Tootfinder

From Knowledge to Noise: CTIM-Rover and the Pitfalls of Episodic Memory in Software Engineering Agents
Tobias Lindenbauer, Georg Groh, Hinrich Sch\"utze
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23422

From Knowledge to Noise: CTIM-Rover and the Pitfalls of Episodic Memory in Software Engineering Agents
We introduce CTIM-Rover, an AI agent for Software Engineering (SE) built on top of AutoCodeRover (Zhang et al., 2024) that extends agentic reasoning frameworks with an episodic memory, more specifically, a general and repository-level Cross-Task-Instance Memory (CTIM). While existing open-source SE agents mostly rely on ReAct (Yao et al., 2023b), Reflexion (Shinn et al., 2023), or Code-Act (Wang et al., 2024), all of these reasoning and planning frameworks inefficiently discard their long-term …

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

In praise of the Triangle
https://www.tumblr.com/troyminos/784626346278174720?source=share

Mixture of Encoders is a vector-native alternative that models both structured and unstructured data in a unified embedding space. Join Filip Makraduli as he introduces the method, demonstrates how it powers natural language search and real-time recommendations, and shares open-source tools and benchmarks for replacing complex hybrid stacks.
Learn more:

An open-source Bluetooth speaker that is fully user serviceable and easily repairable. Yay. https://hackaday.com/2025/07/24/teufel-introduces-an-open-source-bluetooth-speaker/

Windows Terminal Product Manager Christopher Nguyen shares news about the edit command line utility, its new open-source status, and initial feature set that includes:
1. It is Lightweight
2. Mouse Mode Support
3. Multiple Open File Support
4. Find and Replace (with an option to use regular expressions.)
5. Word Wrap
(Installation instructions:

GitHub - microsoft/edit: We all edit.
We all edit. Contribute to microsoft/edit development by creating an account on GitHub.

Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with constraints
Zhenyun Yin, Shujie Wang, Xuhong Wang, Xingjun Ma, Yinchun Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16727

Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with constraints
Improving the reliability of large language models (LLMs) is critical for deploying them in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Deliberative Searcher}, the first framework to integrate certainty calibration with retrieval-based search for open-domain question answering. The agent performs multi-step reflection and verification over Wikipedia data and is trained with a reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes for accuracy under a soft reliability constraint. Empirical …

I wrote a little blogpost about #AI #bots that are like a plague of locusts on the #OAPEN #Library

Funnelling locusts – further reflections on the OAPEN Library and DOAB’s response time 
In my previous post on our less than optimal performance of the OAPEN Library and DOAB, I wrote about the effect of AI bots on our systems, and that it has become a common problem for many sites providing open access (OA) or open source software content. All of them – including the OAPEN Library … Continue reading "Funnelling locusts – further reflections on the OAPEN Library and DOAB’s response time "

Eliciting Reasoning in Language Models with Cognitive Tools
Brown Ebouky, Andrea Bartezzaghi, Mattia Rigotti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12115 https://

Eliciting Reasoning in Language Models with Cognitive Tools
The recent advent of reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 was met with excited speculation by the AI community about the mechanisms underlying these capabilities in closed models, followed by a rush of replication efforts, particularly from the open source community. These speculations were largely settled by the demonstration from DeepSeek-R1 that chains-of-thought and reinforcement learning (RL) can effectively replicate reasoning on top of base LLMs. However, it remains valuable to explore alte…

How Do Community Smells Influence Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Machine Learning Projects?
Shamse Tasnim Cynthia, Nuri Almarimi, Banani Roy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15884

How Do Community Smells Influence Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Machine Learning Projects?
Community smells reflect poor organizational practices that often lead to socio-technical issues and the accumulation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD). While prior studies have explored these problems in general software systems, their interplay in machine learning (ML)-based projects remains largely underexamined. In this study, we investigated the prevalence of community smells and their relationship with SATD in open-source ML projects, analyzing data at the release level. First, we ex…