james_marks

I was referring to the (potential) illusion of home grown agentic solutions being lower cost/effort over the long term.

An illusion, I suspect. All software needs maintenance, and someone driving it, even if they are prompting an agent.

Exactly. When I realized my homegrown JS DOM management had grown into a version of Vue.js that I was the sole maintainer of, I switched to Vue.

There’s still value in building something from the ground up; you understand the framework that much better. But so long as your needs largely overlap with the community, the benefits of working with the community are real.

You are right! But there is a nod to the individual:

> The "i" in iPhone originally stood for internet. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the lowercase "i" prefix with the iMac in 1998 to highlight the computer's fast, out-of-the-box web connectivity. During the launch, Jobs also revealed that the letter represented four other concepts: • Individual: For personal use and computing. • Instruct: For education and learning. • Inform: For accessing information. • Inspire: For creativity and future innovations.

In a more generous light, the focus on the individual is a reaction to an Authoritarian groupthink, eg 1984. Perhaps it’s just the Cobra Effect.

In more ways than the obvious, "great leaders are jerks, like Steve Jobs".

There has been a shift from "We" to "I". It rubbed me wrong when Apple launched the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In that moment, the world became more self-centered, instead of group-centered. Social media is the same, it's all about the individual: MY profile, MY followers, MY status.

It's anti-social by nature, and society is worse because of the shift.

This is beautiful, thank you!

It’s similar to MCP, where in the Swift app I’ve got a catalog of actions eg, SearchEmail, AddToCalendar. I’ve got them bucketed by sensitivity so I have to approve (some of) them with TouchID.

So the model can see the results, but the access is whitelisted and temporary.

I’ve hacked together my own version of this, basically a Swift app to manage secure access so I control the thing that has full disk access.

And then run a coding agent to manage calendar, emails, research projects against my work history, etc, with TouchID for the sensitive pieces.

It’s incredible, I hope to never put a flight on my calendar by hand again, and soon I won’t be buying them, either.

Amplifier of human intent. Do you want to work hard and cure cancer? Great! AI can help. Do you want to phone it in and do the bare minimum? AI can help you do that, too.

I wonder how much of that orchestration is necessary for a narrow use-case with low numbers of users. So many of our patterns are for a scale a small internal tool will never see.

I love indie labels, btw. But the judgment and indictment of someone that chooses a different path is unnecessary.

Your mind seems made up, but it’s hard to imagine we’d even be having this conversation if, say, Zack had stayed on Victory putting out hardcore records.

He just wouldn’t be a part of the zeitgeist in the same way. There’s an argument that a lot of what we’re experiencing now is a backlash against how well it worked. “the machine” is defending itself.

Can you imagine the president of the US using the term “Woke”, without RATM, and RATM without Sony behind them? They didn’t coin it obviously, but certainly gave it a huge boost.

It’s like a startup, the same product with a better distribution mechanic often wins.

Don't forget 18 months trailing Soc II, Type 2. And that the time to execute on this idea was 15 years ago, back when this was relatively difficult to build.

Pando looks nice, thanks for sharing. Is this an overlay on e.g, AWS, or is the idea that this spins up a single container and creates partitions for each of the user apps its hosting?

Exactly this. My joke tagline for BI is "Lie to your colleagues with confidence and ease".

It doesn't have to be intentional, it just needs to be a sufficiently complex, messy real-world data.