Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
For me the biggest thing is subagents are harness agnostic

I used to hit usage walls with CC/Codex harness using native subagents

With herdr I delegate some work to another herdr pane and it runs Claude code, codex, opencode, pi, whatever model is appropriate and has usage

Comment · 4 days ago
Sequential tasks are still sequential. The difference is one engineer can you work on many sequential tasks in parallel.

The old way of working where an engineer picks up a ticket and works it through to completion before working on the next one is over. Engineers in my team work on about 5 at a time, sometimes far more. That might mean working on multiple features at once, or working on CI or DX or tooling improvements or bug fixes while building a feature, but the days of working on one thing at a time are well and truly over

Context size and ability to context switch without burnout is what will differentiate a median engineer from a great engineer, not technical ability

Comment · 11 days ago
Coming back to Nix (and Linux in general) this year has been an absolute pleasure.

Not because it's suddenly got better, but because the learning curve has collapsed to a flat line. My problem with linux has always been how un-user friendly it is. Constant tinkering around with config files and googling how to fix problems. Now I just install claude code and tell it what I want my OS to be and how I want it to look.

Comment · 12 days ago
Actually laughed out loud at the idea of a bunch of stereotypical programmers going to a dance class
Comment · 12 days ago
> we will have a list of problem AI has not been able to solve, with even bigger reputational reward for humans

we will have a list of problems that AI has not been able to solve _yet_

anyone who attempts to solve it will do so knowing that there will be thousands of agents working on the same problem, so they may not be motivated to try if they think the AI swarm will get there first and have their time wasted

Comment · 15 days ago
The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk

The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies

SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed

Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc

These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.

I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)

Comment · 17 days ago
You see this in political discourse all the time

There are lots of smart people on all "sides" of the political spectrum, but in online forums (especially Reddit in my experience) people on dismiss the other side as stupid or evil, rather than trying to see the issue from a different perspective and understand the other persons point of view

I think the anonymity of being online brings out the worst in people. Having a discussion in person tends to be much more civil, even if you completely disagree with the other person

Comment · 17 days ago
LLMs are quite good these days at not being fooled by adversarial prompting, especially basics like this

But yeah it'll never be perfect. I imagine the grok bot will trigger an agentic pipeline which will have multiple layers of defence rather than just doing whatever the bug report says

something like: 1. is this bug report malicious? 2. can this be reproduced? 3. is this a real bug or intended behaviour? 4. fix the bug 5. review the change (or multiple review agents focused on different factors like correctness, performance, security)

crafting an adversarial prompt to defeat all the layers without an agent realising its building a security vulnerability is probably quite a challenge

Comment · 17 days ago
7 engineers is hardly a massive resource allocation. Even if they produce nothing of value the lessons learned along the way will be valuable - They're essentially dogfooding agentic swarm development which will help inform their future product direction
Comment · 17 days ago
Your post above describes the value. All the annoying restrictions and UI/UX decisions made by SaaS providers that don't work for you. The value is being able to essentially wish into existence your ideal tooling, unburdened by the tradeoffs and decisions that some product designer thought was best for the masses
Comment · 18 days ago
What are we if not a system of sensors directing our muscles towards nutrients and reproduction
Comment · 19 days ago
LLM generated websites are so instantly recognisable

Vibe coded tools are great. I have loads of them to work for my workflows. AI makes it almost free to make your own tools. Almost none of them are worth sharing or distributing

Comment · 19 days ago
You can spend a week crafting the most optimal query possible, making sure the plans are perfect and all the best index types are used

And then you push it to production and get completely different results

Statistics change everything. Queries which produced beautiful plans in local and staging environments breakdown when given production statistics, some users get the same plans you did, others get nasty nested loops, indexes don't get used, and debugging and fixing it requires poking around in prod statistics which is never a good place to be. Don't even get me started on how RLS impacts query optimisation

Postgres is great but the authors refusal to add plan hints is a decision that comes to bite me at least a few times a year

Comment · 25 days ago
Yeah the news for me here is that people thought nature could "bounce back" on a human timescale. Any human lifespan is just the blink of an eye to nature
Comment · 1 month ago
I finally gave in to the rust hype and built a new project in it (or my agent fleet did). Almost instant regret. My poor machine with just 2TB HDD and 24 cores was almost immediately crippled by agents each working in their own sandbox, each one building and compiling

Most projects my fleet works on are in other languages (TS, Go, Elixir) and can comfortably handle 10+ agents working in parallel, but not rust. I had to cap the fleet to 5 workers and build a dedicated resource monitor to step in and tidy up every time the disk almost filled up

That and general progress on building is far slower, with far more time spent building and testing than any other language I use.

Ended up rebuilding in Go, the perf gains weren't worth it

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