antirez
Salvatore Sanfilippo — Creator of Redis
Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis. Deep thoughts on programming, systems design, and software craft.
antirez.comProgramming is now automatic, vision is not (yet).
Salvatore Sanfilippo — the creator of Redis — writing about programming, systems design, and the philosophy of building software. His posts are long, thoughtful, and opinionated, moving between deep technical dives on data structures and broader reflections on how AI is changing the craft of programming. He writes with the directness of someone who's spent decades making complex things simple.
Written by Salvatore Sanfilippo.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
4
Independent Blog
English
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Implementing a clear room Z80 / ZX Spectrum emulator with Claude Code
Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to make. Why not provide the agent with the ISA documentation? Why Rust? Writing a C compiler is exactly a giant graph manipulation exercise: the kind of program that is harder to write in Rust. Also, in a clean room experiment...
Automatic programming
In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming". In case you didn't notice, automatic programming produces vastly different results with the same LLMs depending on the human that is guiding the process with their intuition, design, continuous steering and idea of software. Please, stop saying "Claude vibe coded this software...
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to economically succeed, I don't care if the current economic system is subverted (I could be very happy, honestly, if it goes in the direction of a massive redistribution of wealth). But, I would not respect myself and my int...
Reflections on AI at the end of 2025
* For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so. * Chain of thought is now a fundamental way to improve LLM output. But, what is CoT? Why it improves output? I believe it is two thing...
Scaling HNSWs
I’m taking a few weeks of pause on my HNSWs developments (now working on some other data structure, news soon). At this point, the new type I added to Redis is stable and complete enough, it’s the perfect moment to reason about what I learned about HNSWs, and turn it into a blog post. That kind of brain dump that was so common pre-AI era, and now has become, maybe, a bit more rare. Well, after almost one year of thinking and implementing HNSWs and vector similarity stuff, it is time for some wri...
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