jakevoytko

This is also my experience in my own bubble. Even my friends who were skeptical for the longest started finding ways to perform cool cross-org work with them and accelerate their coding.

The biggest pocket of skilled holdouts I've noticed are in more artisan spaces where the craft of coding is part of the art. Things like old-school indie game developers where they're still sweating the assembly output and clock cycles.

I’m based in NYC and just entered “who won the 2020 presidential election” into AI mode. It happily spit out, “Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, defeating the incumbent president, Donald Trump.”

It just doesn’t provide an AI overview for me on a basic search.

I was in a Chromebook pilot program when I was at Google. They gave me a different model every month or three as long as I kept giving them feedback. The build quality and usability varied wildly. Some models were so good I forgot I wasn’t on a real laptop. Some were so slow and unusable even on basic sites. Unfortunately the latter tended to be the ones that were so cheap that they ended up in schools.

The only thing I would open source is the spec file from the Q/A so people can implement it if they'd like.

I find it extremely unlikely that I'd be able to sell it since its two main competitors are (1) literally free to use and has been polished for 16 years, and (2) a best-in-class native application that has been the lingua franca of business writing for over 40 years

> all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans

I've talked to a lawyer about how they handle this. They do indeed double-check everything, since it'd be embarrassing (or worse) to send hallucinated statements to opposing council or to the court. They still find the assembly a huge time saver

But based on stories in the news on the subject, not everyone has this same level of diligence

These numbers are useful proxies for how likely you are to have your work disrupted outside of your own control.

If you do something 100 times a day against a four-nines service, you can reasonably expect that everything will succeed.

If you do something 10,000 times a day against a two-nines service, you can expect to hit a substantial number of errors during that day, or even have long periods where your work cannot happen at all.

People aren't frustrated with Github because Github has 98% uptime or whatever the specific number is. They're frustrated because it regularly interferes with their ability to work. The 98% number is just a concise way to say it.

In my experience it’s a safe way to do something useful while everyone is getting their bearings. It immediately partitions the situation space between being persisted or systemic vs local or caused by long-running processes. Plus everyone’s going to ask if you’ve tried that already, so you might as well get it out of the way if it makes any amount of sense

I know there are like 5 trillion Instagram viewers. But I've never actually needed to use any of them because there is absolutely nothing so important on Instagram that I must see it. The entire site is optional.

Actual details.

I hate when companies do this. Instagram is a black box for me. Whenever someone sends me a link the web app is completely nonfunctional; clicking links just reload the page, it constantly tries opening the app, etc

The last time I signed up for an Instagram account (2016) it got immediately flagged as a bot account. I think I was supposed to appeal it to have it reinstanted, but why bother if this is how badly they treat users?

Can you imagine going to work as Instagram's web developer, spending your day finding new ways that the app accidentally works and disabling them?

I built my own personal Google Docs clone to use as the editor for my blog

I used to work on the Google Docs team, so I basically did an 8-hour Q/A with Sol spanning like 400 questions. Did my best to reach back 10 years into my memories to see how things were implemented, and discussing architecture and tradeoffs. Then went through 5 ChatGPT resets implementing it on Astra to get a feel for the model.

I have a long way to go. But I'm writing my first post on it this week, and then I'll do a writeup of the editor project.

My workhorse is Opus orchestrating Sonnet or Sol orchestrating Luna, depending on which ecosystem I'm using this week. I'm a backend engineer, so for tasks that either interact with the machine learning or client codebases, I have Fable (Medium) review across the product spec, tech spec, and all the codebases after the implementation is done (haven't tried this workflow with Astra yet, don't know if it's a good reviewer).

As a side project, I'm doing an experimental task now (having Astra implement my own personal Google Docs clone, OT and everything, for my blog), and it feels more capable than Fable but needs to be watched closer than Fable. It is obsessed with verification and evidence to the point that I've needed to make some absolute rules to stop it from repeatedly e.g. making unit tests with 10,000 test cases with 5+ hours of runtime

For well-defined coding tasks, I'd default to either Luna or Sonnet, or hell, just writing it by hand.