thr0w

> v5.5

You don't still feel that mental friction when 5.5 responds with a wall of text and you drop into that first tedious sentence? I even had it generate a syntactically invalid English sentence the other day. It's still pretty bad.

> they ask Claude to write an explainer for exactly that slice

If their Claude is the same as our Claude, then this is a joke. Claude’s writing style is insidiously mind numbing. It takes constant pushing to get it to explain things in digestible English.

Sublime was/is still the best, unfortunately had to finally abandon it due to lack of first-class agent support. Hard to find something that emphasizes core text editing first and that doesn't constantly have some new update to apply on start that may break or change something.

This is vibe coded I guess? Toggling the "Happiness plateau line" does nothing.

Agree with what you're saying, but what are you ultimately driving at?

That's crazy. I did a Notes migration to a custom Java/Red Hat platform 20 years ago, even at that time it was like "can't believe these guys are on Lotus Notes". I remember Howard Stern used to reference LN on his radio show in the early 90s.

> acquiring assets that can make the money for you

Any ideas beyond real estate?

It is rage inducing.

> And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard.

It really is, if there's one sentiment that's remained consistent in me over time it's awe at how harsh of a mistress software is. As good as coding agents are, it still routinely dismantles them in astonishing ways. It's like complexity is the natural state to which all systems want to settle.

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job.

The vast majority! I think I've come across 1 or 2 competent engineers in 20+ years. It's a miracle that software works, ever. Increasingly, it doesn't.

> "Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?"

Tech consulting takes all kinds of forms. I've been doing it for a while. A lot of clients aren't thinking about time spent. A lot of clients have an in-house team that simply can't achieve something at all. Can't figure out how to do automated deployments, can't figure out their server OOM errors, can't figure out why a SQL query is slow. There is a huge swath of simply incapable teams. That's a whole class of opportunity potentially wiped out, I say potentially only because a lot of teams are so incapable that they still don't realize you can use an LLM to solve those kinds of problems.

And yes, every consultant loves to think they're getting paid for value, not time. Try telling a potential client that you're so much more skilled than their team, that you will finish the "200 hours" project in a single weekend, and that you would still like to bill 200 x market rate for it. Unless they are incredibly savvy, they will balk. If they are incredibly savvy, they probably don't have a shit eng team in the first place.

> Hmm - I need to map these results onto objects I can use.

What sql client is going to hand you raw text?

> Hmm - wouldn’t it be great if the object tracked changes and could save itself.

Lost me there.

> The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight

Premise is laughable right out of the gate.

> I feel like we as a profession generally don't like sloppiness

Thanks for that, needed a deep guttural laugh.

> The people who most argue for vibe coding will themselves never accept responsibility for the technical outcomes.

This is right, and don’t think this isn’t all partially fueled by spite. I’m not sure if engineers understand how much they’ve been simultaneously reviled/revered by non-technical people. They see this as a Prometheus moment. They would love to vibecode a mess and make the engineers deal with the details.