Thursday, 8th October 2026
Sighting
11:34 AM – 1:08 PM
— California Towhee, Red-tailed Hawk, California Brown Pelican, Osprey, in San Mateo County, CA, US
Computer programming is, fundamentally, about two things:
- Problem-solving using computers
- Learning to control complexity while solving these problems
I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of those solutions is less valuable than it is today, so I think it will continue to be a viable career even with the advent of AI tools.
ttok is my CLI tool for counting tokens, using OpenAI's open source tiktoken library.
It hasn't been in updated in a couple of years, but I finally fixed a Click warning, updated CI, and added a --list-models command to list available models.
It works with uvx, so you can count tokens in anything like this:
cat file.txt | uvx ttok