http://programmer.ie/tags/appendix/ Recent content in Appendix on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/dspy-from-first-principles/21-chapter/ Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/dspy-from-first-principles/21-chapter/ <p>Chapter 20 assembled the book&rsquo;s mechanisms into one loop. This appendix does something smaller and more specific: it shows three of those mechanisms already running in a production codebase that was not written for this book, and it holds itself to a stricter evidence rule than the chapters do.</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Evidence rule for this appendix.</strong> There are two tiers here. The <strong>mechanics</strong> around each language-model call — UCT selection, the budget gate, the trace cache, the champion-update rule, the output parser — are deterministic software, and a committed fixture (<code>experiments/dspy-from-first-principles/ch21_beyond_book/</code>) exercises them with no LM and no DSPy import. Those results are measured. The <strong>kernels themselves</strong> — the production modules the excerpts are drawn from — are <em>selection evidence from one codebase</em>, not a generalisation. Their full source lives in the <a href="https://github.com/ernanhughes/stephanie">Stephanie repository</a>, linked below and pinned to <code>main</code> at revision <code>32d02ee</code> (2026-01-06).</p>