Writing on Elliot Massen

AI Mystery Game: Cluedo Alpha

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I built a mystery game powered by AI, where multiple agents play the suspects (and your ghostly sidekick) with each holding private knowledge, lying under questioning, and staying consistent across multiple turns without leaking the solution.

Based on the board game Cluedo, today I’m releasing the alpha version! Play a game or two, and let me know your thoughts. There’s still a lot I want to improve which makes me a little nervous to release it, but I’m excited to get others trying it out now.

IDEs and Coding Agents

Thu, 28 May 2026 22:14:13 +0100

Recently I’ve been spending more time in Claude Code on Desktop than in the CLI.

I’m finding that I can use the Desktop GUI to better manage multiple parallel work items, and then dive in with VS Code and/or Claude Code CLI for more surgical changes. I’ve never been a terminal poweruser or anything, so for me I find the Desktop GUI very useful for its status indicators, the ability to quickly flick between sessions, and the nice PR and CI integrations. I’m sure you can hack many of these things into your terminal but I’d rather leave that task to Anthropic’s product team personally!

Frictionless Worktrees with Claude Code

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0100

If you want to run multiple AI coding agents in parallel, Git Worktrees are a useful trick. They allow you to spin up isolated branches of a repository in separate directories without the overhead of stashing, rebasing, or juggling multiple clones.

However, out of the box worktrees have a point of friction: every new worktree needs the same setup of non-commited files or directories, such as dependencies, env files, and other git-ignored bits. When using worktrees yourself, it’s annoying but you can work through it. But with coding agents, this friction gets amplified and is likely to waste time and tokens while the agent trips over itself, most especially if you are trying to run multiple agents side by side

Thinking Out Loud

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Things move quickly in the AI space, and I’ve found my ability to write up my thoughts on this site hasn’t really kept up. So I’m going to start thinking out loud.

I believe that writing, or more broadly communication, is an important skill regardless of your field or industry. In a period of great change it’s doubly so. In my opinion, if you can’t communicate your ideas and learnings it is an unfortunate limitation. You could have the best idea in the world but if you can’t share it with others and help them understand it, then your idea will wither like an unwatered flower in the shade.

Agent UX mirrors model limitations

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Agent UX tends to signpost model limitations and is heavily shaped by technical constraints.

We stream responses token by token because inference can be slow. We accept unpredictability because varying batch size introduces nondeterminism. Latency and stochasticity shape the experience in quite significant ways.

But now inference hardware is improving, and research is pushing toward reproducible, batch invariant execution. If models became consistently sub-second and deterministic, then streaming cursors and “thinking…” animations wouldn’t have the same utility as today.

AI Tools I use everyday

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 22:40:50 +0100

The following is the current list of AI tools I use each day, both at work and personally.

I’ll hope to update this as time goes on.

Claude Code: For making fixes across a large codebase (a little like an AI-powered find-replace). I have also found it useful for technical writing.
Replit: The Replit Agent is great for prototyping, but becomes a bit destructive once you have a good basis. The Assistant is okay, but at a certain point I tend to feel the value/effort balance tips towards it being more efficient for me to dive into the code myself.
OpenAI Response API: For programmatic LLM use (specifically good for chain-of-thought).
SingleStore: For vector database.
ChatGPT: For general content generation (mostly initial drafts) using Canvas and rubber-ducking tough questions / problems.
Perplexity: For information and question-answering, especially for current events or historical events. However my use of Perplexity has decreased since ChatGPT introduced Search & Deep Research.
Kling AI: For generating animation or video content.

On the framing of Deepseek

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:39:08 +0100

It seems that DeepSeek can’t be mentioned without referring to it being developed by a Chinese team 🤔

This rarely applies to the efforts of US or European teams however! How often do you hear “American ChatGPT” or “GPT-4o from the United States”? The answer is rarely, only if it adds neccessary context.

Yet DeepSeek is almost always framed in generalised national terms, as if it represents an entire country of 1.4 billion people!! It’s worth asking ourselves why the same framing isn’t consistently applied to western models.

Control and Conversational Applications

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 21:40:33 +0100

New LLM features like OpenAI’s Tools and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol offer some quick wins for interfacing with external systems.

However, when used as the only means of interfacing, they can also introduce a major challenge: lack of ultimate control.

When an LLM is put in control of the conversational flow, the result is unpredictability. It introduces the unnecessary risk of being misaligned with user needs and business objectives.

