verbify

> Why would I pay $10-20K/mo to employ a software engineer and then balk at a $500, $1000, or even $2000 monthly AI bill, assuming they were even vaguely trying to use the tokens productively?

Spending $10k and then balking at an additional $2k can make sense to me based on the circumstances. It's an additional 20% that hasn't been budgeted for.

The question is partly about what that 20% gives the employer - for some businesses, you might see diminishing returns from additional productivity of a software developer. E.g. I did some work creating BI reports and warehousing for a manufacturing company. Being more productive just meant faster reports or more reports. But faster/more reports didn't necessarily equate to more money for the business.

Sometimes it's a question of a business being penny wise and pound foolish, but sometimes it does make sense to me to not spend this additional money.

Is that all humans are? When clockwork was the frontier, people thought the brain was akin to clockwork (which is why the mechanical turk fooled people). By analogy, now that classifiers are the frontier, we think the brain is a classifier. Our model of the mind is whatever the most complex artifact of our era is .

Just to be clear: I do think the brain classifies. But I wonder if it does other operations as well that we don't fully understand.

> ignoring that people would start keeping themselves homeless for several years on purpose

Don't you need to spend on bureaucracy to figure this out? That then increases the cost.

So I don't use stuff like Superpowers either - I think if it were actually that good, it would work it's way into the core product.

But I do mod Claude Code to incorporate gotchas from my specific workflows. For example: Which snowflake instance should you look at, where are the tables in my data warehouse, [Product] doesn't have an API, here's a Skill that uses the Chrome MCP to handle repetitive tasks, here's an agent that should explore the schema, you don't have write-access to this repo. A recent skill I made was to modify our terraform config (after doing it 4 times in the same way) - it requires pulling the ticket from JIRA, knowing how our terraform config works (or at least the bit I'm interested in), and making a pull request in a certain format.

Agents solve a real problem of keeping your main context shorter, and you can also have your main thread on Fable/Opus/Sonnet, but use Haiku for certain tasks in a subagent because you know the dumb AI can figure it out - but you need to think about the tasks in your job.

I've done my fair bit of modding with electric bicycles and 3d printers and in general the lesson I learnt is that a small bit of modding can cause an improvement (e.g. I want a usb charger from my battery), but overmodding breaks things, and either you want ebikes and 3d printers to be your hobby, or your hobby can be fixing your ebike or 3d printer. I think the same applies to claude code or Vim. Incidentally I never modded vim.

My company gives me 1k a month to burn on Claude. Any experiments have to be relevant to my work. I'm guessing it’s similar.

Companies always trade at a premium to book, so how would that work?

Always? There's never a place for it?

> With home ownership though, things like a modern kitchen, a shed, new laundry machines not only better your life today but also (likely) have some value add.

Just beware that it's usually much less than you put in though. We bought our house for £25k more than the next door neighbours even though they're cookie cutter houses sold within 4 months of each other. Our house was thoroughly modernised, new kitchen, all old windows replaced with double glazed windows, garage converted into home office and a bunch of other stuff. We definitely can't do all this work for £25k.

My understanding is that it does raise the value of the house, but less than you put in. I do find it strange, because personally I'd hate living in a building site or dealing with contractors, so if someone already did an extension/loft conversion that I would've wanted to do, I'd pay a premium. Apparently people want it done 'their way', which I can appreciate, up to a point.

The snowclone is annoying, but comparisons are sometimes necessary. The problem here is the actual content is sloppy.

> Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.

In the 40s, the British were ruling Palestine as a mandate, I wouldn’t really call that a country.

Just in case someone gets the wrong end of the stick, the UK isn’t getting rid of the House of Lords, just the hereditary members (of which there aren’t many).

I'm sceptical that it was entirely autonomous, I think perhaps there could be some prompting involved here from a human (e.g. 'write a blog post that shames the user for rejecting your PR request').

The reason I think so is because I'm not sure how this kind of petulant behaviour would emerge. It would depend on the model and the base prompt, but there's something fishy about this.

A stop sequence, but for humans.