas, no new innovation, and no new hope. And without hope, we would have nothing.

A solution to async boilerplate in JavaScript ✨

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:01:46 +0000

Source

Have you ever written code that looks like this?

function loadStuff() {
 state.loading = true;
 fetch("//myapi.com/stuff")
 .then((res) => res.json())
 .then((data) => {
 state.loading = false;
 state.stuff = data;
 });
}

Maybe you also have error handling or a fancy delayed spinner that adds even more complexity. Writing the same code for every single async task in your project can add a lot of boilerplate, especially if you have a lot of HTTP requests in your application.

How to Build Your Own Reactivity System

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 22:14:34 +0000

A couple of months ago, I attended an in-person meetup at Frontend Masters called Vue.js Advanced Features from the Ground Up. It was really awesome because we got to learn about Vue.js from its creator, Evan You. Instead of just teaching us how to use Vue, he showed us how to actually implement a few parts of it. Reactivity was the part that interested me the most, so, after the class, I dug into Vue’s source code to learn more about exactly how its reactivity system works. In this guide, I’ll explain how Vue’s reactivity system is implemented, and show how you to make your own working reactivity system.

How to control bootstrap’s css

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 17:05:43 +0000

Source: https://teckstack.com

In our Angular 4 project, we’re using a datepicker from ng-bootstrap. It has a lot of features (such as date ranges, minimum/maximum date validation, etc.) that are really useful to us. The only issue? As you can probably tell from the name, it uses bootstrap.

Bootstrap works great when it’s used to style an entire app. But as soon as we included it in our app, it changed a ton of our styling. I couldn’t just increase specificity in our styles, because bootstrap was targeting tags that we hadn’t styled at all. I thought I would have to manually create style rules that reverted everything that bootstrap added.