yak-shaving

Reverse-engineering and keratinous biomass reduction in bos grunniens

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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.

Athena Federated Queries: Azure Data Lake Storage

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Well, this one is super broken, which one finds out after shaving a number of yaks.

We want to query Parquet files that sit in Azure Data Lake Storage with Athena. AWS has what seems to be a nice documentation on how to do it… Except:

  1. Searching for it in Serverless Application Repository with “azure” or “adsl” terms is not yielding anything.
    • Additionally there seems to be a bug there, per AWS support:

      Issue:
      – The search functionality appears to be unresponsive when using the traditional “Enter” key method
      – This seems to be a technical bug in the console
      Workaround:
      – Enter your search term in the search bar – Instead of pressing Enter, click anywhere on the screen
      – This should trigger the search functionality and display the results
    • Search for something like “gen2” actually yields something… It’s a AthenaDataLakeGen2Connector — which is the same thing as below, so read on.
  2. Trying to add the Data Source from Athena, selecting “Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2” connector… It is based on athena-datalakegen2 code which is borken because the underlying mssql JDBC driver is borken.
  3. After patching the mssql driver and the connector, we realize that it is trying to connect via JDBC to ADLS, but that is not supported. And yet AWS claims “the documentation is correct“.

Srsly now, AWS and Microsoft, you even tested anything?

It’s already 2025, and still…