Matthew Thompson
banner
thompson.gr
Matthew Thompson
@thompson.gr
Architect/Engineer and Independent Researcher.

Finishing Master in DS and AI. Interested in Meta-Reasoning.

Researching in-context reasoning for ML-Agents via Cohere Labs, doing some data annotation, and learning more about rational agents.
Exciting day today - this quote captures it well.

"“The most important thing in life is to be true to yourself. Because if we’re not true to ourselves, then how can we be true to life?”"

Business, innovation, father, husband, son, brother, and friend.

Meditator, artist, and warrior.
November 18, 2025 at 5:22 AM
Wow 🥳 Awesomely strange when the proofs and lemmas have been written and I'm happy with it!: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/11/17/wow-awesomely-strange-when-the.html
November 17, 2025 at 12:55 PM
November 11, 2025 at 9:51 AM
Degenerate is a tricky term: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/11/06/degenerate-is-a-tricky-term.html

The more ways a system can achieve a function, the more robust and adaptable it becomes. I think it is fair to say we tend to think of “degenerate” as a pejorative. Something broken, collapsing, or ...
November 6, 2025 at 7:55 AM
Generalisation (and its zibling): https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/11/06/generalisation-and-its-zibling.html

Generalisation… I am comparing State Spaces and Solution Spaces and realised that I may be talking about generalisation….
The post is diving into the definitions to prompt some thought.
November 6, 2025 at 7:06 AM
Planning is offline search.

Planning is offline search.

Planning is…. Yup, it is offline search.
November 5, 2025 at 6:53 AM
Agentic Context Engineering (ACE): Self-Improving LLMs via Evolving Contexts, Not Fine-Tuning

Agentic Context Engineering.

Interesting concept but lacks rigour, so feels like the legend of the boy and the dike

There are better ways to manage context.
Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
Large language model (LLM) applications such as agents and domain-specific reasoning increasingly rely on context adaptation -- modifying inputs with instructions, strategies, or evidence, rather than weight updates. Prior approaches improve usability but often suffer from brevity bias, which drops domain insights for concise summaries, and from context collapse, where iterative rewriting erodes details over time. Building on the adaptive memory introduced by Dynamic Cheatsheet, we introduce ACE (Agentic Context Engineering), a framework that treats contexts as evolving playbooks that accumulate, refine, and organize strategies through a modular process of generation, reflection, and curation. ACE prevents collapse with structured, incremental updates that preserve detailed knowledge and scale with long-context models. Across agent and domain-specific benchmarks, ACE optimizes contexts both offline (e.g., system prompts) and online (e.g., agent memory), consistently outperforming strong baselines: +10.6% on agents and +8.6% on finance, while significantly reducing adaptation latency and rollout cost. Notably, ACE could adapt effectively without labeled supervision and instead by leveraging natural execution feedback. On the AppWorld leaderboard, ACE matches the top-ranked production-level agent on the overall average and surpasses it on the harder test-challenge split, despite using a smaller open-source model. These results show that comprehensive, evolving contexts enable scalable, efficient, and self-improving LLM systems with low overhead.
arxiv.org
October 27, 2025 at 7:42 AM
Domain Driven Design: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/10/22/domain-driven-design.html

​"Domain Modelling is itself the process of learning, you cannot know it all at the start, and should expect to update aspects at any stage of the product development".
bliki: Ubiquitous Language
a bliki entry for Ubiquitous Language
martinfowler.com
October 22, 2025 at 7:30 AM
Approaching learning new skills - me or the machine?: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/10/06/approaching-learning-new-skills-me.html

Do I need patience to learn to direct coding agents or is it time to learn a new language to learn and develop in that?
October 6, 2025 at 11:40 AM
Discussing the state of LLM-as-a-Judge - is it good enough to use? (human edition): https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/10/03/discussing-the-state-of-llmasajudge.html

This is about connection - both with a fellow human interested in and articulate about Artifical Intelligence and the connection of the...
Discussing the state of LLM-as-a-Judge - is it good enough to use? (human edition)
This is about connection - both with a fellow human interested in and articulate about Artifical Intelligence and the connection of the information inputed, processed, and produced. The Information - LLM-as-a-Judge - we chat about the survey paper and how it can be applied to modern AI Applications. There’s a human written blog post, a Youtube video, and a NotebookLM to chat to. Fill your boots :)
matt.thompson.gr
October 4, 2025 at 12:35 AM
Claude Code is monitoring file changes - this is good (I think!!)

"⏺ Excellent! I can see you’ve already started updating the documentation files. You’ve successfully changed reasoning_parameters to agent_parameters in the domain model, data model, and agents files."
September 18, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Finished reading: Dune: The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert 📚

Great book - interesting character development, was a bit of a weird shift into the final parts but ended well.

Some interesting challenges in terms of acce... https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/09/10/finished-reading-dune-the-machine.html
September 10, 2025 at 11:18 AM
September 10, 2025 at 6:02 AM
insight into Claude's Learning userStyle setting: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/09/01/insight-into-claudes-learning-userstyle.html

I asked Claude to output the userStyle to the chat - glad I did as I’m not on PhD level topics but it needed to change approach !
September 1, 2025 at 9:24 AM
[BH 6/n] Summer review, la rentrée est proche: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/08/23/bh-n-summer-review-la.html

Ad-libbed list of what I’ve done, still doing, and learnt over the summer.
August 23, 2025 at 8:26 AM
Functional Information - measuring evolution and AGI?: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/08/14/functional-information-measuring-evolution-and.html

Functional Information: a way to represent information that has come to be useful over time. That is information that provides a function for itself or a...
August 14, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Double Split Experiment lecture from 1964 (remastered): https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/08/12/double-split-experiment-lecture-from.html

Remastered broadcast of a 1964 lecture by Richard Feynman on the Double Split experiment. Finished with a call to action on having open priors to evidence we see ...
August 11, 2025 at 11:11 PM
August 4, 2025 at 10:08 AM
August 4, 2025 at 10:08 AM
Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/07/30/specifying-systems-the-tla-language.html
July 30, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Interesting presentation on the downfall of the Bronze Age Civilization around Egypt, Greece, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

.video-wrapper {
position: relative;
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
height: 0;
max-width... https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/07/28/interesting-presentation-on-the-downfall.html
July 28, 2025 at 11:27 AM
Finished listening to: Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert 📚

What a book to listen to whilst building AI Agents!
July 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
An attempt at guiding Claude to be less sycophantic: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/07/27/an-attempt-at-guiding-claude.html
July 27, 2025 at 8:30 AM
[IA 9] Agent Design Process v2: Bridging the Agent Function and Acceptance Criteria: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/07/24/ia-agent-design-process-v.html
July 24, 2025 at 10:48 AM
[BH 5/n] Argh Just because we repeat Correlation does not imply Causation does not mean there isn't Causation!: https://matt.thompson.gr/2025/07/23/bh-n-argh-just-because.html
July 23, 2025 at 11:41 AM