DEV Community: James Thompson

Join Me in UC Berkeley's RDI Advanced LLM Agents MOOC

James Thompson — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 23:49:35 +0000

Learning the Why Behind the How

My previous article talks to AI Agents going mainstream in 2025. Part of this series is explaining the Why Behind the How. As you progress through your AI/ML learning journey, you will need to maintain some level of understanding as to where the larger corpus of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence research is progressing.

UC Berkeley’s RDI is providing such an opportunity for all of us through their Advanced Large Language Model Agents MOOC. Their mission:

The Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) is a new multi-disciplinary campus-wide initiative, focusing on advancing the science, technology and education of decentralization and empowering a responsible digital economy. The RDI Center currently includes faculty and students from computer science, finance/economics, and law, and will support 3 pillars: research, education, and community / entrepreneurship.

What You’ll Learn

From January to April, you'll learn from world-class researchers at the forefront of AI innovation. You will learn inference-time techniques from Xinyun Chen at Google DeepMind, reasoning strategies from Jason Weston at Meta, and agent safety and security from Dawn Song at UC Berkeley.

Key Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you'll understand:

Advanced inference and post-training techniques
Agentic workflow and tool use
Functional calling strategies
Techniques for mathematical reasoning and theorem proving
Methods for code generation and verification
Inference-time techniques for reasoning
Post-training methods for reasoning
Search and planning
Agentic workflow, tool use, and functional calling
LLMs for code generation and verification
LLMs for mathematics: data curation, continual pretraining, and finetuning
LLM agents for theorem proving and autoformalization

Lesson Schedule

The weekly livestream meets on Mondays 4pm-6pm PT and 7pm-9pm ET January through April 2025. It's not too late to join. 😄

The current schedule is provided below (clickable screenshot, I'll update with a markdown table soon):

Complete Coursework for a Certificate

You can participate through the Application Track or Research Track, which also requires weekly quizzes to apply for a course certificate.

Applications Track:

3-4 students per group
Focus on applied use cases of LLMs
Does not necessarily need to contribute novel research

Research Track:

2-3 students per group
Conduct novel research under the supervision of postdocs and graduate students
Goal of publishing in a workshop or conference
Students must apply to participate via a forthcoming Google Form

Audit to Learn

You can also simply follow along at your own pace with the weekly lectures and supplemental readings. You will not receive a certificate for this option.

Whatever your choice, please let me know if you want to work together on the Application Track or if I can help in any way. Good luck!

Agentic AI Agents Go Mainstream in 2025 with Coherent Persistence

James Thompson — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 22:45:38 +0000

AI Agents in 2025: The Technical Reality Behind the Hype

AI Agents are really going mainstream in 2025, where 2023 was about chatbots and 2024 was about RAG.

The most interesting thing about AI Agents in 2025 isn't what they can do - it's how they're doing it. I've been digging into the technical architecture of modern AI Agents, and there are some fascinating patterns emerging that deserve more attention.

First, let's clarify what we mean by AI Agents. These aren't just LLMs responding to prompts anymore. Modern agents are stateful systems that maintain context across interactions, manage their own memory, and make autonomous decisions within defined boundaries. The key breakthrough has been in what I'm calling coherent persistence - the ability to maintain consistent behavior patterns across extended interactions.

The Modern AI Agent Technical Stack

Here's what's actually running under the hood of a typical modern agent:

class ModernAIAgent:
    def __init__(self):
        self.working_memory = CircularBuffer(max_size=1000)
        self.long_term_memory = VectorStore()
        self.action_space = ConstrainedActionSpace()
        self.context_manager = HierarchicalContext()

The interesting part is the HierarchicalContext. Unlike earlier agents that treated each interaction as a flat sequence, modern agents maintain multiple layers of context simultaneously. They're basically running a distributed state machine where different aspects of their behavior can evolve independently, where they are able to offload synchronous and asynchronous actions through AI tools or functions.

Multi-Agent Architectures

The real power comes from how these agents interact. I've been experimenting with networks of specialized agents, each handling different aspects of complex tasks. The breakthrough isn't in individual agent capabilities - it's in the protocols they use to coordinate.

Here's a typical agentic interaction flow:

The key insight: agents don't need to be general-purpose. They're most effective when they're specialized and coordinated through well-defined protocols. Different AI Agent frameworks vary in their implementation of the above diagram, and the results of their agents and predefined workflows may vary.

SQLite for AI?…Heck Yeah!