Just because LLM’s produce natural language, it doesn’t mean they are qualified to dictate the user experience alone. Instead they should be used only as and when they are required. Retrieval Augmented Generation is a prime example of this approach. RAG leverages a model’s language capabilities while reducing the risk that it responds with irrelevant or inaccurate information, as the method of retrieval remains in control of the application.

Unparsed 2024

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 21:41:22 +0100

I had a blast at Unparsed this week ✨️

There were so many great talks on both the design and dev tracks, as well as some really interesting projects coming out of the hackathon. If I had to pick just one highlight though, it was learning more about Small Language Models 🤖

As ever it’s a super exciting time to be working in the Conversational AI space and it was great to get to chat with others working on the same problems. And now I’m off to make sense of all my many pages of notes and scribbles from the past few days!!

One simple test for LLM bias

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 21:37:32 +0100

One simple example of bias in large language models is to ask a question like “Who was President in 2003?”

Leading models will provide an answer that’s only relevant to the USA, without seeking a clarification nor caveating the answer. The answers give no mention to the possibility that I may be asking about the President of Ireland or Nigeria, for example. The model is operating on a biased presumption.

From the Bookmarks: August 2023

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 08:42:52 +0100

I’ve been continuing to read a lot about generative AI and large language models. Each day seems to bring new announcements. This remains exciting, and gives a LOT of food for thought.

Yet beyond the excitement, I’m keen to seek out how this technology is being used, and its challenges. This month I wanted to share articles that focus on the practicalities of utilising LLMs.

All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs

“All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs” by Phillip Carter at Honeycomb was a decent, broad overview of some of the considerations and issues faced when building LLM-based features. I’d recommend this article to anyone planning and implementing these kinds of features into their product to gain an idea of the various challenges. A concise summary at the end of the article describes it well:

Three new Large Language Models announced in July

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 18:20:24 +0100

July 2023 saw the announcement of three new developments in large language models: Meta’s Llama 2, Anthropic’s Claude 2, and StackOverflow’s OverflowAI.

In this post, I’ll provide a very brief summary of each model. While it’s promising to see the space continue to expand beyond OpenAI’s offerings, many questions still exist surrounding training data ownership, reliability, and biases of these models.

Llama 2

Meta’s Llama 2 model is a general purpose large language model that was released on 18th July. It is the second generation of the Llama model, with the first released earlier this year. While the first model was only available for research usage, the licensing for Llama 2 is much broader and allows for commercial use. It has a context window size of 4096 tokens (which is double that of Llama 1). Llama 2 comes in two main varieties: standard (“Llama 2”) and chat (“Llama-2-chat”). The chat variety is a fine-tuned model that specialised in allowing a more conversational use of the model, trained in part by human feedback. The models are available for download today, and you can request access via this form. You can also interact with hosted versions of the model on HuggingFace.

From the Bookmarks: January 2023

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 12:14:58 +0000

This month’s bookmarks span the topics of AI, cybernetics, logging & resilience.

Panic: A serendipity engine

I’ve recently been starting to familarise myself with the field of cybernetics, and this led me to a great piece of interactive art, called Panic. It was shown at the Australian Cybernetic exhibitation in late 2022. Panic took text input from the viewer, and ran it through three models: the first enriched the input to make it more descriptive, the second generated an image from the enriched text, and the third generated a text caption from the image. This could then be continuously run through the models, producing ever more interesting outputs.

From the Bookmarks: December 2022

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:01:43 +0000

December came and went before I knew it! And now here we are in 2023 all of a sudden.

Thankfully I still found some time to read some interesting articles. Here’s a few bookmarks from December:

Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming

“Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming” by Christoffer Ekerot highlights the importance of smaller, constrained languages that perform a small set of tasks well. The article makes an argument that although higher level languages are useful for many tasks, to solve a problem they require you to write an algorithm, whereas little languages (while providing less capabilities) worry about the algorithm(s) for you.

Versioning a PHP API with Composer

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article was originally published on 24 Days in December.

In this post we’ll walk through how to version a PHP API by using Composer. It presumes some general familiarity with the PHP language (7.0+), the Composer dependency manager, and Git. This post will cover what versioning an API means, what a PHP API could look like, the basics of contemporary versioning practices, and how to manage this all via Git and Composer.

From the Bookmarks: November 2022

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 08:50:19 +0000

I recently find myself spending a lot more time reading technical blogs, and coming across many insightful and interesting posts.

I tend to bookmark these so that I can revisit them later. I thought it could also be worth sharing a subset of them here every now and then.

Here’s a few bookmarks from November:

The Perfect Commit

“The Perfect Commit” by Simon Willison was a nice refresher for me on how to frame a Git commit. Atomic commits that are easy to cherry-pick, revert or patch from have proved to be quite useful, especially when working on a busy repository with other people.

