llm

Reverse-engineering and keratinous biomass reduction in bos grunniens

Gregory Golberg projects, voitta, yak shaving, zoominfo , , , , , , , , , , ,

Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

Hunter S. Thompson

Reverse-engineering is kinda fun. More fun when we can shave the yak by adding more tools to our LLM/MCP toolbox, amirite?

So I accidentally came across this LinkedIn post, about an SVG diagramming tool for Claude. I was just working on some diagrams as part of reverse engineering and having been making agents create those with Mermaid, but I thought I’d give it a try.

Well, that was a flock of wild geese chasing a red herring down a rabbit hole to borrow a shear…

First, I thought the idea was clever, but I wanted more cowbell (because we don’t have enough animals in this post), so I forked that and vibe-coded an MCP server on top of that.

Then I tried to use it to create a few architecture diagrams but I found it actually somewhat lacking. When the client (Claude Desktop) was using it, I didn’t love the editing capability. When the client was not using it, it created nicer-looking diagrams somehow (in SVG, yes) and with legends and stuff. But of course the graph layout still sucked. So I’d need to manually edit it.

Well, screw that, said I. I’ll use AWS MCP server, said I.

Screw that, said I next.

Then I modified the prompt to ask not for SVG but for DOT format of GraphViz. Much better, I said. And then, uh… It could have gone better, right? But at this point I’m not sure how to improve the prompt.

But I know what to do when I don’t know something, right?

Yes. I put the DOT file to the LLM and ask it to tweak it to have a certain thing. Then I ask why. Then I, of course, ask it, to fix this original prompt. And it’s turtles (yes, we’re in a zoo and you’re reading it on a Safari) all the way down.

And what do we learn, Palmer? Well, never mind, let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene.

(Well, not quite true — using DOT is the better thing to do here than explicitly doing things like “30px” instructions).


NOTE: multiple individuals of bos grunniens species have undergone keratinous biomass reduction, which also included:

The moral of the story is absent.

Coding assistants musing

Gregory Golberg holding forth, projects, voitta, yak shaving , , , , , , , , ,

I love me my Cline, Claude Code and company. But there’s major thing I found missing from them — I want my assistant to be able to step with me through a debugger, and be able to examine variables and call stack. Somehow this doesn’t exist. This is helpful for figuring out the flow of an unfamiliar program, for example.

Now, JetBrains MCP Server Plugin gets some of the way there, but… It can set breakpoints but because of the way it analyzes code text it often gets confused. For example, when asked to set a breakpoint on the first line of the method it would do it at a method signature or annotation.

And it doesn’t do anything in terms of examining the code state at a breakpoint.

So I decided to build on top of it, see JetBrains-Voitta plugin (based on a Demo Plugin). It:

  • Uses IntelliJ PSI API to provide more meaningful code structure to the LLM (as AST)
    • This helps with properly setting breakpoints from verbal instructions
    • Hopefully also this should prevent some hallucinations about methods that do not exit (educated guess).
  • Adds more debugging capability, such as inspecting the call stack and variables at a given breakpoint.

    Here are a couple of example debug sessions:

Much better.

And completely vibe-coded.

Maybe do something with Cline next?

MCP protocol of choice: stdin/stdout? WTF, man?

Gregory Golberg projects, self-promotion, silliness, voitta, yak shaving , , , , , , , ,

Let’s talk about MCP. More specifically, let’s talk about using stdin/stdout as a protocol transport layer in the year of our Lord 2025.

Yes, yes—it’s universal. It’s composable. It works “everywhere.” It’s the spiritual successor to Unix pipes, which were cool at the time. The time when my Dad was hitting on my Mom. As an actual transport layer, stdin/stdout is a disaster.

Debugging Is Basically a Crime

Let’s say I want to create an MCP server in Python. Reasonable. Now let’s say I want to debug it. Set a breakpoint. Inspect variables. Use threads. Maybe spin up the LLM in the same process for context. You know, software engineering.

The moment you try to do this, you’re writing a debug driver. Congratulations. You are now:

  • Building a fake client to simulate a streaming LLM
  • Implementing bidirectional IO while praying the LLM doesn’t send surprise newline characters
  • Wrapping things in threads and/or asyncio or multiprocessing or whatnot other total fucking bullshit.

Been there. Twice:

  • Voitta’s Brokkoly: Thought I could run the LLM and the driver in one process. Spent 3 hours implementing queues, got it half-working, and realized I was debugging my own debug tool.
  • Samtyzukki: Round two. Same problem. Ended up with more abstraction layers than a Kafka conference.

Eventually, I just gave up and decided to use SSE (Server-Sent Events). Because you know what’s great about SSE? You can log things. You can see the messages. You can debug. It’s like rediscovering civilization after weeks of wilderness survival with only printf() and trauma.

 stdout Is Sacred, Until It Isn’t

Here’s the other problem. stdout is a shared space. You can’t count on it. Libraries will write to it. Dependencies will write to it. Your logger will write to it. Some genius upstream will write:

print(“INFO: falling back to CPU because the GPU is feeling shy today.”)

Congratulations. You just corrupted your transport. Your parser reads that as malformed JSON or a broken packet or an existential and spiritual crisis.

It’s not a bug. It’s a design decision—and not a good one.

This is the part where I invoke Rob Pike. Sorry. Not sorry.

In Go, to format a date, one doesn’t simply use YYYY-MM-DD. You do Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006.

Because, I get it, we all need to get high once in a while. But srsly.