Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs

this is a very common reaction to people doing things with llms and i think the effects of it can be somewhat insidious. you constantly see people out there vibing their way to something that has already been discovered somewhere else, but they didn't know that and in many cases wouldn't have known how to find that thing even if they did.

the framing of "the llm tricked you into thinking you discovered something" while technically true in many cases, very strangely casts the positive outcome of a person being linked in a very engaged manner to something they wouldn't otherwise know or found out into something to be looked down on, and sort of just discourages people from trying stuff themselves that wouldn't be possible for them without something like an agent. it's okay if someone else already found the thing. for areas like science and research, it's actually a good thing if something you did repeated the work of someone else. it validates the original piece of work, and it tells you the things you were trying were on the right track to begin with.

While I am truly grateful for him and the team for their contributions to neonatal genetics (and hosting me in San Diego for a few days to show me how I could help), Rady was actually the unnamed lab that failed to diagnosis my son.

And this happens all the time. The WGS NICU diagnostic rate is only ~30%, depending on who you ask. Just because people have been working at this for a decade and products exists, doesn't mean it's a solved problem.

I don't know if you read until the end of my post, but I did run a small experiment in collaboration with an academic geneticist and outperformed the first-line clinical labs across the board. My approach, which is essentially Claude Code for genetics, is fundamentally different and novel than how this work is done today and seems to perform much better in early experiments. Time will tell is this generalizes to all clinical work.

I'm planning on publishing evals and benchmarks in the next few weeks, but out-of-the-box systems actually don't do very well for a variety of reasons.

In case you find it useful, I wrote what I learned in my first year of fatherhood (the little guy is now 17 months): https://alejo.ch/3hj

As you can see, I never found anything as scary as the possibility, however remote, of my baby being unhealthy. So, yeah, best of luck!

I mean, make no mistake, it is terrifying, but you'll make it through eventually and it will be okay.

Also not sure if this was covered in class, but in case it wasn't: You need to rotate the baby. The baby needs rotation so that the head doesn't grow misshapen. Rotate the baby.

Just a joke. It will be marvelous. Savoir the first years. It's a lot of work, bad sleeping nights, but you'll have fond memories for life.

None of us really know what to do!

We're talking about a deep human experience here. I don't know about HN as a whole but I personally come out of this much more touched about the human side of the story and how someone's life events can tremendously change their paths and goals than the LLM itself.

I'm planning on getting one out in the next few weeks characterizing the system and how it performed on real clinical use-cases vs. alternatives and existing tools.

The TL;DR is that Gamow Labs is a harness and interface company on top of SOTA LLMs as you suggested, but my harness and interface outperforms the existing thing. While this approach would have earned me the "wrapper company" label last year, I hope the success of OpenEvidence, Harvey, Perplexity, and so on has opened minds with respect to the value here.

It was only working through clinical cases that I realized how much more I needed beyond dropping raw reads into Codex.

If you are open to chatting about your experience, I'd love to hear from you. I spend a lot of time learning from and supporting other rare disease families these days.

And the anti-natal thing was kind-of joking not joking. I do know lots of people with kids there now, but when my wife first got pregnant, we were alone.

If they can save more lives without harming other lives I would gladly take it during the analysis. Even saving 1% more lives is an amazing achievement!

I'm in the process of getting my first batch of long reads, but I am skeptical that this is the "just" what's needed. There is little doubt that long read > short read, but I think that computational techniques for both need to be improved significantly.

There is already some clinical evidence to support my hypothesis. The first clinical long read trial at Kansas City Mercy showed a 10% bump in diagnostic rate, which is great but not fully solving the problem: https://news.childrensmercy.org/unlocking-answers-faster-chi...

As for trisomy-21, if we wish to increase the rates in the future we can stop performing pre-implantation testing and the MSAFP and nuchal translucency and so on. After all, even if we abort all embryos that carry the markers today, new such embryos will be formed in the future since it comes from non-disjunction so selection pressure once removed will allow it to return.

My friend from elementary school has had a Down kid at 19. She takes it well, but managing a grown-up man five times as strong as her (she is petite) when he decides to do something like "take his bicycle and ride on a busy highway" is exhausting.

This is why most people abort Down fetuses.

I have two kids. If I could have chosen whether or not they would be born with Down syndrome I would choose would “without” every single time. If either of them were born with it I would love them the same but I would never choose it, if I had the choice to make.

Potential people aren't actual people though either.

You destroy the life of the family and greatly make the lives of healthy children harder.

Why would you sacrifice your healthy children for one who has no real future?

Complete inversion of common sense.

Oh, the horror.

Listen, you have no idea what these people went through and judging them for not wanting to go through the same thing is shitty.

(And then there was the whole “antinatalist” bit and I am trying really hard to keep this dude’s shoes tied so I will stop there)

Internet reply: this is extremely disturbing