nerptastic

If you don't mind me asking, what are "good agentic engineering practices"? To my knowledge, we are still exploring many techniques of using agents within a codebase, and have not widely agreed on "best practice".

Do you mean "good code" and "good documentation"?

Careful, you might just get turned into an H100 along with everything else in the observable universe

Well - I think the writing was on the wall when they announced they were going to be for-profit. Slippery slope and all that, but I’m sure some of this is because they’ve been giving out free tokens for years.

What are the first and fourth?

“The limits now are so bad that a business that relies on it would need bigger plans.”

Isn’t this the goal to some extent? They’ll probably have the standard “light” usage plan for weekend warriors or normal folk looking to play around. Companies that mandate usage and provide the subscription for hundreds of employees will have to cough it up, and will have no problem doing so if they want to compete with the others (or so the hype would allude to).

Is this not the case for OTC drugs? Specifically, the two mentioned in the article. I rarely take either of them, but if my doctor tells me to take 1 ibuprofen every 6 hours or so, if I halve that am I actually doing more damage?

I have a degree in design - it's one of those frustrating fields where laypeople really do believe they are experts. Mostly because... they can "see" it. It's easy to propose a change to a design. "Just move it to the right. Or left. Or make it green".

The end product is SUPPOSED to be simple to digest and understand, but the process behind that artifact is enigmatic. It may have taken months to determine the proper layout structure for a government website, but a certain end user can still say "Well... I would rather have the navbar on the right side."

Some of it is probably vocabulary as well. Software has jargon - design has jargon, but laypeople know how to say "bigger, smaller, right, left, red, blue". Frustrating, and part of why I left the field.

I agree — right now it's "all eyes on AI". They are moving fast, I don't think there's some evil plan behind the scenes. They're trying to build software super-weapons, and they're trying all sorts of different things because they can iterate quickly.

Of course the articles are going to get to the top. It's all anyone is thinking about, and has been for the last few years. I keep wondering if we're going to reach some sort of inflection point where the hype starts to die down, but then another "tool" is released and everyone is convinced that this is the one that will take the jobs. It's a bit tiring, but this is the brave new world.

Question for you, did these tools replace software / design consulting as something you relied on in the past?

This is a success story I've been hearing more recently. Restaurants, contractors, plumbing, 1 person startups... I'm wondering if this is because the barrier to entry is now lower - or if these tools are actually moving work away from small software teams or individual devs.

IMO this is the crux of the "AI Eating SWE" scenario (along with other knowledge work...) I'm sure it's a little bit of both. If this was something you were going to pay a designer and a developer for, it changes the outlook.

From my perspective, it feels more likely that with cheaper software we'll see a rush of people building their own, but once it gets sufficiently complex it then needs to be maintained, or improved, and it becomes more work than the initial weekend POC.

Back when I was a lowly web dev intern - I was able to finish most of my work rather quickly. Obviously, instead of going above and beyond - I found a way to browse Reddit in the terminal.

My manager was non-technical, and so anytime he walked past my desk it appeared that I was hackin’ away. I had (and still do) have my terminal set up to be black background with bright cyan text.

I don’t know much at all about materials - but wouldn’t this be a little “fuzzy”? If they’re using heat to expand/contract whatever material, I imagine there’s a degree of variance with the starting state / ending state - depending on the environment the “soft robot” is in.

A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?

This is what I’m noticing. At my workplace, we have 3 or 4 non-devs “writing” code. One was trying to integrate their application with the UPS API.

They got the application right, and began stumbling with the integration - created a developer account, got the API key, but in place of the applications URL, the had input “localhost:5345” and couldn’t get that to work, so they gave up. They never asked the tech team what was wrong, never figured out that they needed to host the application. Some of the fundamental computer literacy is the missing piece here.

I think (maybe hopeful) people will either level up to the point where they understand that stuff, or they will just give up. Also possible that the tools get good enough to explain that stuff, so they don’t have to. But tech is wide and deep and not having an understanding of the basic systems is… IMO making it a non-starter for certain things.

Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.

My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

Anthropic today, who next week? If locally run models ever get to the point where they can reliably solve... 85% of what the frontier cloud models can do, I think many would be willing to accept slightly less problem solving ability and just run the thing locally.

All hypothetical, but if compute + AI research continues at pace, in 5 years we should see extremely good local models.