RE: https://mastodon.social/@kepano/117456888453951005
I was curious how these results were achieved and looked up the repo https://github.com/obsidianmd/pele
- First commit 12 days ago
- gitignore contains Claude dir and AGENTS.md
- no technical doc about perf strategies
Is it really open source if the prompts that generated a software package are kept secret?
To be clear: I’m not trying to shame the use of LLM assistance. I really am curious about this project’s software design guidelines. The docs discuss the usage of the software, but not its internals. The LLM harness md files would have provided transparency to that, but that is proprietary.
@ilovecomputers it's not hard to decipher if you look at the priorities I shared, my related open source projects (Knap, Flexoki, Defuddle), and the code itself
Obsidian limits dependencies and Mermaid.js was one of the biggest https://obsidian.md/blog/less-is-safer/
Obsidian 1.13 added a warning/toggle to render (see Mermaid.js CVEs)
https://obsidian.md/changelog/2026-05-28-desktop-v1.13.0/
Mermaid's new AI direction feels like a strange choice, and I never found the library well suited to Obsidian even though the syntax is popular
@ilovecomputers On the topic of performance a lot of the gains come from what Pele doesn't do. Mermaid has three renderers, 23 dependencies, and a lot of legacy code for backward support.
@kepano Got it, so that really is all to it. Simply creating a "Mermaid format text to SVG renderer" from scratch with no dependencies brings perf gains. That wasn't clear to me as I was expecting a more specific technical strategy to have been communicated in the md files, but couldn't find any. Left me wondering if such a guideline was hidden away in the prompts given to Claude.
@kepano taking Knap and Defuddle as an example
Defuddle docs talk about HTML standardization https://defuddle.md/docs#standardization
which points me to this ts file https://github.com/kepano/defuddle/blob/main/src/standardize.ts
And I'm like, okay, a big part of Defuddle is direct DOM manipulation to cleanup HTML.
Knap's README cuts straight to the chase: https://github.com/obsidianmd/knap
>parses templates into an AST and interprets them without eval or arbitrary JavaScript execution. Applications control the data and integrations available to templates.