Announcing: "Pedal Assist Coding" Newsletter

Why have just one newsletter when you can have two? 😅

My second newsletter is Pedal Assist Coding. That name is weird enough that I dedicated the second issue to an explanation.

Overall, the newsletter is about coding agents and AI, just not in the “unabashed fanboi” mode that you see a lot of. LLMs, especially for coding agents, have tremendous potential. They also have tremendous problems, especially those using frontier models. I am not going to extol the virtues of running dozens of agents in a swarm and “tokenmaxxing”, but I also am not going to ignore the realities and potential of this technology.

Instead, I am focusing on how to using coding agents (and LLM technology more generally) with an eye towards ethics and developer security (DevSec), with a slight Kotlin Multiplatform bent. For example, today’s post is about the risks of coding agents doing harm to your development environment and one way to try to stop that. Future issues will:

• Explain how I am blending a bit of frontier models with local models for a coding agent environment, in the hopes that local models will take on more and more of the work over time

• Illustrate the rationale behind some of the Kotlin Multiplatform tooling I am building up in support of that frontier/local blend… including one I will talk more about here later this week

• Demonstrate how to use coding agents for things other than pure coding, such as mutation testing or “red-teaming”

• Highlight uses of LLMs that are not societal risks, but rather help smooth out rough edges in UX or tackle other small problems

If this sounds interesting to you, it is free to subscribe:

Or, add the RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, which does not have to be FeedFlow, though it is my current fave.

You can learn more about the intentions of the newsletter, such as frequency and scope, in my inaugural issue.

I do not know if I will be publishing this newsletter five years from launch, the way I have been for my Jetpack Compose/Compose Multiplatform newsletter. But, for a while, it will be my main vehicle for sharing my discoveries and disasters in small-scale AI and coding agents, with this blog serving more for Android stuff and general CommonsWare news.