this_user

If you move fast enough, they can't find the vulnerabilities in your system before you deploy the next version.

Crypto was originally born during the Great Financial Crisis. It's not surprising that the idea of: "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we didn't need any of that," seemed attractive back then, even though that is obviously far too simplistic a view of what the financial system actually does.

But the end result is that crypto currencies never really delivered on their promise, because they barely work in practice, and the only reason to engage with them is for gambling or crime. Anything else is just too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome, too error-prone, and just generally far too inconvenient. What's the point of a digital currency that is best stored on an air-gapped device that must never connect to any network?

Whenever people talk about why you should host in the EU, this is just the most recent example for why should shouldn't.

Nuclear is to solar in terms of energy generation what hydrogen is to electric for cars: it's proponents keep arguing that the other thing doesn't work and will never work, and that you absolutely, positively need their approach. And then it just works and effectively kills off the other technology within a couple of years. Nuclear is basically already dead, and anyone starting new nuclear projects now will look extremely silly in 20-30 years when they finally come online.

That is how you end up with a test suite that now takes 10x as long, unless you occasionally prompt the agent to consolidate and group tests.

There are still a lot of issues with coding that require intervention. Just recently, I had Astra detect a minor bug in an HTTP client that resulted in it deciding that the best approach would be to spend 1800 LOC on implementing its own from scratch. Some other time, Opus 5.5 was trying to tell me that test runs on a small to mid-sized application would take another three weeks until they would be fully finished.

They are probably like 3-6 months away from just letting their agents work directly on prod after realising that repos don't scale enough.

If you need a reason, the modem and the baseband firmware have several unpatched vulnerabilities on that model, which is not something that an Android update can resolve.

OpenSSH don't have the same luxury of being able to ignore potential vulnerabilities.

Well, the point is being able to charge enterprise customers more.

And how many CDs can you buy per month for the price of a Spotify subscription? I am not going to be spending hundreds of Euros per month on physical media, and I also value my time too much to bother with ripping and converting these, just so I can end up with a worse experience for more money, while also producing a bunch of unnecessary plastic rubbish.

Astra doesn't just burn token at an insane rate, it is also strangely high maintenance when using it. Occasionally, you have to keep prodding it to keep working. Then at other times, it will disappear down some rabbit hole, trying to resolve increasingly hypothetical issues. It feels like you constantly have to keep it on track, while Opus is just churning through tasks.

They probably forgot to tell Claude to make no mistakes.

But seriously, the fact that this started as Crypto-adjacent should have immediately disqualified them for serious use.

Astra is barely usable even on the $100 plan. And that is if it doesn't just burn through 80% of your weekly quota in a couple of hours by continually expanding the scope of the task you gave it - while not noticing the failing tests that are right in front of it.

Opus is at least actually usable even on the small plan. The main downside is its insane writing style, but 5.5 seems to address that somewhat. Otherwise, you can just use your $20 OpenAI plan to have Luna de-slop Opus' prose, which seems to work fine.

The issue is that in order to have the agent write good code, you need to implement standard SWE best practices. But that also means a lot of manual intervention in terms of writing specs, checking acceptance criteria, and reviewing code. So you end up spending a lot of time on managing your agent, which means you won't get a 1000% productivity gain, you get maybe 50 or 100, possible less in some areas and with some issues.

I'm not sure that Claude's "Realigned the shape of the load-bearing ownership gate to reduce the blast radius of the design contract; confirmed, not assumed" is more meaningful than "fix".