Hi, I’m Wolfgang Faust.

Feep! Search

This is my most active personal project: a web search engine focused on programming resources. It uses an independent index which currently contains a bit over 32 million pages, and runs in my living room. It’s both a practical tool and a long-term learning platform for experimentation with tools, architectures, and techniques. (Currently, data ingestion and indexing are handled with a mix of Node.js and Rust, with shell scripts for orchestration and control flow; full-text search is powered by ElasticSearch, with a basic TF-IDF model augmented by custom PageRank scoring.) Try it out at search.feep.dev today!

The branding for Feep! search has tended to be minimal at best. This lack of branding is part of what made adding dark mode so easy: there’s hardly any styling to begin with, a sort of Béton brut aesthetic with only a thin layer of paint over the underlying code. Still, branding isn’t a terrible thing to have; so today I’d like to introduce you to the new mascot for my search engine.

I said in my last post that I was going to try out OpenHands; but then somebody showed me Aider Chat and I decided to try that instead, on the strength of a personal recommendation. The results were very good, and confirmed my suspicions that having the AI agent as a collaborator rather than attempting to one-shot it seems like a good idea. I got a fix I’m happy with in one go, with only a little bit of hinting and none of the fiddling with prompts that I had to do to keep SWE-agent from going off the rails.

Like almost everybody, I’ve been using LLMs more and more recently. I’ve used ChatGPT to generate quick scripts, and I use GitHub Copilot autocompletions in my IDE; but I haven’t yet tried going as far as getting an LLM to autonomously make a complicated change in an existing codebase. So, in the spirit of my post on 20 minutes with Alpaca.cpp, here's a post about a morning with SWE-agent.