Forem: Alex Obreja

I built a version manager for llama.cpp using nothing but vibe coding.

Alex Obreja — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:25:26 +0000

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a little side project I cooked up over the last week. So, long story short, I only started diving into the LLM world in February, and honestly, it’s been a wild ride. I started with LM Studio, but as many of you know, by the time you get comfortable with one tool, a new "insane" feature post drops on r/LocalLLaMA and the software is already playing catch-up. I eventually settled on using plain llama.cpp because it seems to be the gold standard, but I kept hitting a wall: the update cycle is so fast, and manually updating it feels a bit ... clunky, especially since there's no integrated updater bundled, especially for those juicy new beta versions that get released so often.

So.. about a week ago, while watching The Wire (adhd at its finest), for some reason I had the idea that basically: Why isn't there an nvm but for llama.cpp?

Coming from the Node.js world, I was missing the simplicity of nvm, so I wanted something that lets me swap, install, uninstall and manage versions on the fly without a headache. So, alongside Claude and my local Qwen 35B (mostly Qwen), I decided to "vibe code" it into existence (I can't believe I'm using this term). The models suggested Go (since it's great for CLI tools), and even though I don't actually know how to write a single line of Go, we made it work.

The gist:

It’s a lightweight version manager that handles the heavy lifting for you. Instead of hunting GitHub releases, you just do:

lvm install latest (Gets the right build for your GPU)
lvm use (Switches active version, there's a selection prompt)
lvm ls (See what you've got installed)

It uses "shims" to make sure commands like llama-cli or llama-server always point to whatever version you currently have selected as active. So no more manual PATH hacking every time a new build drops. Now, I understand that many people use docker to create containers of different versions and whatnot, but I wanted something simpler for the regular guy.

Disclaimer:

This is a "vibe code" project. It took me about a week, and while it works surprisingly well for what I need, I am definitely not a Go developer. There are edge cases to polish, more testing to do, and things I probably overlooked because I don't know the language deeply. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I wanted to contribute something small back to the community, at least for the time being. If there are any Go wizards out there who see potential in this, please grab it! Star it, Fork it, fix the bugs, polish the edge cases; help me turn this from a "fun experiment" into a polished tool.

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/asertym/lvm

I’d love to hear what you guys think. Is this something that would actually make your workflow smoother, or am I overthinking a problem that doesn't exist? And again, if anyone who actually knows Go wants to take the reins and turn this into something robust, I would be incredibly stoked.

Let me know your thoughts!

Browser Wars™ (Extended) From A Developer Point Of View

Alex Obreja — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 19:09:47 +0000

I’ve been talking to my peers a couple of times in the past and every time I was coming with the same angry rant about “how I dropped [insert browser here] and switched to [insert browser here]”, and I was always getting the same response “what’s the big deal, why can’t you just be happy”. Truth is — it’s much more difficult than it seems. Now, years later, countless browser switches, and lorries full of nerves and frustration I finally decided to share my own point of view on browsers to this day.

As rules of article writing state — Let’s start off with a bit of history:

A bit of history

Before 2008, Firefox, slowly but steady started eating the whole browser market, until Google introduced Chrome and marketed the crap out of it. Of course, competition isn’t a bad thing, and Google’s move had its impact as an innovation in browser technology with an amazing UI, faster loading, privacy perks, etc.

That is already in the past, and fast-forward to today — the competitive scene for browsers has moved into a completely different direction, focusing more on their security of online data such as their passwords, bank info, browsing history and other sensitive information.

Privacy and Security, needless to say, is an important aspect of what makes a great browser great, I would like to look at today’s competitive scene from a more developer point of view, and to start off, I would like to talk about engines.

Browser Engines

The Giants

In a way, browsers are exactly like cars, there is a salon in which there is a gas pedal, brakes and many switches that are useful and understandable to the user; and there’s a mechanical part — hidden from the user, under the hood, the pipe that gets the juice flowing, the brains of the whole operation *(alright we get it!!).

