Jare

They are accountable for their library, you are accountable for putting it in your production environment.

If they fail you can stop using their library. If you fail your company can stop using you.

- I started programming games in z80 back in 1983. I've had several periods of 1-2 years in my professional career where I have not programmed anything; at best I've still guided others (as lead or producer) and at worst nothing at all, not even looked at code (as director).

It all came back every time I went back to the trenches. The question in my mind is, what do "AI-native" engineers have that they can come back to?

- During these decades, I have relinquished control several times in favor of productivity. From knowing exactly where every byte is placed in RAM and where each cycle goes, to only knowing that for the inner loops, to just knowing the machine code that the C compiler will generate, to dynamic memory and classes and indirections and cache misses, to wasteful but oh so very expressive javascript and python. I stopped writing my own engines and used Unity, Unreal Engine, Phaser, Godot...

Relinquishing control is easy if you are still truly in control of the new layer, and know where the pitfalls are. Where are new engineers going to gain that expertise?

- Regarding addiction, I've also quit smoking. After 25 years of daily cigarettes, one day 16 years ago I just stopped and never touched another one.

I won't pretend that applies to everyone, or even that I'm impervious to other addictions just because that one was so easy to shed. But harder or easier, everyone can stop problematic habits if they are clearly problematic.

- I don't know where we're going with all this AI. I would prefer it had not happened the way it is happening (IP theft, job destruction, race to the bottom, power concentration, etc). I love progress but I don't think the most important aspect of progress is how fast it happens. Speed only helps the greedy and the terminally ill.

But I'm not going to pretend it hasn't, or risk whatever is left of my professional future boycotting it in favor of a different reality, or (who knows) reject a medical treatment just because it was proposed by Opus 7. The world will live or die regardless what I do, but MY world relies on me.

I will continue trying to have enough expertise, passion and attention to detail in what I do and how I do it, that whatever level of control I have over it is as optimal as I can. From typing z80 bytes, to asking Claude to change a 5 for a 6, the above traits are what has always mattered in my experience.

> If the folks wielding these tools are not using a tool effectively

I struggle with this argument when the subject ("the folks") turns out to be "many people", perhaps even a majority of people. If one teacher is an outlier that uses it badly then sure, the teacher is to blame and be judged. But if a collective is using it badly, then perhaps the capability of the collective should have been evaluated before handing the tool to them.

I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.

Kenta Cho has created hundreds of games and toys over the past 20+ years. A lot of brilliant stuff.

A programming language spec is expected to be unambiguous. A compiler is expected to be deterministic. There are multiple ways to different outputs when compiling (optimizations, etc) but those are also meant to be well defined and deterministic themselves.

AIs are stochastic/probabilistic machines. Their big potential is in how they take malformed, incomplete, ambiguous inputs and come up with valuable and usable solutions.

"502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)

Lemmings was one of the 3-5 inspirations for the Commandos games: - giving different tasks to characters over the level to finish it. Lost Vikings won over Cannonfodder and the Commandos would be very defined characters not a mass of generic soldiers. - levels structured as "bubbles" of logical challenge; after you solve one you typically move on to the next one, eventually reaching the level finish.

The Commandos series also parallels a bit of the history, fizzling out very quickly after Commandos 2, when it might have seemed that the sky was the limit for the series.

This brings back memories! In 93 I wrote something similar (simpler) for MSDOS, to inspect and extract pieces of binary files, GFV (still downloadable from the Hornet archive somewhere in here https://www.hornet.org/cgi-bin/ha_search.cgi?opt_s=5:Iguana). You could set the stride and show 1/n bytes, so it was relatively easy to find textures from game files and memory dumps of running games.

open one and inspect the two ways to view it, one is horizontal scan, the other is a peano curve which leads to natural square-ish areas.

Well at least you're healt... oh wait.

To be fair, he's mostly saying that this is not a Claude CODE bug, but yeah I was equally shocked.

If by now you're willing to make EM the guardian of your code, nothing I can say would dissuade you.

tl;dr as the sole reply to someone IS a condemnation of what they wrote. tl;dr at the front of your message with a short summary, is an admission that the long version may not be for everyone and there's a core point for quick consumption.

I'd say that sounds about the same for ai;dr. I could see myself posting a prompt like that in front of the generated report.

