youtube.com/watch?v=j-_zDKwO… Some of my favorite features in Plasticity v26.2

Interestingly it appears that smlib (nvidia’s recently released geometry kernel) and solids++ (the kernel used by moi3d) share a common ancestor. In having a hard time finding the exact date they diverged, but maybe around 2005? integrityware.com/products/o…

At the same time that we are seeing the “clean room” clones of the adobe suite, the top trending repo on GitHub is a reverse engineering plagiarism tool (the README begins: “See a feature in an app that you want in your own product?”). Historically, mechanically generating source code from disassembly was considered copyright infringement. I don’t know what the courts will say about this because the process is closer to reimplementation by normal standards. Does this end well for users? - all software becomes free and open source because every good idea is trivially clone-able ; or does this end poorly for users, because nobody can afford/justify software r&d anymore, and all novel ip will be locked behind network services or only sold into the enterprise market?

Aside from games, I think AI reverse-engineering is going to strangle commercial, indie desktop software. The typical anti-reverse-engineering tools like Themida are defeatable by today's AI. So if the code runs on the user's machine, it will get cracked. I doubt it's practical to start a new business selling perpetual licensed software in this world

I just got rejected by @AnthropicAI to do cybersecurity defense work on my own application. They took a scan of my passport and face and then said "no". I have a hard time not hating everything about this company.

I talk here a bit about Polysplines, a new kind of spline surface, which is a generalization of the b-spline and (hopefully) a successor technology for Catmull-Clark. youtube.com/watch?v=FFEIhpiB…

Chat GPT 5.4 is really frustrating to work with. Awful hallucinations and laziness. It's hard to tell if it's "smarter" when it's so difficult to steer.

I'm excited about this upcoming feature: a rasterized image behind an (mostly analytic) hidden line drawing. It just makes for a very cool look

Honestly the next year of development is going to be even more exciting

It's insane how quickly you can build throw-away prototypes with Claude now. I made a timeline recording debugger in about ten minutes. Warning: this is partly fake data! It would surely be many weeks to make this production ready. But you can also just hack together a tool like this, use it once and throw it away after. "Single use plastic" code.

I guess this is a contrarian take at this point, but Claude Opus 4.6 is better for everyday programming tasks than Codex 5.3-(extra) high. Claude does higher quality "ordinary" work and is better at following instructions. Codex is great for anything especially tricky or mathematical, and it's superior for finding bugs during code reviews. But for everyday tasks the outcomes are worse.

Prediction: code quality will continue to matter a lot - at least for the next few years. High availability network services, for example, can easily have impossible to debug cascading failures when the architecture is unsound. There is a large class of software where just barfing out a million lines of code is going to be a disaster. This applies to a lot of SaaS stuff that people are currently paying for, not to mention anything related to payments or banking. Most of us don’t really care about the generated assembly code of our software (except in some critical sections), and we don’t consider duplicated (inlined) asm instructions to be “slop”. So I think there is a good chance that for a lot of programming “in the small” (ie, internal to a single function) the quality of that code will matter less and less. But the basic structure of software: how it’s decomposed into modules, how cohesive the design is, the fundamental choice of data structures, and so forth: high code quality here will allow llms to be more productive, produce fewer bugs, and move faster. This is “programming in the large”. Today’s models (Codex 5.3 and Opus 4.6), are genuinely awful at this programming in the large stuff. Obviously it will get better with time. But for the foreseeable future the best harness for these models is high quality code, good unit tests, good type checking, explicit invariants assertions, etc.

I've been curious exactly how much LLMs have impacted my productivity. Here is a chart of all the lines-of-code I've added/removed from Plasticity over the last 3 years. I've put labels for when ChatGPT 5 came out and when I started using Claude more recently.