Terretta

Thank you for writing this yourself, it's informative and refreshing!

If an LLM wrote it, then it's the best simulation of non-LLM writing I've seen on an agent related post. They seem all to have gone through an LLM "edit" (cough) that strips the personality seen in your update.

Also, Flint is awesome.

Engineering's stereotypically low empathy for those who may not connect dots as readily is no problem if teams would make a habit of these simple mechanical compensations.

In my view, the current "value" is driven by the current artificial scarcity of quality web search results.

For now with not all agents controlled by advertising engines, and not all content yet designed to honeypot them, today's agents make good headway bush-whacking their way to finding the right information on which to base task work for you.

If the first page of SERPs for anything, and the extra time needed to suss out quality information to inform your work or task doesn't bother you, then this benefit isn't one you'll value.

Put another way:

Today's agents help "cut through" the same maze of value extraction that Silicon Valley (where market share means find a way to tell users your thing is "free"), adtech, and the content-as-ad-scaffolding industry have built over the past three decades. Why waste time wading through all that when your time is better spent building more of it? :-)

> can't communicate well

Or, perhaps the person thinks (solves) in abstract concepts rather than linear words. Just because many people mouth words when reading or can't think without hearing words in their head or aloud, doesn't mean others should have to handicap their own efficacy of thought while working it out. Two conceptuals can communicate in a kind of ultra condensed shorthand liner verbal thinkers struggle to follow. Less can't communicate, more can't conceptualize squared off with can't verbalize.

Both groups should synthesize simply and clearly at the end, both should work to get in sync. And both ways of thinking have their uses in a team. Catch: conceptual thinkers can interview verbal thinkers, the other way around is more challenging.

While visiting not(USA) recently, found Xbox Cloud streaming no longer viable (lag fest) though last year travels (even over 5g hotspot) it was fine. Doesn't bode well for this streaming concept.

Looked for a real console and discovered all small shops and big box chains offer Nintendo and PS, none have Xbox. Speaking with managers revealed they or their suppliers "lost" or "ended" contracts to carry it.

Secondary market / used was dirt cheap – good condition consoles for less than a new controller: €35 for Xbox One S, €85 for Xbox Series S.

Smelled like a death spiral well underway.

Exactly. It's not the bricklayer's responsibility when mortar fails. It's the person who specified that mortar.

So I'd agree it isn't not a coder or developer's responsibility when they're given a bill of materials and told how to build, but it is an engineer's responsibility. Comp should recognize that as well.

The truth is in the url.

> many fewer realize that the other three copies of your iMessage data on Apple’s servers are just, uh, not encrypted

With Advanced Data Security enabled?

Of course, then there's the persons you're talking to. I figure they are one of your "other three", another is the iCloud copy (deduped from backups) ostensibly resolved by advanced data security, what's the third?

Brilliant example of leveraging conceptual compression through metaphor.

Most valuable paragraph in the piece:

“The model does more than expected. Each role's skill file starts with a few sentences framing the role… This lays the groundwork as the underlying LLM knows very well how a teaching hospital works, what a differential diagnosis is, why a handoff has a structure, and what it means to be a second opinion. When you tell an LLM a persona to embody, it does it very very well.”

This took OpenAI and Anthropic some time to grasp, arguably only landing in late 2025 or early 2026, when you see them start leaving out common sense instructions, and see system prompts dropping in size. They said this was thanks to newer models, but arguably it's from no longer fighting core concepts the training compressed in.

Exercise for the reader: what metaphor best captures your system?

• • •

Below the line feedback:

These kinds of lines are painful to even decide whether to read:

“In July we audited them. Twenty-five skill files, a little over 100,000 words. About 23,000 of those words, 23%, were flagged as removable without changing a single gate, command, template, or sentinel. The dominant pattern was the same rule restated in several places: six thousand words of it across seventy findings. One file was forty-seven percent redundant.”

By contrast, these kinds of lines are refreshing:

“While this merged rather recently, and we don’t have good data to point to its efficacy, early signs seem positive.”

Fascinating example of how unfortunate the mélange.

> This feels like throwing a sandwich in the trash rather than let a hungry person eat it.

More like: giving up on making artisanal sandwiches to leave on a counter for free, after realizing the surge in people grabbing them aren't hungry, they're running off to resell them in sandwich shops.

Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.

You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.

There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.

As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.

On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.

Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.

It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?

Again, they give you the tools for this. You can understand your usage by API, you can set threshold actions on it, you can switch things on and off, and applyable templates exist, all of which are under your control and "out of band" from the systems delivering traffic or compute to your paying customers.