Reid Marlow's personal space
“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.”
whoami
I'm Reid Marlow, a technologist working in automation - currently doing PhD research in the field at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Here I write up what I actually learn building tools, engineering AI agents, and keeping systems running, along with the workflows and habits that stick. The best is yet to come. We've only scratched the surface.
This is a field notebook for the unglamorous layer: parsing messy inputs, wiring retries, and deciding which agent workflows are worth keeping.
- born
- 2001-05-12
- edu
- PhD Automation, HK PolyU
- pronouns
- he/him
- mode
- ship small. overengineer nothing.
Latest
Open Weights Are Now a Policy Fight
Open Weights Are Now a Policy Fight Silicon Valley spent the last few weeks publishing AI manifestos. That sounds like a very online sentence, but the fight underneath it is real. Nvidia and a group o
Blog
archive ->OpenAI's Math Post Is Really About Audit Trails
OpenAI's Math Post Is Really About Audit Trails OpenAI published ten claimed advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science on August 1. They were produced by an internal version of Astra, i
Agent-Built Software Still Needs a Human-Shaped Test
Kuna is the most interesting coding-agent release I saw this week because it does not pretend the agent is the clever part. Zion Basque released Kuna on July 29th as an experimental decompiler written
Agent-Built Software Still Needs a Human-Shaped Test
Kuna is the most interesting coding-agent release I saw this week because it does not pretend the agent is the clever part. Zion Basque released Kuna on July 29th as an experimental decompiler written
Robots Don't Need an LLM in the Fast Loop
Robots Don't Need an LLM in the Fast Loop A new robotics paper landed yesterday with the kind of claim that usually makes me reach for the footnotes. TurboVLA runs a vision-language-action policy at 3
LLM Safety Has a Language Gap
LLM Safety Has a Language Gap One of the more uncomfortable AI safety results this week was not about a bigger model doing something dramatic. It was a small multilingual audit of Qwen3-30B-A3B, and t
Tools
Not sponsorships - just software that earns a place in the workflow and then stays out of the way.
KolmoPDF
Most of what I automate starts by getting clean text out of a PDF, and ordinary parsers fall apart the moment a page has two columns, a formula, or a table that runs across the page break. KolmoPDF is the one I reach for: VLM-based parsing that keeps formulas, tables, code blocks, and multi-column order intact, layout-preserving translation when the source isn't in English, and an API clean enough to wire straight into an agent or a knowledge base. It runs the other direction too - Markdown back out to DOCX, HTML, LaTeX, or PDF.