sporkland

I hate to break it to engineers feeling this for the first time, but this is what management and "leadership" has been dealing with forever in software. It's just you were a fleshy Claude/codex. And your goal was never to understand everything it was to build something of value that had the risk squeezed out of it through development processes.

Unfortunately the answer is that you better get comfortable with the feeling and know that when something goes wrong it's not the end of the world (for most of us, some of the AI labs it may actually be) and while it will be painful you fight through the incident, you do the post mortem and you don't let that class of error happen again.

There are some techniques, which you hated as an IC that you'll now have to embrace:

1. Have it write a doc and review it.

2. Have a strong point of view on critical parts of the architecture and one way doors. Review those mercilessly.

3. Spot check and taste test the code.

4. Be merciless about the small mistakes you see slipping in expand scope on them to find the class of problem it is.

5. Think about contracts and test coverage and failure modes at a higher level. What is the most effective way to find misalignment without reviewing every line.

Know that through this meta process you will squeeze out risk but that you won't eliminate it and at some point you feel like you squeezed out enough risk to ship.

And when something does go wrong take that moment to find a way to add another step to your risk reduction process that eliminates that class of errors not just that individual error.

While I think the peter principle plays and human factors definitely play a role I also think that misaligned incentives also start to creep in internally in a way that wouldn't be tolerated by the market in general. Strategy costs and internally subsidized losing approaches add up until the company is no longer effective relative to a clean slate competitor that is being held accountable by the market and customers.

> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI,

Really enjoyed this snippet of your post. Not sure why, but being in the weeds with it, it had never really looked like this is an industrial revolution style retooling of how we work, with the pain and benefits that come along with it.

I read his tweet as concerned about the lack of widespread adoption and the impact of that.

Any high level on what you'd do today? I'd love to get mine sequenced at a place that won't sell it to a health insurance place. I saw @pcollison post about unleashing coding agents on his being fascinating, I'd love to know more.

Unfortunately for Ramses and Erika the description tapped into something deeper, a symbol that is all too actually present in our society of the infantile male whose every whim is taken care of.

I myself confused the person for the symbol and owe him an apology. But also eff all the child men walking around always taking and never giving. Be more like Ramses.

I've subjectively detected this in previous codex releases where the 2 days before release of a new model the agent went from great to me pulling my hair out yelling at it. I think it's just a win-win for them. They need to ramp up basic capacity and usage on the new model, what better way to free up capacity than to reduce the effort with the current gen. There's not deep detectors that they've regressed (especially before this guy showed solid data).

> Seeing the hype online feels both validating and deeply frustrating. I worked on this literally one year back in March 2025. I spent months of hard work, sweat, and sleepless nights building it

While I have deep empathy for what the author must be feeling. It feels tone deaf to me that as someone working in the model industry, likely using data sets scraped from other folks work, he doesn't see the hypocrisy in this.

We've hit an interesting question in our society where a lot of us are getting tremendous value out of the uncredited and uncompensated use of people's hard work and sleepness nights. It seems naive of the author or anyone at this point to believe that the same won't happen to them.

The question is whether we want this to be how our society operates? I can see a number of pros and cons and I know it's not a straight line from they trained on the works to derived works. But it's hard to imagine as humans how we will sustain broad motivation over a long period if we keep allowing this to happen.

As an outsider in a hyper competitive commercial space like mobile os (apple, android) which part makes you think it's active obstruction and not just moving fast and trying to keep up, get ahead, etc and they want the open source side but it's a lower priority?

Since S3 supports regionally and zonally locked buckets it seems like any promise around this would have to except those buckets where that was configured.

Hacking is also interesting in that it has a clear success/failure outcome so it's easier to RLVR from similar to math problems. Whereas clean code, good architecture, good product taste are reliant on RLHF.

Article brought to you by your local AI agent.

We had one of the most damaging lab leaks in history with COVID and the wuhan lab. And we couldn't even get the facts straight.

I think this is largely a similar thing. The labs should be running at certain levels of containment given the vitality/risk of the organism under study. Hopefully they get there for all our sakes.

But the revealed preference of society at this point is the damage is worth the benefits both in wuhan and with AI. Unfortunately with some of these "substances" it could eventually prove lethal.

Having tried recently to build an app using POI (restaurants) information derived from OSM I've been left both simultaneously in love with the idea of OSM and sad by the reality of it.

The idea that we all have an open map free to use by developers and users not controlled by a rent collecting corporate entity should be wonderful resource for humanity.

The practicalities are often unfortunately far from wonderful:

1. A lot of the POI data in OSM is often either out of date, wrong or incomplete, including names, web addresses, phone numbers, closures, etc.

2. They often don't have addresses as you're supposed to resolve the address from the location, but if you have multi-story buildings this gets problematic.

Part of this I believe is due to the community requirement that this data come from folks walking around vs from providers that say restaurant owners use (square, toast, etc) to manage their online presences.

Google Maps is just dominant in terms of gravity with folks are throwing all their photos and reviews and edits on there. But if google maps had to build google maps on the Places API google itself would be out of business the prices and terms are so out of control.

But even in the more open space you've got:

1. Overture trying to to make OSM actually usable by combining multiple data sources and doing validation. But overture is up to 1 month or more out of date.

2. MapBox and others are trying to make money selling improved POI data on top of OSM derived data with their own sources added.

I ended up building a system that combined OSM (for freshness) plus Overture for reliability plus validation, but no data duplication from google maps to filter bad data coming from OSM and Overture.

If you've ever ridden a bike next to an autonomous car on its worse day and most meatbag drivers on their best day you'd know it's not just life saving... the amount of near misses, stress and asshole moves drops precipitously as well, at least once per trip from my experience, but usually more.