now: writing about AI and formal math
quanglee

field notes.

vol. 02 Β· no. 11
oct 26 Β· paris
~/hql hi!

I develop AI solutions that are useful and cheap to use. Senior software engineer in Paris, math, tech and AI enthusiast, creator of dim0, minmux and kiframe. Here I write about what I learn, with figures you can poke.

also: draws, plays PES, null at Age of Empires barΓ§a Β· arsenal, all the way

Latest, interactive

9 figures Β· all running code
FIG 5 Β· ATTENTIONrunning
"it" looks at "animal" Β· 66% theanimaldidn'tcrossthestreetbecauseitwastootired
latest03 oct 268 min#ai#llm

How a transformer reads

A walk through the parts of a transformer, from tokens to sampling, with a working figure for each step.

read it β†’

Writing

  1. 11

    Mistral Large 4, seven months behind the frontier

    5 live figures aillmbenchmarks

    Mistral Large 4 is the best model built outside the US and China and a big jump from Large 3. Independent tests put it about seven months behind the US labs and behind five Chinese open models, and a task on it costs about fifteen times more than on the small US models with the same score.

    12 min
  2. 10

    πŸ‡¦πŸ‡·πŸ Messi in numbers

    15 live figures footballdata

    Lionel Messi made football look like art, and no spreadsheet can hold that. But the spreadsheet still says it, plainly. The best forward who ever played and the best playmaker who ever played are the same person.

    19 min
  3. 09

    How Lean checks a proof

    4 live figures mathleanai

    Lean is a programming language in which a theorem is a type and a proof is a program, checked by a small kernel. This post covers how that works, where it can still go wrong, and why it lets language models write proofs nobody has to read.

    8 min
  4. 08

    OpenAI's 722 math manuscripts

    5 live figures aimathlean

    On 6 October OpenAI published 722 machine-written math papers with claims on the Unique Games Conjecture, the colouring of the plane, a $5,000 ErdΕ‘s problem and dozens of other open problems. This post goes through the claims, the parts that come with Lean proofs, and the first day of reactions.

    12 min
  5. 07

    DeepSeek V4.1 vs GLM-5.3, and how far both are from Claude Code and Codex

    6 live figures aillmagents

    DeepSeek V4.1 and GLM-5.3 compared on agentic work and coding in two weight classes, next to the closed models behind Claude Code and Codex, with benchmark scores by task type, speed, cost per solved task and reports from daily use.

    12 min
  6. 06

    How a transformer reads

    9 live figures aillmtransformers

    A walk through the parts of a transformer, from tokens to sampling, with a working figure for each step.

    8 min
  7. 05

    LeetCode 1977: number of ways to separate numbers

    5 live figures leetcodedynamic-programmingalgorithms

    A hard DP that's worth knowing, because it stacks three classics in one problem. Partition DP, prefix sums and an LCP table take it from O(nΒ³) to O(nΒ²).

    7 min
  8. 04

    Behind prompt caching: a friendly intro to KV caching

    5 live figures aillmtransformers

    What actually happens when a provider says your prompt is cached. The trick underneath is called KV caching, and it's a small idea with a big memory bill.

    7 min
  9. 03

    The real cost of running agentic AI, and how not to go broke

    4 live figures aiagentscost

    Agents loop, and every loop resends everything. Where the tokens actually go, how prefix caching claws most of it back, which benchmarks matter when you pick a model, and a router you write yourself.

    10 min
  10. 02

    Elasticsearch best practices, and a few twists nobody mentions

    6 live figures elasticsearchinfraperformance

    What I check first when an Elasticsearch cluster gets slow. Shards, segments, refreshes, and the profiling result that changed how we fetch ids.

    10 min
  11. 01

    Notes on making this site

    4 live figures metabuild-logastro

    The site, twice. A one-font page I shipped in april, then a rebuild with figures you can poke, a small green critter and a status bar.

    6 min

Built

open source
idea mini-app @board agent

dim0 dim0.net β†—

A thinking canvas. Notes, mini-apps and agents on one infinite board, and the AI reads the board before it acts.

apiwebdocs ~/minmux main ❯ claude ● reading src/pane.rs● editing 2 files ● needs input ● 2 running ● 1 waiting utf-8

minmux minmux.dev β†—

A terminal for agentic coding. Tabs, splits and real shells, plus the panels that show what your agents actually did.

scenario β†’demo video

kiframe in dev β†—

An agent that turns a written scenario into a product demo video: it drives a real browser, moves like a person, and cuts the footage.