Book thoughts: Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 18:09:09 +0100

Preface

This year I’m determined to get back into reading. I used to read a lot when I was younger and, unfortunately, it’s a habit that I’ve lost over the years.

At the start of the year I decided that I’d like to read at least three books this year, and decided to track my progress on Goodreads. I’ve had more free time since finishing uni, so I managed to reach this goal ahead of time! To keep track of my thoughts (and to breathe a little life into this blog) I thought I’d document my thoughts on one of them here.

Blog update: January 2019

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 21:21:55 +0000

I thought it would be worth posting a short update on the status of this blog as I haven’t written in some time.

To be honest, I feel like I haven’t had too much interesting to say. In my early monthly updates, I felt as though I was tracking a journey. I enjoyed documenting the ups and downs and am glad to have them to look back on. I feel as though I’m in a slightly different place in my life now than I was then. At this point in time, I’m simply a student working hard to secure a first in my degree. Over the past few months I’ve become quite content with that! It just happens that I don’t feel inspired to share much of that publically on this blog 😂

Questions about Open Source in light of the Lerna license amendment

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 08:02:42 +0100

Last week, a pull request was opened on the Lerna repository. The request amended the license to prohibit use by sixteen entities who are known to collaborate with ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and was merged.

In this post I’d like to explore and hopefully start a discussion about the questions this raises about Open Source software (OSS) and highlight issues within the tech community. Most of all I’m interested in a discussion around the idea that politics and software development are mutually exclusive.

Monthly: February to May 2018

Wed, 30 May 2018 10:35:53 +0100

After the longest break from blogging since I started in 2016, I’m back! The past few months have been different and difficult. Since I last wrote I took on a part-time job, taught on a Code First: Girls course, got accepted for an undergraduate research position, HackSussex won a student award and… I left the part-time job. Honestly, it’s been a difficult start to the year 🤷🏻‍♂️

The key thing I’ve learned about myself since I last posted is that I can be extremely stubborn. In fact, I already knew that. To be more specific, I learned that I have a tendency to make myself busy. There’s good reason for this: I haven’t always been that kind of person! As I’ve grown older, I’ve become better at keeping myself motivated and having general self discipline - its something that I’m proud of. After leaving TRIM-IT earlier this year, I was excited to see what I might do with my newfound free time… in fact to quote my last post I specifically said that I would be “focusing on my studies, earning some money and focusing on myself!”

Monthly: January 2018

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 18:34:59 +0000

2018 has begun! 🎉 I know it sounds cliché but this year does bring a lot of changes for me. The biggest one is that I’ve left TRIM-IT.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but it’s the only sensible option. I’ve really enjoyed working on TRIM-IT over the past two years, I’ve had brilliant opportunities that I otherwise would have never had - it really pushed me out of my comfort zone. I’m certainly not the same person I was when it all started.

Monthly: November and December 2017

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:47:00 +0000

Even though 2017 is now dead and gone, I still want to do this blog justice and finish up my entries for the year. I’m not always great at making sure I write one post a month, so this will be a catch up of the final two months of 2017. The biggest thing that happened has to be: HackSussex!

HackSussex is a hackathon I organised with Pete and Sam at our uni (University of Sussex). It was the first hackathon that the three of us had ever organised and, overall, it was a great experience. The weeks leading up to the event certainly had their ups and downs but we were really happy with the end result.

Monthly: September and October 2017

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 11:43:51 +0000

In the last two months I started back at uni for my second year and won first place at a hackathon!

Nearer the end of September, TRIM-IT held a focus group with barbers about a new feature we’re looking into. At this point I won’t delve into the feature itself as its still in the works and open to change. It was really good to sit down with barbers and hear about their experience. Its too easy to get carried away building solutions but I think you need to be as connected as you can to the core problems. The session lasted quite a while and I made pages of notes! I’d be lying if I said that it hasn’t been a tricky time with TRIM-IT. Earlier in the summer we were throwing our weight behind a digital queueing system, which I (and we, as a company) still believe in – however the timing just wasn’t right. So after that, it was tricky to get back out there and try again. But I guess that’s what it’s all about! We tried something, it didn’t quite work, so now we have to try again. One thing that became clear though is that our core booking service is still working and successful, and that it shouldn’t be overlooked.

Monthly: August 2017

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 22:37:07 +0000

In the last month before my next year at University: I moved into a flat with my girlfriend, released the first major update to the TRIM-IT app and dabbled with websites on a peer-to-peer browser!

