paldepind2

My theory (which might be completely wrong) is that models do this because it improves quality for vibe coders.

When vibe coding the content of user prompts is ground truth and the only way any human thought affect the code base. So if the vibe coder says "do X not Y", recording int comments that "we shouldn't do Y" is important. It ensures that the agent doesn't accidentally decide to do Y tomorrow, which would frustrate the vibe coder who'd feel that the agent doesn't "remember" what it was told yesterday.

So for people who look at the code the comments are obvious and completely superfluous, but for the vibe coder it's a way to ensure that their tiny (relative to the size of the code base) input is not forgotten.

Lots of praise for Pi in this thread, so I'll offer up a diverging opinion. Given all the hype, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pi. It definitely has some good ideas around customization, but it annoyed me in many little ways.

For a program that's minimal it sure takes a long time to start up, the standard C-p and C-n bindings don't work, it doesn't follow the XDG Base Directory Specification and just pollutes my $HOME directory.

I think there's still space for another harness that's 1/ open-source, 2/ written in a fast compiled language (Rust, Go, etc.) and scriptable in a simple (aka non-JS) scripting language (Lua, etc.), 3/ less opinionated and more sensible so things like XDG isn't a WONTFIX.

You can do that in Copilot in VSCode. There’s a fork icon before every message that creates a new session from that point. The relationships are not maintained in a tree though (not sure if Pi does that).

Ah, ok. Visibility into subagents makes perfect sense. From the "reddit-style" description I was imagining something where the user was conversing non-linearly with the agent at different points in some big tree.

Can you go more in depth on why LLM conversations should branch reddit-style? That doesn't seem immediately clear to me, and I'd be afraid that the different branches would step on each others toes? (also I'm assuming what you're describing here goes beyond the "fork" feature found in many agent harnesses).

What do you use for hosting the PWAs?

Jevons paradox starts with some resource being used more efficiently.

A classic example could be coal. The first steam engines used a ton of coal, but over time more efficient steam engines where created that used way less coal.

One might think that this caused the global coal usage to go down. But the opposite happened, as the overall cost of doing something with a steam engine went down.

Note, that the price of coal itself can remain fixed in this example. So Jevons principle is not (directly) about a resource changing in value.

If LLMs make codes cheaper to produce, then obviously more code will be produced. That's not an instance of Jevons paradox even though the article claims so.

You could say that LLMs means that we can create software with less of the resource that is human software engineers. So one might think that we'll need less software engineers in the future. If, on the other hand, we end up needing more software engineers, then that'll be an instance of Jevons paradox. But the article is not making that claim.

From the article:

> Jevons Paradox: when something gets cheaper, you tend to use more of it, not less.

That's a butchering of Jevons paradox. What's stated is not a paradox, but a very natural effect. Obviously usage of something goes up when it gets cheaper.

What Jevons paradox actually describes is the situation where usage of a resource becomes more efficient (which means less of it is needed for a given task), but still the total usage of that resource increases.

Sorry if this is a basic question, but what's you workflow for feeding the papers into the LLM and getting the implementation done? The coding agents that I've used are not able to read PDFs, so I've been wondering how to do it.

I completely agree with the points in this article and have come to the same conclusion after using languages that default to unary curried functions.

> I'd also love to hear if you know any (dis)advantages of curried functions other than the ones mentioned.

I think it fundamentally boils down to the curried style being _implicit_ partial application, whereas a syntax for partial application is _explicit_. And as if often the case, being explicit is clearer. If you see something like

    let f = foobinade a b

in a curried language then you don't immediately know if `f` is the result of foobinading `a` and `b` or if `f` is `foobinade` partially applied to some of its arguments. Without currying you'd either write

    let f = foobinade(a, b)

or

    let f = foobinade(a, b, $) // (using the syntax in the blog post)

and now it's immediately explicitly clear which of the two cases we're in.

This clarity not only helps humans, it also help compilers give better error messages. In a curried languages, if a function is mistakenly applied to too few arguments then the compiler can't always immediately detect the error. For instance, if `foobinate` takes 3 arguments, then `let f = foobinade a b` doesn't give rise to any errors, whereas a compiler can immediately detect the error in `let f = foobinade(a, b)`.

A syntax for partial application offers the same practical benefits of currying without the downsides (albeit loosing some of the theoretical simplicity).

> Local-first was the first kind of app. Way up into the 2000s, you'd use your local excel/word/etc, and the sync mechanism was calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls

To be precise, these apps where not local-_first_, they where local-_only_. Local-first implies that the app first and foremost works locally, but also that it, secondly, is capable of working online and non-locally (usually with some syncing mechanism).

I never understood why people are so keen to do that in TypeScript. With that definition a `UserID` can still be silently "coerced" to a `string` everywhere. So you only get halfway there to an encapsulated type.

I think it's a much better idea to do:

    type UserID = { readonly __tag: unique symbol }

Now clients of `UserID` no longer knows anything about the representation. Like with the original approach you need a bit of casting, but that can be neatly encapsulated as it would be in the original approach anyway.

Yes, absolutely. I did programming competitions back in high-school (around 10 years ago) and common folklore was that back in the days knowing dynamic programming could win you a medal, but today it was just basic expected knowledge.