Debugging

I published six articles this week. One about PostgreSQL. Another about AI agents. Another on context management. A tutorial on automation. An analysis of debugging. And an adversarial advice framework for evaluating MVPs. It wasn’t planned. Each article came from a paper, a talk, or a project that I found interesting individually. But looking at them together, there’s a common thread I hadn’t noticed while writing them. All six are saying the same thing. ...

Jane Street, one of the world’s most selective quantitative trading firms, published a mechanistic interpretability puzzle a few weeks ago. They hand-crafted a neural network with approximately 2,500 linear layers, integer weights, and released it to the public with a question: What function does this network compute? The answer: MD5. A cryptographic hash algorithm from 1992, implemented entirely as matrix multiplications and ReLU functions. What matters isn’t the answer. It’s the path the winner took to reach it. Because that path is, without exaggeration, a manual for debugging opaque systems that applies far beyond machine learning. ...