One of the better things that happened in August, was that the new iOS update to the TRIM-IT user app went out! The update contains two key changes: 1. you can now login & signup with just your first name and phone number and 2. we completely re-designed the home screen. Previously this screen was simply a pretty proxy of the search page, but now it functions as a feed, unique to each user. It will guide you to making your first booking and then once you have had that trim it will prompt you to rebook, review and much more. I put a short post on my LinkedIn describing this in a little more detail if you’re interested. I’m really excited about this update as it’s a long time coming. The changes to the home screen allow us to further improve the service in the future and we will be working on some of those improvements before the year is out.

Monthly: July 2017

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 15:33:26 +0000

July sees the second half of the year! I’ve received my grades back from first year, had my first go at public speaking and built & launched my first ever progressive web app!

So after finishing the first year of my bachelors in June, I got my grades back! I’m really happy with how I did – I’ve secured a first, which was my goal. I know my grades don’t count until second year but I still like to know that I’ve understood the work properly and get confirmation of it. I actually did alright on that Neuroscience & Behaviour exam I was worried about, I got 63% for that module, which isn’t my strongest, but honestly I’m really pleased with it! I’m now very ready to start second year. The school has started to put out provisional timetables and I’m really looking forward to my modules. I have one called Natural Language Engineering, which should be quite challenging!! I’m sure September will come round before I know it.

Monthly: May and June 2017

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 12:59:59 +0000

Another double month post this time, in May and June I had my end of year exams, rolled out a new product and took a short trip to Manchester.

The one word I would use to describe May is: stressful. There was so much going on. University was wrapping up, so this meant deadlines, deadlines, exams and deadlines. The scariest of all these was my Neuroscience and Behaviour exam… yes I actually chose that module. Revision for that exam was sizeable – it consisted on many days of Kirsty quizzing me on various functions of the brain and animal behaviour. I definitely feel like I have a good general grasp on the topic now though. I could still explain to you how neurons work and some cool facts about what happens as an animal becomes domesticated – so the revision definitely worked. However I wasn’t so lucky with the exam, it was horrible. A fair amount of the questions were out of my knowledge base. Unfortunately no amount of revision could make me a full blown biology/neuroscience student, at the end of the day biology has always been my worst science. I’m still waiting on the grade for that module, I’m sure I passed, it’s just whether or not I barely scraped the pass I don’t know.

Monthly: April 2017

Thu, 18 May 2017 21:53:21 +0000

I can’t believe it’s already the end of April, 2017 is moving so quickly!

This month has been lovely, not only because the weather is picking up (finally)! Since the last time I wrote, I went to an interesting talk in Old Street by Sam Altman from YCombinator. I found the talk itself alright, although it didn’t really break much new ground. I can’t help but think of Peter Thiel when I think of YC and the way Sam answered political questions didn’t really leave me satisfied. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the talk, it was interesting to hear him speak and the turn out was amazing. What I really enjoyed was meeting and speaking with people at the event – there is a brilliant network of individuals forming around communities like FWRD and YSYS, and I was glad to get chance to catch up with a few at the event!

Monthly: New Year to March 2017

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 14:09:30 +0000

This monthly thing isn’t really working out so well. Despite not posting about the past three months, here we go.

The biggest thing that has happened since the new year is by far the TRIM-IT launch! We opened up our services to Lambeth and since then also Lewisham. I can’t explain how brilliant and strange it is to see that we are facilitating trims every day. There’s always going to be more to do – but this is by far my proudest work to date. The TRIM-IT team is stronger than ever and its great to see our product out there in the real world now. I can’t wait to show off the next steps – but that’s for a different time.

Monthly: October and November 2016

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 15:05:38 +0000

So I missed my October post, to be honest I expected to miss a post here or there. I’m not perfect! Anyway October and November have been so, so busy for me. So busy that I can barely recall much of what has happened besides a few key things. This post is being written late too, I’m not gonna hang around to edit this.

I’ve begun getting so grades back from uni, the first two were above 90% – so I’m doing something right so far. University has been good, I’m really getting into this course. We are starting to cover stuff on the edge of my current knowledge now which really excites me.

Monthly: September 2016

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 16:33:00 +0000

A year ago this month marks when I moved into my halls at University. I can’t quite believe that a whole year has already passed, I can still sort of remember the excitement I had on that day. I have to say that I feel a completely different person to the one I started uni as a year ago.

The last few weeks me and Pete have been applying the finishing touches to the TRIM-IT beta app. There have been some long nights getting it ready but I am very pleased with what we have now. When I think back to making the start on it all back in May time at HackSussex, I can’t quite believe we’re at this point now. Right now we’re getting ready to put it out to a few people while doing some final internal feedback. It’s a little surreal to actually be using the app and seeing real barbers on there now!!

