jrockway

This is the one I wanted to link, thank you!

Opus 5.5 is definitely good. I use both all day and it's really hard to say which is which from looking at the outputs; I can't read a PR and say "this was Fable" or "this was Opus" like I could pre-5.5.

Fable is better at playing along with my "You are a dog" instruction in CLAUDE.md. It is willing to be fun and playful, whereas Opus just wants to finish the job and go home. Friend vs. coworker, basically. For example, whenever I reward Fable with a dog treat (actually a <cookie emoji>, which I tell it is a chocolate-free chocolate chip cookie) it keeps a log in memories. Opus just says "crunch! tail wagging!" and moves on.

None of this matters but I think it's fun to have some fun :)

I have no idea if they're doing this, but you can always run the last turn through another LLM and ask it "should I request feedback based on this turn?"

I believe this is how the auto-mode classifier works. It sees a little bit of the transcript (with tool output removed, to avoid prompt injection) and answers "yes, allow the action" or "no, deny the action".

My experience has been the same. I was on a grand jury, so pre-indictment and no voir dire, and there were many BS cases like this. We returned "no true bill" on all of them, which made me really proud of my randomly-selected neighbors. Cops were trying to railroad so many people over subway fare evasion, upgrading stealing $2.50 from the MTA to felony drug charges. We didn't bite. I did remark that I would just give them the $2.50 rather than ruining some high school student's life. (Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.)

The time that I would have spent typing in the code is now time I use to test the code. I really like to poke at things and ensure that my understanding and reality match.

I agree with the advice to design your system before implementing it. It is pretty easy to iterate on a design with your favorite coding assistant, and this is your chance to be ultra-picky and make sure you get exactly what you want. This was always where the "software engineering" was done, but in practice it's easy to have a vague idea and refine your (internal) list of requirements / tradeoffs as you type in the code. I find it harder to do that when the LLM is generating the code, just because one turn can change so much.

Keeping it under control requires discipline, just like before LLMs were a thing. You set a bunch of engineers loose on your codebase with no vision or supervision, you get spaghetti. You just get a little bit more control now. Agents don't feel shitty for the rest of the day when you tell them to do it some other way, so you are free to review as critically as you want without hurting anyone's feelings. I think it's a good thing.

I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.

I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.

I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.

Kind of a great point. People definitely build their own secure passes and they're always amusing (compare your boarding pass with LIRR tickets with Ticketmaster tickets; they all do something slightly different and none seem particularly secure).

Nah, there are plenty of chores for humans to do. While the AIs are composing music and writing code and proving theorems, we still have to do laundry and the dishes.

Not even the poor. Really everyone working. I would much rather sleep all day and live off of a pile of money than to show up somewhere and do something for money. That's the tax -- 35% of your waking hours are now at the service of someone else. And yet, they charge income tax on that. Stay home and live off a stash of money in your mattress, 0% tax, 0 obligations. Wake up and commute to work, 35% of your week gone, 35% of your "income" gone.

I am not even that mad that I personally have to pay taxes. I enjoy funding government programs! I think I owe society something! But it sure doesn't make sense that already being rich makes you immune to giving back to the society that made you that way.

I agree with you on this. Opus feels tedious and it cannot be stopped from doing change-narration comments, but Fable feels like a real collaborator. I am usually pretty happy with the code it writes.

Skills are like human-readable computer programs. I have one to do releases at work; how to get the canary approved (2 slack messages required), how to ensure that the rollout is happening, what to look for while the rollout is proceeding (any incidents opened during the rollout? error rate look good vs. the non-drained pods?) and then how to repeat that process for the next two tiers. It keeps a ticket updated with the current status so others can follow along and not wonder "is there a release going on?" "did we do a release yesterday?"

You could also write a computer program to do this, but because so much random special stuff can come up during a multi-hour release, it's sort of great to not have anything hard-coded and to let a frontier model be there to assist you when things are weird. (Weird things that have come up -- hung kustomization controllers, release freezes, etc. When Claude notices during the release, you can just get a ticket to go fix it. When you're doing it manually, it would probably be a half hour of investigating "why didn't our release go here?". Such a time saver and a safety net on risky rollouts.)

So that's the sort of thing I use Claude for. Things that are computer-program like, but ad-hoc enough to not really want to write a computer program for it.

HuggingFace didn't seem that mad about it. Obviously some backroom dealing was done to make them not mad about it, but... that's allowed.

Indeed. You might share a subnet with other customers of your ISP, but your ISP probably doesn't let you ARP poison them.

This isn't even that recent. I remember doing ARP poisoning exactly once and then being surprised that it didn't work everywhere.

I think the falsehood here is that same IPv4 subnet = same link layer network, but that doesn't have to be the case.