I'm a software engineer with interests in: 👉 Java-related technologies 👉 Cloud Computing 👉 Software architecture 👉 Artificial Intelligence 👉 Rust

Atlanta, GA
Joined July 2020
Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
Rust 1.99 is out 🦀 Cargo now disables incremental compilation by default when it detects. This can save time and storage in clean CI builds, where the cache is rarely reused. Read more details 👇 blog.rust-lang.org/2026/10/0…
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
📚Multiple Rust books by Microsoft - including "Rust for C/C++ Programmers", "Rust for C# Programmers", "Rust for Python Programmers", and more. microsoft.github.io/RustTrai…
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
Here's what OpenAI's agentic software factory looks like, today. Details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer… (thanks to all the OpenAI folks who explained how it works! And Perf Factory looks especially interesting to me)
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc. So I would not "declare AGI" until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention -- conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc.
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
Have you tried Topcoat, the framework released this summer by the Tokio team? If not, a Topcoat Tutorial: Full-Stack Rust Web Apps for Beginners just dropped for you. Watch it, build it, and enjoy the batteries – they’re included 🔋🦀 youtube.com/watch?v=VCgUmW6W…
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
The never type "!" has landed on Rust nightly 🦀🎉 "!" represents a computation that can never produce a value, such as a function that always panics, exits or loops forever. If you maintain Rust libraries or tooling, give it a try! 🔗github.com/rust-lang/rust/pu… #rustlang
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
Martin Odersky (@odersky) is the creator of Scala and I interviewed him to compare different languages designs (Rust vs Zig vs Python vs Scala) and how AI will impact programming languages. In this episode: • Comparing Rust, Zig, Python, and Scala designs • Why its hard to write a compiler • Predictions about how AI will impact software • Why functional programming matters Where to watch: • YouTube - youtu.be/LdN4sPWM-WY • Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/0EH… • Apple Podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… • Transcript - developing.dev/p/creator-of-… Thank you to the sponsors of this episode for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at workos.com/ • Jira by Atlassian: Get more work done with your favorite agents and models all in one place, check them out at jira.dev/ Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:44 Why care about functional programming 06:35 Why should people learn Scala 09:26 Rust vs Scala 12:42 Rust vs Zig 15:45 Scala vs Python 18:31 The programming languages that influenced him 22:16 How running on the JVM works 26:33 Why writing a compiler is hard 29:19 Why Twitter adopted Scala early on 31:00 How he believes AI will impact programming languages 43:40 Will there be less engineers in ten years 44:34 Top programming languages to learn to grow 46:18 Top technical book recommendation 46:51 Why he chose academia instead of industry 48:28 Reflecting on Scala 55:42 Advice for his younger self 56:33 Outro
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Ilya Lapitan 🎯 retweeted
Rust had a busy week 🦀 From a security incident that caught the ecosystem's attention to some pretty unusual places Rust is turning up, there’s plenty to catch up on. Here’s this week’s roundup. 👇
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Software engineering news and articles on Java, Rust, AI, and machine learning Newsletter: Week 33, 2026 ilapitan.com/2026/08/16/news…
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