headcanon

This is a pretty cool setup! I've wanted to give my agents "a life of their own" as well and interact with it somehow, but struggle to find the balance between giving it freedom and being ok with the risk. How is this set up, do you just use something like a claude routine on a loop + context repo, or is it more sophisticated than taht?

I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe - my company has fully adopted agentic coding, we're working with:

- large codebases

- business critical software for clients that don't tolerate downtime

- agentic and classical features

We still collaborate well, we still care about quality, we still have good knowledge of the codebase, but I haven't written a single line of code myself in over a year.

We have not had a single incident that I'm aware of where we shipped a slop and it created downtime.

We're building a "software factory" that is currently handling low-level chore tickets and merging about 1/3rd of our PRs. A year from now I imagine it will be doing significantly more, and I don't think anyone is going to get fired because of it (if anything we'll keep hiring more).

I don't see this as an either/or thing. If there is some hidden ocean of slop that we're bound to fall into I don't see it anywhere. Where is the disparity?

That depends on the output's purpose: if the purpose is to produce readable text for a human that is _not_ me, like an article or document, then I care more about clarity, plain-speaking, and general register. If the goal is to accomplish a specific task, I don't care as much about the prose quality: I'll put up with "Honest Framings" and "load-bearing" since it seems to me that's the token that needs to be in the context for it to function.

I've been in the habit of pushing my claude-speak to codex to improve legibility, but only if I think someone is going to read it.

I will frequently post the output of a computer to slack as a part of an engineering discussion. For Claude output I'll treat it the same, wrap it in code blocks, and say something like "Claude's analysis". If its ok to post system logs, why is it less ok to post claude's output (also a computer), especially if I declare this? Is the difference that its plausibly human-level speech and thus breaks an implicit contract?

agreed, but IMO thats been true for most off-the-shelf skills I've seen. Instead I built my own "/meta" skill to improve my workflows, which I can use in targeted ways across my projects

I think AI optimism is an easier jump for those already immersed in computer culture, or at least the subset of that culture who view automation as a virtue.

For those either outside computer culture, or those within who might view "craft" as virtue, automating that craft is an affront.

Right now, the "automators" (pro-AI) folks seem to be pushing that culture onto the "crafters" and naturally getting pushback.

I see you haven't tried a modular synthesizer yet :) Getting back to the same "place" in a patch can sometimes be impossible, and it does feel "random" until you get the hang of it.

Two years ago (Dec 2023), I visited Japan and try to use ChatGPT (GPT-3 era) to translate Kanji signs, it was OK but not great. A little over a year later (late April 2025, o1 era IIRC), I visited again and saw a political rally with hand-painted-style Kanji signs. I took a picture and asked what the political party was about. The big "wow" moment was how it would write inline python code to crop analyze the image while it was thinking, then combine it with web searches to eventually find me the website with a summary of what they were about. It definitely hit home for me the potential of what these were capable of.

I would definitely agree that data center investments would need to be coupled with energy investments. If this could act as a catalyst for more (sustainable) energy production that would be a net win for all IMO.

Do you feel poison fountain is actually effective? To me it seems like free chaos engineering for ingestion platforms. Wouldn't it paradoxically harden data ingestion?

I've been trying to solve a lot of the issues brought up here, like personal automation, note taking, article summarizing/indexing, etc. What I've learned so far is that no level of AI-enabled automation will help me with my inherent ADD. All it means is that I have more started projects, but just as many finished ones. It has been a big enabler for things I'm already knowledgeable about, but the cognitive debt issue is real: A machine that thinks for me can't help me think better by itself.

Came here to say this as well. I've written and read full human-written essays on slack before AI.

With that said, I don't disagree with the article. Don't use more word when few work.

To use your analogy, I would say the "blanket ban" attitude would be more like wishing all viruses would just go away, or have never existed in the first place, which:

1) is an impossible and unproductive attitude, and

2) fails to recognize the important contribution to evolution, genetic diversity, and our immune systems that viruses introduced, not to mention the possible beneficial applications that could exist by understanding it.

Rejecting something without nuance makes you more vulnerable down the road because it prevents you from building an effective immunity. Engaging with it is the only productive way to mitigate its downsides and promote its benefits.

My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.

It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.