While the browser integrates peripherals, and provides functionality that allows you to manipulate the engine, its behaviour, and provides additional services; the engine does all the dirty work: loading, processing, rendering data and all possible calculations.

Currently, there are mainly 3 Engines (not to disrespect the other ones, but this is another kind of review) that compete between themselves:

WebKit, made by Apple, which powers Safari.
Blink, a fork of WebKit, made by Google, which powers Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Brave, and Opera.
Gecko, made by Mozilla, which in turn, powers Firefox and Thunderbird (their email client) alongside other projects such as the Tor browser and Waterfox (worth a look).

These are the main owners and developers of the engines. Of course, in development they are assisted by third-party companies, for example, let’s take Google’s project — Chromium. To create this project, Google was assisted by companies such as Intel, Facebook, IBM, LG, NVIDIA, Yandex. You can find the full list here.

Browsers such as Opera, Yandex and Brave, use this particular browser engine, which makes statements like “oh, we have our own browser” not entirely true.

That being out of the way, comes the question: Which one is better? And is there even a difference? Let’s test!

Long story short, there’s a couple websites online that let you “benchmark” different aspects of your browser. I tested Safari 13.1.1, Firefox 79.0, and Chrome 84.0 on my 2016 MBP (Catalina 10.15.5).. not that it matters that much.. but anyways..

And now, let’s have a more detailed breakdown of each and how they fare when looking at the entire lineup.

⚠️ Note that: there’s always a tiny degree of error to these due to the connection and use of different services but nonetheless should give a more than enough answer to do our research.

HTML5Test

First, let’s have a look at our browser’s HTML5 support range.

HTML5Test results

The tests don’t differ from one run to another, so it’s a definite answer on feature support. If we dive into the list of supported and unsupported features you will observe that Chrome is a little better with form handling than both Firefox and Safari — when it comes to the newer tags, and a couple of other small features, but generally, an even fight.

Also please keep in mind that with future updates this number is very likely to change as we see from the data on the website over the years.

Source: HTML5Test

Test for yourself: HTML5Test

CSS3Test

Because we’ve already come so far with browser technologies, we’re gonna ignore stuff like the CSS Selectors and the Acid3 test, since all of our browsers pass the selectors test without a single problem, and the latter is outdated.

Now, this is the part that really amazed me.. but before we get to the good part, let’s take a look at the results. As it seems that the CSS3Test is the most comprehensive online test available, it would be good to have the ability to compare your results with other browsers, much like on HTML5Test.

CSS3Test Results

The results don't tell you a lot until you know what you're looking for. Its mission is to check what syntax the browser recognises, which doesn't necessarily mean it will work correctly when used. WebKit is especially notorious for cheating in tests like this, recognising stuff it doesn’t understand, like the values “round” and “space” for background-repeat, but the cheating isn’t big enough to seriously compromise the test.

The most interest part of all of this is, that if we look at the results from 2012, we can see how much the browsers have improved over the years. Safari, from version 5 to our current version 13 remained at exactly 60%; Chrome improved by 2-3%, while Firefox really got it together and went from 61% to a whopping 74%!

I would like to see that level of dedication more often to be honest. Kudos Mozilla.

Source: XKCD

Maze Solver

The Maze Solver test we focus on the browser layout engine to exercise the browser’s handling of CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 layout constructs. These constructs are used to style HTML, and the layout engine is an important component of overall web browser performance.

The mazes in this test are constructed from hundreds of HTML elements styled with CSS. Every step through the maze changes the style of a single HTML element. How quickly a browser can process that change determines how quickly the maze is completed.

Because the mazes are different every time, we can’t directly compare the browsers, so I ran different boards (40x40) 10 times in total, on each browser, to get an average value of completion; here are the results.

Maze Solver Results (numi calculator)

This is the part that aMAZEd me, because I was completely shocked to see results so fast from Safari’s Webkit (I knew Safari is fast but not THAT fast). Harder mazes, that took 20something seconds to complete, Safari was just rushing them in 14–16 seconds; and the difference is actually visible, Safari is visually faster than Firefox, and even faster than Chrome!

