stephen_cagle

I've gone through a few recruiter screens lately and the number of people who mention "number of deploys per day" as a metric they are proud of causes my eyes to roll.

What can you possibly be doing as a product that justifies you releasing 60 times in a working day?

It's certainly better than the old models of releasing on a quarterly cadence with the test team and all that, but it feels like the metric has become the goal when you are releasing that often.

I agree. I honestly think convenient food is perfectly fine for people most of the time. Recently I have been playing with "eternal stews" which I guess are logically the opposite of fast foods, but at the same time are focused on availability and convenience over intentionality and mastery (at least the way I make them).

Most food is literally just fuel. I think that is fine. And at some level, eating 3$ burritos for a quick lunch on the daily really makes you appreciate the depths of a home made risotto even more. :]

I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.

Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..

Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.

I wonder if this is true (I am less than a layman, so feel free to disregard).

My feeling on this is that math is amenable to LLM based development because the formalism of LEAN + the ability of AI to nudge research means that we basically have machines that can "research" through what is basically brute force search, but where the explored trees are ordered by AI.

But what if there were a biological system similar to LEAN for drug interaction? Could we not use AI in a similar way to nudge the exploration space based on the vibes that the AI has about drug discovery?

I agree there is a a distinction in the formalism of a proof (through LEAN) and the sort of probabilistic/chemical/physical/whatever nature of a biological organism (through some sort of future modeler for life science). But is the fact that one system is deterministic and the other probabilistic really as much of a leap as you think?

Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.

I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.

A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.

Really? Bad luck, I have literally never had that happen! What time was this? Because Austin is closing down 35 in the evening and it is just doing crazy things to traffic. Maybe it was that?

Agreed, a buddy and I wrote a simple mod that shimed into Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader and were able to pull all of the art and description assets for that game by walking the object graph. Took about 4 hours total (including the site).

Similar to your camera, we would never have been arsed with doing that much work were it not for LLM vibbing. It allowed us to get something working (sufficiently) very quickly.

At what point of maintaining this code would it be cheaper for me to actually find underlying patterns and program this myself with some actual thought, rather than continuously "shaping the clay" of my LLM slop? These questions keep me awake at night (not really), and probably predict the future of software engineering!

To play the devils advocate here (just for software), I would say principally this:

"A world where starting is incredibly easy and finishing is more complicated than ever"

LLM's do allow you to oneshot huge starting bits of work in record short time. The frontier of the amount of work they can oneshot is clearly getting larger and larger. But I am still not convinced that they allow you to maintain existing work at a cost that is below a human being.

But, if the frontier of what you can oneshot continues to grow unbounded, then it really will not matter. We will eventually oneshot all software and maintenance will be a thing of the past.

... But that is a very big bet.

This is the main thing that raises my eyebrow.

If you are constantly churning your codebase to the point that you need to invent a system that handles your churn... then you must at least be admitting that the previous 6 refactors you wrote were not good, but NOW you have it right.

I feel that good, well designed code change by accretion, not by rewrites. Code that remains stable for a long period of time was likely better than code that needs be continuously rewritten (at least with humans writers).

But maybe this is just a human-centric view of what good code means? That LLM "slop it until it works" approach to development will have a different measure of what quality looks like?

Getting a 24 out of 36 response rate on your applications is an S tier level response rate. I mean, the news is bad (rejection), but that is pretty incredible.

I can't make up my mind if that means he is so good that actual human beings look at his profile, or some sort of ATS filtering system just hard rejects him with prejudice.

By my own, completely arbitrary split of this into 16 predictions, I would say that this hits on maybe 8 of 16 if we are being a bit generous. Which is good, but certainly not "Inevitable" (the title of the book).

With that said, maybe he meant inevitable as N approaches infinity... So there's still time!

Aside: I think the biggest interesting prediction he had was that AI would obey a user driven network effect. It seems like a very clean prediction, and yet it has failed to materialize? I wonder if this has more to do with just how scrape-able the whole internet was or with distilation or what? There is certainly an advantage to having good user data, but it seems like it is largely something that can be worked around (by hook or crook)?