I have bad stories about classic corporate architects too, but that's far from all there is. The job of a typical Staff / Principal in a modern organization is most often to lead, shepherd and conduct technical decisions and people to execute a project, very different from managing them as personnel. Having some hand in execution helps a lot, but the value of their contribution is typically not in the hands-on execution part.

> how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans

Pattern recognition to be sure, and structured communication conveyed with proper contextualization and emphasis, are common to both humans and LLMs. (at least if you want to get anything done)

I remember as a kid reading Lucifer's Hammer novel by Larry Nivel and J Pournelle, where at some point they discuss the theory that Earth was in a very different orbit and under different gravitational conditions that allowed giant dinosaurs to exist. It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but the description of muscle and bone cross-section as the core factor in their performance stayed with me.

I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.

Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.

> Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people?

Ahhh I see. That's going to change a lot across companies, teams and individuals. My particular bubble is full of actual workers looking for ways to apply it and trying things to see what sticks, so that interpretation did not land in my head. If anything, decision makers around me are being encouraging, but cautious and throttling experiments and requests for access/connection/etc, and damn well they should because they are actually accountable for mishaps.

> Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?

Technically, because if the world moves to AI-driven tools and Slack is not cooperating, it will no longer serve the world and will be left behind.

> Isn't a tool supposed to work for you

If you want AI integration in your chat and Slack is not helping make it happen, then Slack is not working for you.

On the other hand, constantly chasing the latest fad can be a useless drain of resources and (worse yet) attention. In this context, AI is by now most likely not a fad, but the ways to interoperate with it can be: mcp, cli, agent, tag, ... And the same goes for users, reinventing their processes and practices 5 times per year.

You need the right products and services. If you know what those are, then you need employees to build them. Until you figure out what those are, you are (sadly) better off with fewer people.

I think Phil was pushed out by the complete failure of his strategic vision when confronted with reality. He had a vision of growth and prestige, and money would follow. I loved his vision in its grandiose and lofty goals, but he completely failed to capture any of the "how to make it happen". It stays a fantasy.

> if John Carmack wants to create another breakthrough technology, he might be better off re-creating id Software’s 1995 chaos

Chaos is not what made them great. It was definitely part of who they were at the time, and thus part of their greatness. If you try to recreate chaos without recreating everything else within which that chaos happened to work, you will be miserable and also fail.

I suspect JC had plenty enough "being on the other side of chaos" during his VR days. It's not fun at all when it's someone else's chaos that you have to endure.

I'd agree you do need intensity in order to create breakthroughs. Not gonna happen in a "don't worry about it" type of environment.

I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things".

Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.

You'd have the non-NDA, core stuff in the submodule. The submodule can then be referenced by the big, driving NDA repo. And maybe another repo with a non-NDA, likely simpler "shell" that lets non-NDA devs work with the codebase.

If you need to NDA the core stuff instead and thus can't pull it as a submodule, the only thing I can think of is to pull the core as binary/compiled artifacts.

It's speculative fiction after all.

It recovers when having 1.1 kids per person on average does not mean making substantial sacrifices in quality of life over your entire life. Since many people will still not have kids, that sounds like 3 kids per couple being affordable in a comfortable, enjoyable, not stressful manner.

Right now you can guess that for many couples, 2 kids becomes close to unaffordable, and 3 becomes nearly unmanageable. Individually, you will see couples choose to do it and even to do it in ways that others both envy and chastise; but overall, it's not happening.

It requires many things to change not just in economy, but in society as a whole. It's not going to happen in a society devoted to growth, that's for sure.

Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.

For every ten kill X quests you get a Mankirk's Wife quest or a Hogger and it all works out great. 80% of almost everything is filler, like our bodies are 70% just water, but it's the taste that matters.

It remains to be seen how much of that social element is taken over by LLMs as well. There's already plenty of stories about people retreating into LLMs. Whatever shape and form this all ends up, we're just at the beginning, and the only limit will be how economically and socially sustainable it is (chances are: it's not).

For the record, there were constant-Z full 3D engines in the late 90s, which would find the correct axes on screen to render perspective-correct textured triangles using oblique spans of pixels. They were incredibly complicated and prone to holes at the slightest numerical accuracy, but they were a sight to behold. Constant-Z meant not just saving on perspective divides, but also easy Z-buffer and depth-based fog.