Korny's Blog
The personal blog of Korny Sietsma| Korny's Blog
The personal blog of Korny Sietsma| Korny's Blog
Note see also my standard AI Disclaimer 1 Introduction My last few posts have been rather theoretical, this is back to a “here is how I solved a problem” post. A while ago I blogged about better ways to make Mermaid diagrams but that was in the “before times” when I would do these things by hand, like a savage. OK I still edit them by hand - but LLMs like Claude Code are pretty good at drawing Mermaid - it’s just text, after all. However, out of the box, Claude is trained on sample ...| Korny’s Blog
This is a short post (two in one day!) to talk about a new tool I’ve written to help with Claude Code permissions. Note see also my standard AI Disclaimer The problem with permissions In my previous post I mentioned a frustrating issue with Claude Code - it kept asking me to approve the same commands over and over again. The documentation says you can use wildcards in permissions but in practice, even simple patterns don’t work reliably. I’d give it permissions like Bash(rm /tmp/mermaid...| Korny's Blog
This is an edited version of a post I wrote for the Liberis internal engineering blog - it is not particularly original, most of the ideas come directly from Simon Willison’s article “Lethal Trifecta for AI agents” - but I thought it was worth writing a summary for our engineers, and sharing it more widely. Bruce Schneier summarised the current Agentic AI situation in his blog: We simply don’t know how to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure ag...| Korny's Blog
I’ve had the song “Stuck in the Middle with You” in my head for a few weeks. (R.I.P. Michael Madsen!) 1 But not because of Reservoir Dogs - but because of the public discussion about AI coding tools. (Yes, I know… feel free to walk away if you are sick of the whole thing). I feel like there’s this strange culture war, or something like it, playing out - with wild statements on both extremes - and I’m stuck in the middle. Hype To the left of me There is just so much AI Hype. I’m ...| Korny’s Blog
I thought it’d be worth posting an example of a bigger task I did the other day - just to show what can be done, without crazy vibe-coding, on a non-greenfields app, using ASP.Net Core not some simplistic front-end tooling. This was originally part of a longer post but I thought it was worth splitting - this example is used in my post Clowns to the left of me … The task - Sending a message when data changes We have an ASP.Net core application which includes a relationship between Business...| Korny’s Blog
I was demonstrating Claude Code to a colleague the other day - I was working on an ASP.Net Core C# service, using Claude within the JetBrains Rider IDE. And my colleague said “it uses a lot of bash commands like find - why doesn’t it hook into the IDE to understand the structure?” I was a bit surprised by this - I quite like the way it uses small simple commands. Musing about it afterwards, I realised that this is actually an example of the Unix philosophy - “write programs that do on...| Korny’s Blog
I had a shower thought the other day - “I’m an ebook hoarder, I have a bunch of technical ebooks as mobi/epub files, but also pdfs. It’d be nice to be able to slurp them up into LLM tools - for summarizing, for categorising and the rest”. I’d already done epubs (see my recent Stonemouth analysis) so PDFs should be not too hard? It turns out PDFs are surprisingly complex - they often aren’t linear documents at all, they are very display/print oriented - and things that appear simpl...| Korny's Blog
There’s a lot of positive and negative discussion happening about AIs at the moment. I have thoughts - lots of them - and I want to blog more, mostly about coding tools. But I don’t have the time! But some small experiments still blow me away - and are worthy of a quick post. So, I finished reading the Iain M Banks book Stonemouth last night - it’s a complex story with a lot of characters, and I mostly kept track, but to be honest I got lost in a few minor characters - it doesn’t help...| Korny's Blog
Why Mermaid? I’ve always loved diagrams as code - you can easily express graphical information in a text file, with easy searching, renaming, git tooling, and it encourages you to keep things simple rather than getting caught up in presentation. I was a long-time user of PlantUML - it has a lot of diagram types and options, a lot of tweakability, and is open and can run anywhere. But - anywhere means “anywhere with a Java VM”, and about ten years ago, Mermaid.js came along as a javascri...| Korny's Blog
(aside - I have some much bigger blog ideas but haven’t had the time to write them properly - so here’s just a small thing I find handy) Lately I wanted some toolbar widgets - mostly for looking at CI/CD build statuses - and I stumbled across XBar. What is XBar? XBar is a nifty tool for Mac OSX machines which puts little UI widgets on your toolbar. (It started as an older project called Bitbar, which was abandoned for a while - there is a similar alternative called SwiftBar for those who ...| Korny's Blog
