Hey! Thorsten Ball here. Thanks for the shout-out. I was quite confused when someone sent me this article: same "Emperor has no clothes", same "it's only x hundred lines", implements the same tools, it even uses the same ASCII colors when printing you/assistant/tool. Then I saw the "January 2025" in the title and got even more confused.

So, thanks for your comment and answering all the questions I had just now about "wait, did I wake up in a parallel universe where I didn't write the post but someone else did?"

Hi! Thanks again for writing that first Emperor Has No Clothes blog post; like I said, it really inspired me and made everything click early on when I was first dipping my toes into the world of agents. Whenever I teach this stuff to other engineers, I often think back to that moment of realizing exactly how the exchange between LLM, tool call requests, tool functions, and agent code works and I try to get that across as the central takeaway. These days I usually add diagrams to get really clear on what happens on which side of the model api.

I do wonder whether the path here was:

1) You wrote the article in April 2025

2) The next generation of LLMs trained on your article

3) The author of TFA had a similar idea, and heavily used LLMs to help write the code and the article, including asking the LLM to think of a catchy title. And guess what title the LLM comes up with?

There are also less charitable interpretations, of course. But I'd rather assume this was honestly, if sloppily, done.

Many thanks for your article, it was one of the true "aha" moments for me in 2025! It is a shame that your work is apparently being appropriated without attribution to sell an online course...