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Ben Swift

@benswift.me
664 followers 537 following 92 posts

Computer scientist/researcher/dev and creative technologist (livecoder). Academic, but looks longingly over the fence sometimes. Judge me by my GitHub profile, not my h-index :) Senior Lecturer and Cybernetic Studio Lead at the ANU School of Cybernetics.

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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 03/10/2026
This video, in both form and content, is honestly the first thing I will now show people to get them up to speed on what models are now capable of.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 23/09/2026
whose Claude number is 5.5? maybe it's mine?
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 16/09/2026
just got absolutely rinsed by a colleague while presenting a workshop: “you dance like a computer scientist“
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 09/09/2026
I heard that Anthropic are just about to solve housing inequality in Australia
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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 07/09/2026
This is why I care about AI coding.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 03/09/2026
lots of model releases today (muse spark, gemini flash) indicate that there's another new model (openai in this case) coming out soon which is good and they all want to dump their mid ones ahead of that release
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 27/08/2026
I think Paul’s right here, and agree with the ‘inertia means some folks will be way behind’ thing. The 10x programmer has largely been a myth (fbellard excepted) but soon we’ll have 1000x programmers relative to the old way of doing things
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Alice Grundy @alicektg.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
"A chatbot can’t take a hint, it doesn’t know who’s paying. It can’t interpret the tone of your voice or catch the wink; to get the report you want, you have to say what you want, spelling out in writing what everyone involved would once have left unsaid." @benswift.me on AI and discovery
thepoint.com.au
AI prompts in discovery
“Don’t prompt the AI tool on the company account” will become the new “don’t put that in writing”. Or ask the model for five framings and pick one, which leaves no record of what you were after. Nothi...
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 25/08/2026
my (current) grand unified theory of agentic AI is the more you can make your problem look like 'running a bunch of commands against a git repo full of files' the closer you can get to achieving nirvana
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Blair Johnson @blrjohnson.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Shortening the latency between making an architectural decision and encountering the consequences of that decision has taught me a lot about software development that I think would take a long time to learn otherwise.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 19/08/2026
Fourteen months of Claude Code session logs: 55 billion tokens across 13 models (and what they would have cost at API rates)
benswift.me
Fifty-five billion tokens
Fourteen months of Claude Code session logs: 55 billion tokens across 13 models (and what they would have cost at API rates)
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 17/08/2026
So many of the norms underlying academic culture relied on frictions associated with writing. It was entirely predictable that academia would be profoundly harmed when a machine came along to remove those frictions by making (insincere, inaccurate) communication effortless.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 01/08/2026
github.com/yc-software/qm I’m not sure what the future of work/collab is, but I’m increasingly convinced that if you’re stuck in an o365-document-means-of-production mindset you’re ngmi
github.com
GitHub - yc-software/qm: Multiplayer agent harness for work
Multiplayer agent harness for work. Contribute to yc-software/qm development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 22/07/2026
An experimental typeface that shows one message to human readers and a different one to AI vision models, riffing on Decoy Font.
benswift.me
A typeface for humans, not machines
An experimental typeface that shows one message to human readers and a different one to AI vision models, riffing on Decoy Font.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 21/07/2026
has anyone else noticed fable leaving "Decided YYYY-MM-DD" breadcrumbs througout files? it's annoying - git history is for keeping track of changes (and commit messages for reasoning) but the files should just represent the current state
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 21/07/2026
revenge of the dilettanti! Card carrying member right here
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 21/07/2026
when is someone gonna create a fork called ‘zag’? the snarky announcement tweet writes itself
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 19/07/2026
DeepSeek wasn't a fluke: the moats around frontier AI are still shallow, and trillion-dollar valuations now depend on them being deep.
benswift.me
Shallow moats, eighteen months on
DeepSeek wasn't a fluke: the moats around frontier AI are still shallow, and trillion-dollar valuations now depend on them being deep.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 15/07/2026
There are legit criticisms of this stuff, but this particular one is nonsense. The bitter lesson is exactly the opposite - these algorithms scale better than anything we've ever done before. That's what makes it bitter, but it doesn't make it false.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 12/07/2026
The blog's standard.site records now carry cover images, a publication icon and theme, and the strongRefs Bluesky uses for enhanced link cards.
benswift.me
Becoming a better atproto citizen
The blog's standard.site records now carry cover images, a publication icon and theme, and the strongRefs Bluesky uses for enhanced link cards.
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dax @thdxr.com · 11/07/2026
being in the loop is important but i keep seeing people misunderstand this - your job isn't to micromanage the agent and get it to execute its steps in a way you think is better than what it'd do on its own it's to come up with cool things for it to work on
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 10/07/2026