One pattern I'm particularly excited about is using SQLite as a persistent memory store for AI agents. It's lightweight, reliable, and - most importantly - human-readable. Here's a schema I've been using:

CREATE TABLE agent_memory (
    timestamp TEXT,
    context_hash TEXT,
    memory_type TEXT,
    embedding BLOB,
    content TEXT,
    metadata JSON
);

This makes agent behavior debuggable and allows for interesting queries across their memory space. Want to know how an agent's decision patterns have evolved? Just query the database! Of course, SQLite is not the only option for persistent memory storage. Based on your path from experimenting to prototype to production you may make other Agentic architectural design decisions.

The `Observable Pattern`

The most successful agent implementations I've seen follow what I'm calling the observable pattern - every action and decision is logged, queryable, and traceable. This isn't just about debugging; it's about understanding how agents actually operate in production. Imagine having 100s if not 1000s of agents in production; you will need a way to measure their performance and determine their predicability. That’s where evals are critical.

Below, is a simplified class for implementing agent decision trees:

@dataclass
class AgentDecision:
    timestamp: datetime
    context: dict
    options_considered: list
    chosen_action: str
    confidence: float

What's Next for AI Agents in 2025?

The most exciting developments aren't in making agents more powerful - they're in making them more predictable and maintainable. We're seeing the emergence of design patterns that make AI agents behave more like traditional software systems: testable, debuggable, and maintainable.

The future isn't in building bigger models or more complex architectures. It's in developing better patterns for composing and coordinating specialized agents. Think microservices, but for AI.

I’ll be publishing a series of articles presenting different implementations of AI Agents, along with other articles, over the next many months. Subscribe, keep an eye out and please let me know what you think!

Article cover image courtesy of Growtika on Unsplash

AITX AI Hackathon - Spark Creativity

James Thompson — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 04:59:22 +0000

AITX AI Hackathon Recap

Hello and hope you’re doing well. The AITX AI Hackathon last weekend was an amazing event bringing together over 50 devs, aspiring ML Engineers, and enthusiasts with Austin AI Tinkerers for a full day of hacking and collaborating.

If you’ve never attended a hackathon, it definitely should be added to your bucket-list. It’s an energetic environment where all are welcome. Last weekend, there were over 16 teams that participated in the event.

Spark Creativity

One of the greatest benefits of the focused collaborative effort, is that it sparks creativity when working under the pressure to have something to demo by the afternoon. For me, I built a multi-modal app with speech(voice) to text (STT) and text to speech (TTS). I drew inspiration from a number of talks at last month’s AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco, which was a follow up and much larger AI Engineer Summit. Both events have helped me gain a deeper understanding of the current state of affairs for AI research, startups, and established companies leading the way of Generative AI and Machine Learning, which lead me to a more productive hackathon experience.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

In Austin this weekend? Join the AI Community Hackathon!

James Thompson — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 09:26:22 +0000

It has been some time since I’ve dropped digital ink to canvas. I’ve been very busy over the last year diving deeper into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). This short update is to let you know about the AI Community Hackathon in Austin, Texas happening this Saturday, July 20th.

This will be an opportunity to explore the AI landscape in Austin Texas (aka, ATX) while also meeting other like-minded Generative AI/ML tinkerers. I’ll provide a post next week with a write-up about the event and the project I worked on.

If you decide to join the fun, please let me know!

Happy Leap Year Day, Time for a Reboot

James Thompson — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 04:58:56 +0000

How have you been doing?! 🤔🤗

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted so I figured February 29, 2024…Leap Year Day (or is it Leap Day of the Leap Year??) is a good time to reboot. I’ve taken a few months off from writing so as to mainly focus on learning more about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Buzzy Hype or Reality

ChatGPT was released to the world on November 30, 2022. Probably like many of us, I started to wonder if this was buzzy hype or something worth checking out. GitHub Copilot release sparked additional interest in the AI technology behind how it works.

Stubbing through my research, my interest was really galvanized by a podcast. 📻🤖

Swyx and Alessio's podcast Latent Space provides technical deep dives into AI/ML that is also newbie friendly. I highly recommend tuning in for high signal no noise as they have AI/ML researchers and entrepreneurs leading the SOTA (state-of-the-art) research and burgeoning industry.

Where to next?

I plan to write more about my journey through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your Happy Leap (Year) Day!

Thank you to the photographer Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash for the article cover image.

Quick Tip: Make Sure Your Work Follows You

James Thompson — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 04:58:00 +0000

Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Unsplash

Production Matters

This is a quick tip to make sure your work follows you on GitHub. You can do this by making sure the email associated with your commits is a universal GitHub email address.

Why does this matter? If you ever push your company’s production code to GitHub using your company’s email address, those commits associated with that email go away when you leave the company. Rather, they go away if you ever delete the email address from your GitHub account. You would want to do this since commit messages will continue to be routed to this email address, or until your company deactivates your account.