Inspecting the Activity Monitor

I thought I was gonna get lucky by inspecting how much resources are each browser using when loaded with the same content, and I was left kinda disappointed (but in a good way). All browsers were started in Safe Mode (no addons) except for Safari… since it doesn’t have any anyways… ಠ_ಠ and I found the results to be quite even. Energy consumption was minimal, ranging from 0.5 units to 0.6 in the Activity Monitor, CPU usage was always idling somewhere between 1–3% (that’s with all sub-processes combined), the only difference that really stood out was memory usage:

Safari triumphs again.

I’ve read other articles online that bash a certain browser with really compelling data about CPU and Memory usage, load time, etc, but the difference is quite minimal if you compare Chrome to Firefox — again, at least on my machine — while Safari is different because well… it’s Safari. That being said people’s experiences often land on the fact that Firefox gives the most peasant experience, the interface is nice, plenty of extensions and themes, etc..

Developer Tools — Chrome good, Safari bad. /s

A lot changed in the last couple of years and it isn’t quite right to think that one browser’s DevTools are better than the other’s.

Yes, Chrome has a couple of nice features here and there. Yes, the “Lighthouse” is pretty neat, but then again you can install it on Firefox as an add-on. Remember Firebug? That godsend thing is now by default in Firefox & even more in Firefox Dev. Safari? Also not lagging behind, it looks clean and has cool debugging features for iOS devices and not only. It has mainly the same features as any other dev toolbox now! I haven’t tested but I’m pretty sure Opera and Edge have took it serious too and gave some good options for developers out there.

For the modern web, it’s impossible for you to create a website or a web application by testing it in a single browser, or in a single version. Today, on many websites, the traffic from mobile devices is larger than the traffic from desktops (of course, depending on the content you provide for the user). And this has already been happening for the last 4–5 years. Just go on Google Analytics and see for yourself.

Conclusion?

🤔 What do we REALLY want from a browser? I personally don’t care about Firefox’s code base being the size of our galaxy or that Chrome owns over 80% of the market; I want a browser that just works for me.

Every one has their pros and cons…
Safari is REALLY fast and light on your computer but it only has a couple basic extensions (integrations.. not even extensions) that I really don’t care about. Let’s be fair, you only open Safari to test if that piece of code works as it should then you just shut it down after swearing at it.

Chrome for me is like a love-hate relationship.. It’s good but at one point I just couldn’t handle the bugs anymore, same goes with Safari, again. I like some of the chrome-exclusive addons that I wish they were on Firefox, but that won’t make me switch back (for now at least).

Firefox seems to be the most stable of them all. It has neat features like easy screenshots, not-smashing-all-tabs-together-like-chrome-does if you have more than 20 open, and cool integrations like Firefox Send, Privacy Containers, VPN, Firefox Monitor, etc. It being one of the older browsers, it also grew a large enough fan-base to get people to develop a wide array of add-ons and themes (if you’re into those), but of course it has it’s cons. Gecko is not perfect and sometimes it crashes.. not often at all.. but it does. Still, I’m gonna keep using Firefox for the foreseeable future.

Moral of the story: Chrome shouldn’t be considered the only and the greatest browser, others also deserve their shine, and ideally I think we all wait for the same thing: A browser like Chrome, with the stability of Firefox and the speed of Safari.

Become a Mac Power-User

Alex Obreja — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 09:03:55 +0000

Alright, so here are some of the things I use that needless to say make a lot of tasks much smoother and in essence – cut a lot of extra clicks for some easy tasks that most of the time you don't even think that they can be improved.

Keyboard Maestro

First of all, I want to talk about Keyboard Maestro, which was one of the main reasons why I started writing this blog post.

It’s not a free app, it’s kinda costly, I wish there was support for much more apps, but then again.. it gets it’s job done, and if you’re into AppleScript then it can do much more. Personally I didn’t work with AppleScript but if you want some resources to start with – go here or here.