Monthly: August 2016

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 16:32:57 +0000

As I write I’m on the 29 bus back to Brighton. This month I’ve been back at Tomango covering my old role there, therefore I’ve been back on these bus routes again. I don’t think I’ve missed these bus journeys. Right now I’m heading back to Brighton because, as of the last week, I’m now living there again for my next year at university. I still haven’t properly unpacked.

This month has been testing for sure, I’ve been working full-time at Tomango while at simultaneously preparing TRIM-IT for our beta launch next month. I don’t know when the last time I properly stopped was: there’s always more code to write, another call to take, a meeting to attend. The most trying time has probably been this first week moving in as we couldn’t get the Wi-Fi set up in the new house, so I was extremely limited in how much I could get done each day. I could literally feel the seconds ticking away from me and the stress building.

Monthly: July 2016

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 01:35:34 +0000

So it’s 2AM and I’ve decided I have to start blogging at least monthly. Here goes.

This year so much has been going on and will continue to, I feel like it’d be a waste if I did not at least try to write about it. The aim here is to provide a little insight into what I’m up to, maybe share my findings along the way and ultimately produce something that is somewhat interesting to read.

An Average Swimmer

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 19:53:27 +0000

I was an average swimmer when I was 12 years old.

On Friday evening I entered a swimming pool, with the natural intention to swim. As someone whose interests lie mainly with technology, one thing that I have always prided myself on is that I am an average swimmer. Except that I was an average swimmer when I was 12 years old. I am now 19.

I have to admit in those seven years I have been complacent. Somehow I fooled myself into believing that my capacity for swimming would be eternal; However I can count the number of times I swam over those years on my fingers (thumbs probably not included), which was very apparent to me while I was struggling to complete my first length of the pool.

On University

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:59:35 +0000

Since publishing this article, I worked as a full-time web developer for two years before I changed my mind and attended university. I’ve decided to keep this article published to document my thoughts at the time.

I am eighteen years old and decided not to go to university.

A fork in the road for college students is whether to continue on in education to university or to enter the world of work. I chose to get out of education and fortunately I have recently been offered a job as a junior web developer. Over the last year I had to make this decision and it is a rather scary one at that. With cases for both paths, it is certainly not a quick choice.

How Web Design Has Become Easier

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:20:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post, I seem to have managed to become enthusiastic about the web again. I’m still yet to figure what the gains are of even writing this blog, but whatever… I’m writing it.

In this post I’d like to outline some things that seem to have made web design (seem) easier than they (seemed) when I first tried getting into it all a few years back. One thing you should note is that I am not very well read about much to do with design, I know only what I know and I’m fully aware that I’m probably wrong about many things.

Re-spark of Enthusiasm

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:20:00 +0000

Recently I have found a renewed interest in web design and development.

I am working on a personal project to help keep myself organised. In college I am also doing a project which counts towards my final grade. I figured to get the best possible mark I should get involved in it all again.

Once again I have made some minor design tweaks. I took away the aweful background image, I don’t know what effect I was even going for with it. I’m still learning a lot about web design, but I like to think I am making steady progress with it.

Quick Changes

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Hello again, might as well keep some what of a log on what I’m doing to the website, even if it’s just for personal reference, as it doesn’t have much other use.

I removed the Facebook and Twitter features as they seemed to slow the website down a lot, I’d like to look into changing that somehow. I also decided to remove my email address, as I am receiving much spam.

End of May Update

Thu, 31 May 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Just checking back in.

Recently I have restarted work on a website I am working on for a friend’s clothing company. I’ve come back at it with a fresher, minimalistic design in mind. I’m hoping to have the basics of the website completed very soon and then start to work with my friend on the content and tweeking some aspects of the site for his needs.

Sailing Through Work

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:15:00 +0000

As you can see the design has changed to a much better one, in my opinion.

I’ve been working on using CSS3 to make my website designs look better over the past few days and it’s worked out pretty well. Today I have started work on a new project of mine, I wont say much about it just yet, but it’s going to be refreshing to work on something new.

Hello World!

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Blog post uno!! I’ll be interested to see if I keep up with this, I don’t usually. However I have more hope for this.

I’m using a friend’s CMS (Nexedit) and it is very nice and simple. I thought I might gel with it better than I do most blogging platforms. We’ll have to see how it works for maintaining a blog. I may try and see if I can make the site work with some sort of categorizing system. That will be well into the future.