Don’t Reply

GitHub has a built-in feature to associate a no-reply email address for your commits with your GitHub account. It describes it as a way to keep your email address private, which it does. An additional bonus is that you can use it as a universal email address for all of your personal and professional work.

This is how it will look:

YOUR_GITHUB_USER_ACCOUNT@users.noreply.github.com

So in my case, it looks like this:

100stacks@users.noreply.github.com

You would configure this from your terminal command line (the quotes are required):

git config --global user.email "GITHUB_ACCOUNT@users.noreply.github.com"

Verify it is changed by entering the following command in the terminal:

git config --global user.email

That’s it! You’ve made the change.

Ok, one more thing…

If you use SSH to access your GitHub account, and YOU SHOULD in any production environment 🫣, you will need to complete a few more steps which I covered in another article.

Lastly, Trust But Verify

Having SSH configured is a great step towards a secure, distributed, CI/CD production environment. If you want to take additional steps for a more secure development environment, I will cover an advanced configuration that most developers do not use in a future article.

Configure SSH Keys for Your GitHub Account

James Thompson — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 04:49:24 +0000

Do it before you need it

In my previous article, I wrote about GitHub's RSA SSH Host Key update. This shows that even enterprise companies that we depend on can have issues that may affect our daily lives.

Mistakes will happen in our profession and throughout the industry. Adapting a security-first mindset for production environments is important to help minimize potential issues in the future. SSH keys provide a secure way to authenticate and establish a secure connection between your local development machine and GitHub.

In this article, I will discuss how to install an SSH key on GitHub for your local developer environment. I will also explore the pros and cons of using SSH keys for your development environment.

Install SSH Key for GitHub

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

A GitHub account
Git installed on your local machine

Step 1: Generate SSH Key

Open your terminal.
Run the following command to generate a new SSH key:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"

Press Return to accept the default file location and name for your SSH key.
❗ NOTE: DO NOT skip the next step of generating a passphrase.
Enter a passphrase for your SSH key. This step is important for adding another layer of security.

Step 2: Add SSH Key to SSH Agent

Start the SSH agent by running the following command:

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

Add your SSH private key to the SSH agent by running the following command:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Step 3: Add SSH Key to GitHub

Copy your SSH public key to the clipboard by running the following command:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Go to your GitHub account settings.
Click on "SSH and GPG keys" in the left sidebar.
Click on "New SSH key" or "Add SSH key".
Give your SSH key a title and paste the copied public key into the "Key" field.
Click on "Add SSH key" to save.

Step 4: Test SSH Connection

Test your SSH connection to GitHub by running the following command:

ssh -T git@github.com

You should see a success message indicating that you've successfully authenticated.

SSH Keys: Pros and Cons

Pros

Enhanced Security: SSH keys provide a more secure way of authentication compared to passwords. They use public-key cryptography, making it difficult for attackers to intercept and decrypt your credentials.
Convenience: Once set up, SSH keys allow for seamless authentication without the need to enter passwords repeatedly.
Automation: SSH keys can be used in automated scripts and workflows, enabling seamless integration with various tools and services.
Multiple Accounts: SSH keys allow you to manage multiple GitHub accounts easily by associating different keys with different accounts.

Cons

Initial Setup: Setting up SSH keys requires generating and managing key pairs, which can be a bit complex for beginners.
Key Management: If your private key gets compromised, it can lead to unauthorized access. Therefore, it is crucial to protect your private key with a strong passphrase and follow best practices for key management.
Limited Accessibility: SSH keys are tied to specific machines. If you need to access your GitHub account from a different machine, you'll need to generate and add a new SSH key.

Conclusion

Installing an SSH key for GitHub on your local developer environment provides a secure and convenient way to authenticate and interact with your repositories. While there are some complexities involved in the initial setup and key management, the enhanced security and automation benefits make SSH keys a necessary addition to any production development workflow.

Photo credit to Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash

Github Warning: Remote Host Identification Has Changed! 😳

James Thompson — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 05:00:33 +0000

I started seeing this warning

A few months back after coming back from the weekend, I started seeing the below warning below in the terminal. I was working on a GitHub project.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
SHA256:uNiVztksCsDhcc0u9e8BujQXVUpKZIDTMczCvj3tD2s.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Host key for github.com has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

This was an odd change, as I was working on the project a few days prior without issue. This error occurred whenever I tried to push updates to the remote repository on GitHub.

This was the somewhat cryptic warning that stood out.

🛑 The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
SHA256:uNiVztksCsDhcc0u9e8BujQXVUpKZIDTMczCvj3tD2s.

Please contact your system administrator.

