mgdev

To participate you must also install surveillance software on your machine that can confirm the positive or negative label of applying the result. Of course.

YC is a capitalist machine. Why are you surprised?

Can you imagine a devtools company deciding, "Actually, no, we're going to police what kind of programs you can compile" ?

They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology. We cannot afford to blend the two, or we're going to end up as some kind of perverted global theocracy.

Plus your agent (strictly speaking) doesn't need to generate parens as tokens. Instead they can generate imperative stack commands that manipulate the AST. Or something paredit-like.

They should reboot, focused on

1) humans (AI assisted or not) answering with real-money stakes, and

2) people betting on which humans are correct (borrow page from prediction markets)

This does four things simultaneously:

1) It introduces consequences for being wrong, which in turn introduces real asymmetric incentives to be contrarian-but-correct - which are high-value answers you don't get out of a stock model

2) It creates real-world incentives for human guided votes to answers (because, again, there's a real-world stake)

3) Together, this gets humans back on the platform answering questions, which creates meaningful exhaust data that can be sold back to the AI companies.

4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in the world of LLMs, Lisp became the new lingua franca, because we don’t have to convince humans that parens are scary, and because it enables exactly this kind of magic.

Full circle for Lisp as an AI language.

This was true of software development before LLMs as well.

You may also consider that developers (like any person in any profession) exist on spectrum of competency, and you may just be better than most of them.

But models are climbing their way up the percentile charts.

90% of the software development in the work, by volume, can be done by people who are in the 50th percentile of skill.

So these model advances do meaningfully expand the amount of "useful" work that can be done without people. And simultaneously not be "good enough" for the specific kind of work you find yourself doing day to day.

Both can be true.

It depends on how you use it.

AI helps you build more software in the same way that a C compiler helps you build more assembler.

I spend far more tokens on specification and verification than I do on actual feature-code generation.

And with it a small team of 3 developed something in just a few weeks that would have normally taken us 12 months. And we are selling it for multiple-seven figures to customers who (by all rights) should have been able to token-gen their way to the same outcome, but haven't.

So there is clearly some value in the people, and clearly some value in the AI. But I think people are misplacing/misattributing which goes where, in some cases.

False dichotomy IMO.

I've rarely met a "craft" person that authors TLA+ models to find correctness issues in their systems. And yet as an outcome person I frequently ask my AI minions to do this and similar exercises.

What I think you're actually describing is competency using AI as a tool to drive effective and correct outcomes. That takes practice and systems - same as it ever was.

If you buy in, I think you'll find you can create great, correct systems... only more than you could ever do alone. Without N*N comms overhead. Without having to convince your louder, less competent teammate to actually finish their work.

Not insane at all. There are two types of developers: those who do it primarily for the outcomes, and those who do it primarily for the craft. These are fundamental orientations.

Do craft people like outcomes? Sure. Can outcome people appreciate craft? Sure. But fundamentally, you typically fall more in one camp than the other.

And this assertion comes from the outcome people. Is it insane? No. To assert it's insane is insane, because it shows a fundamental disconnect from the economics of software development.

Which is about right, because the craft people don't do something primarily for the economics.

> This is likely a pricing failure.

Problem is while we have a visceral feel for what the "value" of GitHub is to human users for human usage, I'm not sure we have a feel for what the value of the agentic equivalent is.

IMO it's probably very high on paper if you think through what kind of work is unlocked at agent speeds, provided you have a very capable work-execution fabric.

But since we're anchored to human pricing, whatever they propose will feel expensive.

Sure, but now a single person can do newer, bigger things that were previously "impossible" for a single person, and now merely "hard".

YAML-defined agents are great.

Have you considered making a cloudy, managed version?