Szymon Kaliski

Back at it, Dampening Copilot, and 3D-Printed Organization

Hi!

This issue covers the last ~six months to catch up for the (understandably) skipped Q3.

It was so great to take time off to fully focus on the family. I'm grateful that everyone is doing well, grateful for autumn that was warm enough for frequent walks, and grateful for not thinking about anything else for a while.

While I was away, we launched two things at Replit that I've been heavily involved in: the Agent — LLM deeply integrated in the platform — and new, orders-of-magnitude faster, and multiplayer-native Shell experience.

I captured some thoughts about why LLMs need IDEs, and how they relate to End-User Programming in this short write-up.

Improving the Shell experience was also a fun project. I built a full vertical slice, from a custom PTY library ↗, up to UI/UX allowing users to run Shell sessions in the background, and collaborate with each other in multiplayer Repls. There's a ton of technical info in the official launch blog post ↗, if you're interested.

Less Eager Copilot

Until recently I've been using LLMs for programming mainly through the vim-ai ↗ extension, slightly adapted to my personal needs ↗, sending relevant text back and forth between vim's split views. This meant that I only really used it for bigger "global" tasks — rewriting whole functions, fixing type issues across multiple definitions, etc.

Copilot ↗, as a way for more "surgical" LLM-driven edits, always seemed interesting to try in a "serious context of use" ↗ kind of way. What was stopping me, was the "ghost text" UX it relies on, which personally feels over-eager and somewhat distracting.

To work around this, I wrote a small extension for coc.nvim ↗ (which I use for LSP integrations) that man-in-the-middle's the Copilot LSP inline completions to, instead, add them to the tab-completion menu:

I've been daily driving this for a few weeks now, and quite like it. Maybe it's useful to some of you too: coc-pilot ↗.

Organizing with 3D-Printing

I use an IKEA BROR utility cart ↗ for a workbench in my basement studio. It's pretty small and quickly gets messy when I'm doing something, making it hard to access my most-used tools.

A pegboard is an obvious answer for nerdy organization, and the one from IKEA ↗ almost fits their BROR system — if only it was a couple of centimeters wider, I could simply connect them directly.

Instead, I had to adapt an adapter I found online to do so.
My variation is here ↗, again, maybe useful to some of you.

I wish IKEA was more like Lego. There must be a reason why their furniture (especially the "utility" lines) is not a bit more standardized. I don't think it's "vendor lock-in ↗," since the standardization I wish for is just across the IKEA stuff, which would lock us in even more. Let me know if you have any ideas?

On the 3D-printing topic, the pegboard attachments from IKEA are not that versatile, but there are (of course) a ton of people making custom ones ↗.

Worth Checking Out

What I've been reading lately:

On the web:

Fin

Best wishes for 2025!

Backlinks

  1. 2025-03-31Motorizing External Blinds, Dry Filament, and Yearning for a Software Scope1