It took a few minutes of troubleshooting to finally realize the phrases remote host and please contact your system administrator where important here. After a bit of searching, I came across this article for the potentially comprised GitHub RSA SSH Key - https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/.

I was surprised by the unexpected non-warning, though after reading the article I could see why this happened. Next week, I'll get into why this was such a big deal, especially for automated CI/CD pipelines and distributed teams.

Photo credit to Vidi Drone on Unsplash

Enable 2FA MFA For Your Build Process

James Thompson — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 04:56:16 +0000

What is 2FA/MFA?

For modern digital life, it’s hard to avoid Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)/Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). You may see the term 2FA and/or MFA though both apply to authentication, which is the act of verifying a user can access a website, application, or service.

At minimum you need a username or email as sign in credentials, and you need something else:

you (biometrics)
thing (hard or soft token)
and, something you know (password).

The most common MFA is when a user logs into an app they are prompted to check their email or SMS for a code. This code should be a OTP - one-time password/passcode.

Use 2FA/MFA in your build process

First are you using GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket to host your code?
Enable 2FA/MFA on your account.
Enable verified commits for your developer laptop/environment.

Verified Commits

Next week, I’ll show you how to enable verified commits for your developer environment…because even Big Tech makes mistakes. 😳

Photo by Ed Hardie on Unsplash

Next Steps

James Thompson — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 20:39:26 +0000

How I got here

I recently completed the hackathon, and tracked my progress over a series of articles. This also marked the start of my journey on DEV, as I am evaluating different writing platforms.

Where to next

In a previous article, I talked about my typical go-to default environment. In reality, there are multiple considerations that you and your team would need to address in a production environment. In subsequent articles, I will dive more into the technical aspects, with step-by-step tutorials, of building and deploying an application.

Photo courtesy of Photo Boards on Unsplash

Checking In: Writing for a Week

James Thompson — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 19:04:20 +0000

What's been happening?

I've been writing for about a week, since submitting a project to the 1Password + Hashnode Hackthon. I was able to write a series of articles that has helped me to synthesize different developer experiences.

Keeping it going

TBH, it's been enjoyable to start taking thoughts and putting them down on paper...well digital paper. I'm working through a few ideas to keep the topics flowing.

Photo courtesy of Nick Morrison on Unsplash

1Password + Hashnode Hackathon 2023: Published on GitHub Deployed to Netlify

James Thompson — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 01:07:25 +0000

Finishing up

This has been a great week of learning for me @builditdeploy.
I started writing on Dev, and worked through deploying a basic app for the 1Password + Passage + Hashnode Hackathon 2023.

I published my work on Github at 100stacks and deployed the app to Netlify.

Next Steps

I'll take what I learned from this week and expand it into other projects. Thank you for watching! 💻👀

Photo courtesy of Lance Grandahl on Unsplash

DEV Community: James Thompson

Join Me in UC Berkeley's RDI Advanced LLM Agents MOOC

Learning the Why Behind the How

What You’ll Learn

Key Learning Outcomes

Lesson Schedule

Complete Coursework for a Certificate

Applications Track:

Research Track:

Audit to Learn

Agentic AI Agents Go Mainstream in 2025 with Coherent Persistence

AI Agents in 2025: The Technical Reality Behind the Hype

The Modern AI Agent Technical Stack

Multi-Agent Architectures

SQLite for AI?…Heck Yeah!

The Observable Pattern

What's Next for AI Agents in 2025?

AITX AI Hackathon - Spark Creativity

AITX AI Hackathon Recap

Spark Creativity

In Austin this weekend? Join the AI Community Hackathon!

Happy Leap Year Day, Time for a Reboot

How have you been doing?! 🤔🤗

Buzzy Hype or Reality

Where to next?

Quick Tip: Make Sure Your Work Follows You

Production Matters

Don’t Reply

Ok, one more thing…

Lastly, Trust But Verify

Configure SSH Keys for Your GitHub Account

Do it before you need it

Install SSH Key for GitHub

Prerequisites

Step 1: Generate SSH Key

Step 2: Add SSH Key to SSH Agent

Step 3: Add SSH Key to GitHub

Step 4: Test SSH Connection

SSH Keys: Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Conclusion

Github Warning: Remote Host Identification Has Changed! 😳

I started seeing this warning

Enable 2FA MFA For Your Build Process

What is 2FA/MFA?

Use 2FA/MFA in your build process

Verified Commits

Next Steps

How I got here

Where to next

Checking In: Writing for a Week

What's been happening?

Keeping it going

1Password + Hashnode Hackathon 2023: Published on GitHub Deployed to Netlify

Finishing up

Next Steps

The `Observable Pattern`