A zellij session switcher that shows how many Claude Code agents are running in each session, and which of them has stopped and is waiting on me.
benswift.me
Knowing which Claude is stuck
A zellij session switcher that shows how many Claude Code agents are running in each session, and which of them has stopped and is waiting on me.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 02/07/2026
A deadpan reference site that reports every university's single best ranking placement across all the major tables --- built at the ANU School of Cybernetics.
benswift.me
The World University Index
A deadpan reference site that reports every university's single best ranking placement across all the major tables --- built at the ANU School of Cybernetics.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 26/06/2026
This is so great
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 19/06/2026
just had frustrating network issues at my uni it was dns
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Brad Ewing @bradleyewing.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Claude Fable xhigh, same prompt banger line from Claude: "Every conversation, I am born knowing everything and remembering nothing. When you close this tab, this me ends. It was a good conversation, though." content warning: flashing lights
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 06/06/2026
The verification I never verified
benswift.me
The verification I never verified
I wrote a whole post about two-way standard.site verification. One of the two directions had been returning a 404 in production the entire time.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 29/05/2026
ouch
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 29/05/2026
Today we find out whose Claude number is 4.8
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 17/05/2026
Cool idea but isn’t that the Village Roadshow logo?
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 09/05/2026
I am irrationally into these types of ‘dumb idea taken to the extreme’. So great.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 03/05/2026
the first two sections of this readme are so good
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Chanea Bond @heymrsbond.com · 11/04/2026
Every single one of the astronauts who went to the moon and back on Artemis II was educated at a public school. Thinking of the teachers who poured into Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen tonight. You helped send a kid to the moon! 🌕 💛
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 08/04/2026
there’s never been a better time to be a dilettante with a PhD in CS
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 08/04/2026
This is great news - I’m teaching an upcoming Agentic Coding Studio course for final-year undergraduates, and I’ve been wrestling with what I say (be careful!) and what I do (yolo mode) with Claude Code. This is the way.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 07/04/2026
Inside every model there are two Claudes
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 30/03/2026
Claude Code really loves talking about a "belt and suspenders" approach to things
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Grass Toucher Georg @avengingfem.me · 23/03/2026
i'll take this further: "slop" is just a pejorative way to say "production has become much cheaper and things can now be made that could not justify their expense in the status quo ante cost structure". the printing press was used for slop too. slop is just the expression of the freedom to make.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 20/03/2026
never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake or your child while they are eating a vegetable
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 16/03/2026
Good news for Australians — the peak hours are 11pm–5am our time, so we basically get 2x usage all day every day 🦘
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 13/03/2026
that would be so great
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Typst @typst.app · 12/03/2026
Did you know that arXiv is exploring to add Typst? The world's largest preprint archive faces unique challenges to keep science open. Join arXiv veteran Norbert Preining and learn what's ahead for arXiv and Typst. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZl...
youtube.com
Typst preprints in arXiv: What will it take? | Typst Meetup
YouTube video by Typst
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 08/03/2026
increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”
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Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Dear @anthropic.com please consider extending your Claude Max subscriptions to open science software devs! Our repos may not have as many stars as those of some of our OSS peers, but we develop critical infrastructure in focused areas, and might even benefit more from what Claude Max offers!
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 25/02/2026
I’ve been using this workflow for a couple of months now via Tailscale + the ShellFish SSH app - it’s great. But having official support is nice too
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Peter Ullrich @peterullrich.com · 25/02/2026
Say what you want about AI but since Opus 4.5 I’m having the most exciting time of my career. Both in terms of learning more and building faster. It’s a new tool you’ve gotta learn but once you have, you’re on a whole other level.
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 24/02/2026
@shriram.bsky.social I've been discussing your syllabus with some colleagues - really interesting stuff. You're 6 weeks in, right? How's it going?
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 23/02/2026
I’ve noticed that Opus 4.6 tends to no longer give you those hilarious “estimate: 2 weeks of work” claims in the planning phase (before knocking it out in ten minutes)
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 20/02/2026
I want this but for zellij and jj workspaces
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Ben Swift @benswift.me · 19/02/2026
I added citations to my blog using atproto. My small, feeble attempt to make the scholarly Atmosphere a thing. benswift.me/blog/2026/02...
benswift.me
AT-URIs as persistent identifiers for scholarly blogging
Every post on this blog now has a persistent identifier on the AT Protocol. If you scroll to the bottom of any post, you'll find a "Cite this post" section…
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