Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency

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DonHopkins · 2025-07 · Strong recommendation

Me to, and I'm always battling with the LLM's obsession with lazily writing reams of ridiculously defensive code and masking errors in the code it generates and calls, instead of finding the root cause and solving that. (Yes, I'm referring to the code LLMs generate, not the API for generating code itself, but "fail early and spectacularly" should apply to all code and apis.) But you have to draw the line at failures that happen in the real world, or in code you can't control. I'm a huge fan of Dave Ackley's "Robust First" computing architecture, and his Moveable Feast Machine. His "Robust First" philosophy is extremely relevant and has a lot of applications to programming with LLMs, not just hardware design. Robust First | A conversation with Dave Ackley (T2 Tile Project) | Functionally Imperative Podcast [LINK] Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency [VIDEO] Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing [LINK] Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM [LINK] [LINK] DonHopkins on Feb 11, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable... Also check out the "Moveable Feast Machine", Robust-first Computing, and this Distributed City Generation example: [LINK] DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf] A "Moveable Feast Machine" is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Au

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nelsonmandela · 2021-01 · Recommendation

You might be interested in 'Robust First Computing' - [LINK] edit: here is a far better explanation by the terms creator: [VIDEO]

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sitkack · 2020-01 · Recommendation

I am happy you don't agree on modularity. I don't want to be correct, I want to arrive at correct conclusions. :) Composition is great, scale free self similarity is probably the basis for the universe. Modularity is a great design technique, it can also make things weaker and force other (unknowable) design choices because the module boundary prevents the flow of information/force. Overly constrained modular systems encourage globals, under constrained modular systems are asymptotic to mud/clay. I don't want to use K8S as a strawman to attack modularity, but I think it is an example of using this powerful design tool to solve the wrong problem using mis-applied methods all the while being more complex and using more resources. In the case of designing systems, modules/objects/processes (Erlang sense) are critical, but not so much in building/engineering them. Demodularizing or fusing a design can make it more robust and more efficient. I don't dislike modularity, I just think it is a bigger more complex topic than most give it credit for. Unix is highly-non modular and very poor composition. It sits on a molehill of a local maximum, itself sitting in the bottom of a Caldera, a sort of Wizard Mt on Wizard Island. Other things you might like is the research around "Collapsing Towers of Interpreters" [1] Or Dave Ackley's T2 Tile Project and Robust First Computing [2] Would love to chat more, but internet access is spotty for the next week, non-replies are not ignores. [1] [LINK

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