alganet

You're beating a dead horse here buddy.

Show me a social platform that is not complete bullshit. You can't.

I do agree with it, LinkedIn is bullshit. But c'mon, this is all the web is now.

Today's marketing decisions are tomorrow's deprecations.

A businesss decision would be great. What would suck would be a marketing decision.

I think this boilerplate thing got lost in translation some time ago.

We dislike _the presence_ of boilerplate, not the time spent writing it. If another thing writes it for you, it implies that _now boilerplate exists_, and it sucks.

It makes me unhappy when it exists. It makes me unhappy if it appears in seconds.

That said, there is some potential for using AI to reduce boilerplate and help create more meaningful software. However, that is definitely not the way things are shaping out to be.

It is very likely that agent tooling will get better at doing asynchronous things and being aware of the user interacting in parallel, without git, and probably within a single session.

It's feasible, and it makes more sense than separating and merging later (or keeping patches in memory then applying in bulk).

Why do I say it's feasible? We have the technology, right? The IDE knows which file the user has in focus, and can orient agents to use tooling that would inform them of that fact when they're running. Similarly, that same tooling could just spend a little bit of time planning focus to spread to multiple agents in a way they won't overlap.

Maybe big repos, monorepos and so on are a limitation. If we were on the previous "small-to-middle interlinked projects" era, that division would come in naturally. You only really need multiple agents in parallel on a single project if that thing is big enough to have more than one angle to work on. It's a push-and-pull that changes with the times, maybe we're heading to a more granular way of doing things.

> Markdown Lacks the Structure You Need

The problem is, I always need more structure. Give me some YAML and time and I'll make hell (not a metaphor, I'll concoct hell itself on it).

Markdown keeps me honest.

You're right. It's all about solving problems.

Maybe we need a word that, when applied to mathematical concepts, describes how simple, easy to understand and generally useful a solution or idea is.

I wonder what that word could be.

It's funny because I'm evaluating LLMs for just this specific case (covering tests) right now, and it does that a lot.

I say "we need 100% coverage on that critical file". It runs for a while, tries to cover it, fails, then stops and say "Success! We covered 60% of the file (the rest is too hard). I added a comment.". 60% was the previous coverage before the LLM ran.

> "Take a look at those tests!"

A math module that is not tested for division by zero. Classical LLM development.

The suite is mostly happy paths, which is consistent with what I've seen LLMs do.

Once you setup coverage, and tell it "there's a hidden branch that the report isn't able to display on line 95 that we need to cover", things get less fun.

We had upstarts in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Some game, some website, some social network, some mobile app that blew up. We had many. Not funded by billions.

So, where is that in the 2020s?

Yes, code is a detail (ideas too). It's a platform. It positions itself as the new thing. Does that platform allow upstarts? Or does it consolidate power?

On Windows, it behaves like a malware. Suddenly flashing command prompt windows when you interact with it. Not very nice (also, lazy, since you don't need to do that flashing if you're a legitimate app).

Instead of tools for humans, and a separate set of tools for machines, we should just make tools for humans+machines.

The agent should look at my README.md, not a custom human-like text that is meant to be read by machines only.

It also should look at `Makefile`, my bash aliases and so on, and just use that.

In fact, many agents are quite good at this (Code Fast 1, Sonnet).

Issue is, we have a LONG debt around those. READMEs often suck, and build files often suck. We just need to make them better.

I see agents as an opportunity for making friendlier repos. The agent is a free usability tester in some sense. If it can't figure out by reading the human docs, then either the agent is not good enough or your docs aren't good enough.

If plain open-source local models were able to do what Claude API does, Anthropic would be out of business.

Local models are a different thing than those cloud-based assistants and APIs.

You mean generally? Yes, sure. As long as sloppy concatenated micro-messages don't end up in the main branch, I'm game.