px1999

Not just their users. My org got pitched stackoverflow careers and their private knowledgebase around 2019. We were somewhat interested but found it too hard to work with them.

We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.

I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.

N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise

It's not that weird - Google isn't a search engine company, they're an advertising company.

I'm not just flogging a dead horse here - they don't care how good the search results for these types of queries are, they need to be just good enough to stop you from moving to search via Perplexity, Chatgpt, Claude etc. They also need to be as cheap as possible to generate.

Google makes money when you search for things to buy which is why they'll give you an ad-free experience on things that they never made much money off anyways (eg "why is the sky blue?") - they want you to be around when you search for something they can (eg "jewellery"). Note that they never give you AI slop when you're doing a product search.

Unfortunately people both expect answers phrased in response to their questions, and people have generally poor skills at picking up on authoritative-sounding bullshit. Also if they give you "an answer" and stop you from moving to another site with more detail (and possibly ads from someone else!) you're more likely to ask follow up questions on google.

Initially I thought this was a useless/dumb idea.

On reflection, I like it - it's weird. Old internet weird. Like someone with a couple hundred bucks and some time on their hands wants to do something they think is fun or funny... it feels human. I think we need more of this. Extra points for using a sketchy o365 form that looks like a scam.

My org now sends some portion of our requests to non-anthropic models because refusal has become common from Claude. The requests themselves aren't dangerous, we find that benign requests in biological science wind up being blocked semi-frequently.

If it gets worse in future releases, we'd likely step fully away towards more useful (for us) models even if they're less capable.

Very well said.

I think that "deciding what types of code can be reliably handed off to AI" might be missing from the list. It's orders of magnitude easier to nail 80% all the time than 100% all the time. I could see standalone products even developing in this space.

Tools exist to be an energy/effort multiplier, so it's pretty intuitive that increasing that multiplier will make it easier to get more done.

In practice it's pretty difficult to find the balance between yak shaving and piling in unnecessary manual labour by just trying to do the work with existing (possibly poorly fitting) tools.

If you're planning to stick with your current tools for a long time, each 1% improvement compounds massively over time, so that balance is probably much closer to yak shaving than most people might realise.

Imo there's a huge blind spot forming between 6 and 8 when talking to people and in reading posts by various agent evangelists - few people seem to be focussing on building "high quality" changes vs maximising throughput of low quality work items.

My (boring b2b/b2e) org has scripts that wrap a small handful of agent calls to handle/automate our workflow. These have been incredibly valuable.

We still 'yolo' into PRs, use agents to improve code quality, do initial checks via gating. We're trying to get docs working through the same approach. We see huge value in automating and lightweight orchestration of agents, but other parts of the whole system are the bottleneck, so theres no real point in running more than a couple of agents concurrently - claude could already build a low quality version our entire backlog in a week.

Is anyone exploring the (imo more practically useful today) space of using agents to put together better changes vs "more commits"?

My org has built internal tooling that approximates this. It's incredibly valuable from a manual test perspective though we haven't managed to get the agent part working well, app startup times (10+ min) make iterating hard.

Do you have customers who have faced/solved this problem? If so, how did they do it -- it seems like a killer on the approach?

This is really nice and a very original take. It feels good on mobile / other touch devices.

I'd love to see it feel a bit more polished on desktop (maybe I'll give that a shot if I find a bit of spare time!) - I could see a few simple things like adding up/down arrows to the picked item and wiring into up and down arrow presses going a long way to making it work really well there too.

Genuinely, thank you for sharing this, it's something different and interesting.

Following this logic, why write anything at all? Shakespeare's sonnets are arrangements of existing words that were possible before he wrote them. Every mathematical proof, novel, piece of journalism is simply a configuration of symbols that existed in the space of all possible configurations. The fact that something could be generated doesn't negate its value when it is generated for a specific purpose, context, and audience.

Consider this (possibly very bad) take:

RAG could largely be replaced with tool use to a search engine. You could keep some of the approach around indexing/embeddings/semantic search, but it just becomes another tool call to a separate system.

How would you feel about becoming an expert in something that is so in flux and might disappear? That might help give you your answer.

That said, there's a lot of comparatively low hanging fruit in LLM adjacent areas atm.

The Umbraco CMS was amazing during the time that it used and supported XSLT.

While it evaluated the xslt serverside it was a really neat and simple approach.

I expect it will wind up like search engines where you either submit urls for indexing/inclusion or wait for a crawl to pick your information up.

Until the tech catches up it will have a stifling effect on progress toward and adoption of new things (which imo is pretty common of new/immature tech, eg how culture has more generally kind of stagnated since the early 2000s)

Except value isnt polarised like that.

In a research context, it provides pointers, and keywords for further investigation. In a report-writing context it provides textual content.

Neither of these or the thousand other uses are worthless. Its when you expect working and complete work product that it's (subjectively, maybe) worthless but frankly aiming for that with current gen technology is a fool's errand.

devoir de désobéissance is _duty_ of disobedience.

If they choose to follow orders they know are illegal they can be personally liable.