https://www.ronlancaster.com/ I’m working on a research effort, paired with an AI coding agent, and I’m tracking the results of the changes over time. I recognize there are more sophisticated memory management approaches (eval services, vector stores, graph databases, tiered journals, etc.), but I’m having good success with just a simple log... Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/super-simple-memory-for-ai-assistants https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/super-simple-memory-for-ai-assistants Source: Current state of MCP by u/entrehacker on r/ClaudeAI (posted Wednesday, December 3, 2025 at 2:37 AM) Thought I would share some stats about MCP, since I have crawlers over the whole MCP corpus, cataloguing and indexing the MCP server codebases for my MCP chat client. State of the MCP... Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/current-state-of-mcp https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/current-state-of-mcp For the first few years of my career, I drove home most days thinking, “I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this.” I love writing software. It is the joy of turning thought into reality. Because of AI — tools like Canvas in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude — that... Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/disposable-software https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/disposable-software I had a great time presenting Helpful Computer at the inaugural meetup for twin cities AI tinkerers. Very fun. Thank you Augeo for hosting! Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/ai-tinkerers-twin-cities-inaugural https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/ai-tinkerers-twin-cities-inaugural A few weeks ago, OpenAI dropped the price of o3. Because of that, it’s now cheap enough to use as my daily coder. I use Aider with o3 in Architect mode: which directs o3 to make a plan and then 4.1 to make the edits. It’s a great combination. The... Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/o3-plus-aider-is-my-daily-coder https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/o3-plus-aider-is-my-daily-coder I recently shared a note on LinkedIn on the new Codex release: In trying out OpenAI’s newly released Codex (a software coding agent in the cloud), I realized that the ability to launch multiple simultaneous coding tasks is a superpower. The UI offers the ability to ask a question about... Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/openai-codex https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/openai-codex One of my favorite topics to write about is AI - especially AI writing software. At this time, AI is a great co-collaborator for coding… with a pretty big caveat: it’s not great working in large, complex codebases. Let’s talk benchmarks and real-world examples. The Benchmarks Last year, the instances... Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/the-current-state-of-ai-writing-software https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/the-current-state-of-ai-writing-software Large language models (LLMs) can now read images, speak, and write code—yet every new session starts with zero durable recollection. Developers fight this amnesia by replaying chat logs, injecting summaries, or attaching RAG snippets. These patches extend context but keep memory outside the transformer rather than inside it. Why internal... Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/memoryllm-an-approach-to-long-term-memory https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/memoryllm-an-approach-to-long-term-memory In short, those models that provide log probability and function calling in theory can be used together to detect hallucinations. Interesting idea. Entropy measures uncertainty. In LLMs, it tells us how “sure” the model is about the next token. When the model is confident (e.g., it knows the next token... Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/detecting-hallucinations-with-entropy https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/detecting-hallucinations-with-entropy Two related thoughts to consider: I’ve been writing a lot of software in Python lately I don’t know really know Python The “secret”, of course, is that I’m using AI to co-write Python programs. This approach is somewhat analogous to a person who can understand a spoken language, but perhaps... Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/polyglot-programming-with-ai https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/polyglot-programming-with-ai I write software as a hobby because it’s something I enjoy. But I don’t think I’ll continue to do so without the option to collaborate with AI. AI still makes mistakes. That’s why, at this moment in time, I believe it’s best for experts. My workflow includes Aider.chat in architect... Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/cyborg-software-engineering https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/cyborg-software-engineering I’m happy to share my first open-source library: Autonomais – a typescript library created to streamline the coordination of autonomous agents. Designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, Autonomais helps developers build AI agent workflows. Built on LangGraph. Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/introducing-autonomais https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/introducing-autonomais Oner is an AI-aware notebook, built on the idea that agents should be an integral part of every day creative work. Swarms are AI agents that can cooperate to accomplish a common goal or purpose. See Oner here: https://www.oner.chat. In a typical AI chat session without tools, the format is... Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/introducing-oner-swarms https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/introducing-oner-swarms This is a simple idea… Today, we have custom instructions in ChatGPT, that we can use to define how the chat AI interacts with us. Instead, of manually defining that, I’ve instrumented my personal AI to generate a persona - a mental image - of me after each turn of... Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/theory-of-mind https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/theory-of-mind I recently improved how memory is managed in my work on interactive AI agents, and am pleased with the results. Taking a step back - there are various types of “memory” for agents, but I prefer to reduce it to two: there is the context of the current conversation between... Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/memory-management-for-interactive-ai https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/memory-management-for-interactive-ai This is a great read on some of the considerations of microservices (and a software approach to addressing). I’m minimizing the point of the paper, which is the authors’ approach to solving the problem, because the clarity of the benefits and issues with microservices is so good! From the paper:... Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0600 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/towards-modern-development-of-cloud-applications https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/towards-modern-development-of-cloud-applications Two research papers this year demonstrate that generative AI can significantly enhance productivity in the workplace. The first, an MIT study in March, “Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence,” found that ChatGPT substantially raises average productivity: time taken decreases by 0.8 standard deviations and output quality... Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/generative-ai-increases-worker-productivity https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/generative-ai-increases-worker-productivity Today’s LLMs are pre-trained, then frozen in time (unless fine-tuned). What changes when they can continuously learn? Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/llms-that-can-learn https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/llms-that-can-learn I’ve been having an absolute blast with AI (GPT3.5/GPT4 from OpenAI) and wanted to share some of my enthusiasm. Over and over, I’ve experienced situations where using AI has allowed me to do something that I might not have been able to do otherwise. And I see this most often... Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/having-a-blast-with-ai https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/having-a-blast-with-ai Early versions of GPT-4 could “solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, and more, without needing any special prompting.” - Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence research paper by Microsoft Research, April 13 2023. In contrast to this statement, I suspect many people have been... Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/thoughts-on-agi-june-2023 https://www.ronlancaster.com/posts/thoughts-on-agi-june-2023