Alright, with that out of the way, I’ll start with some of the easiest ones. I’m not going to mention that you can macro text faces like these

because that’s unprofessional ಠ_ಠ, but I’m going to talk about these ones:

The currency macros are used to insert the special currency characters whenever you need them so you don’t try to search for them on the keyboard every time – neat!
It simply works by replacing a typed trigger string with the character itself. To make it dumb-proof; I added :: in front of the trigger word to not accidentally mess it up.

Time and Date insertions work the same, I’ve changed the syntax a little bit (not sure why, I guess it’s easier to remember like that..). What it does it inserts current time/date, according to your system. Pretty useful sometimes.

Now as a hardcore reddit user (help), a lot of times you want to access some specific subreddits and/or users by link, because it’s easier. To save up some time, the last two macros in this list replace //r with reddit.com/r/ and then you just write in whatever you need. I can’t say how many times I’ve used this and it’s insanely easy to get used to it up to a point you don’t know how you were doing this before.

Empty Trash macro

This one is really one of my favourites. The way it works is it switches to finder and uses a hotkey to empty the trash then switches back to whatever app you were using in a couple of milliseconds. The second instruction is used in the case that your active application is finder itself, and it doesn’t have to switch windows anywhere.

There are a lot more of these macros that I didn’t mention in this list, maybe not so exciting, but I will link the macros at the bottom of this post for download.

Spectacle

Very useful app, I wish this was pre-built in the system, but there we go.. It’s a free application which you can download here, it’s a window management application that I cannot live without, because multitasking.

Spectacle is a simple utility that allows you to easily organize your windows without using a mouse. The interface is extremely basic, but usable and allows you to set shortcuts for different functions as well as choose how you’d like the app to run.

On that note, there’s no real reason not to keep Spectacle open all the time, as a free and open source app, you’ll never see any pop-ups or annoying up-sells, and doesn’t clog your memory. USE IT!

Alfred

Another productivity app which basically replaces Apple’s Spotlight, with a load more of custom actions to boost your efficiency. It has a free version, as well as a paid one, with many more features. Check it out here.

Some of the general features include:

System-wide File Search
Web Search
Bookmarks
Built-in calculator (I’ll discuss more on that in a another paragraph)
Clipboard history
Snippets
Workflows
etc, etc, etc

Why most of all I love using this app, apart of it’s high customizable features, are Workflows, that let you interact with other apps and do a lot of tasks directly from Alfred’s search bar.

Reminders

The reminders workflow I use (kudos to surrealroad) is just a nice way of creating new reminders in Apple’s Reminders app.
To use the script you just type r [some text] into Alfred, like you would talk to Siri (which sometimes you cannot use due to environment limitations or whatnot). You can also include time and date in the text and have Alfred set a reminder for that particular time. More info you can find on the GitHub repo.

Links

This is one pretty straight-forward workflow that opens a given link based on the keyword you type into Alfred. Also will be linked down below.

Numi

Numi is a nice workflow that is basically an extended version of the calculator that is able to do a lot more like:

Unit conversion
Time Zone conversion
Numbers conversion (hex, binary, octal, hexadecimal)
Currency
Variables
Functions
etc etc etc

More @ numi docs

Note that, for the workflow to work you still need the Numi app, which brings us to our last but not least part of the post.

Numi

As mentioned above, Numi is an insanely useful app if you’re into a lot of calculations, or just plain need an easy app that will allow you to do a lot of conversions and calculations in the same work space, with a clean and nice UI. The app is Free (at the moment of writing this) but it will become paid soon, so if you will really love it like I did – be sure to preorder a Numi licence.

Conclusion

This list could be enlarged, depending on what tools you use and what you need for a nice and fast workflow, but I just wanted to share some of the stuff that I basically use everyday, and are helpful in a lot of situations. If you have some useful macros that I didn’t mention (and I’m sure there’s a lot of them) feel free to @ me on twitter.

GLHF.