It's wild that Sonnet 4.6 is roughly as capable as Opus 4.5 - at least according to Anthropic's benchmarks. It will be interesting to see if that's the case in real, practical, everyday use. The speed at which this stuff is improving is really remarkable; it feels like the breakneck pace of compute performance improvements of the 1990s.
Oh sorry, I don't at all intend to say you should write your own parser! Totally agree: "Don't roll your own XML implementation"
What I was addressing is, interfacing with an XML parser and converting that into whatever your internal representation is, can be a chore. LLMs are great at that stuff.
It's a perfectly reasonable choice: flexible, well specified, well supported, reasonably performant. I think the extreme level of hype 20 years ago was overdone and (just like with anything) there's good ways to adopt it and bad ways. But as a basic technology choice, it's fine. Particularly these days when you can have a coding agent write the parser boilerplate, etc. for you.
There was a sockets API though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock) and IIRC we all used Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.1 with our dialup connections. But could have been 3.11 - my memory is a bit hazy.
For sure, but sometimes what you or I think should be important really isn't in the grand scheme of things. An example could be focusing on cost or efficiency - generally very reasonable things to care about - but if all a company cares about right now is growth at all costs, then that focus would be wrong. This can happen - the company leadership might see a market that they absolutely must enter and be dominant in no matter the cost. That may not filter down well 3-4 layers of management; so the soft skill in that instance would be in sussing out what several layers of management above you actually care about and surfacing to them things that align with those concerns.
There's also a corollary to this: if the organization does not recognize some work as needed or useful, you could well be actively wasting your time putting effort into it. There might be a good reason the company doesn't care that you just don't see, and leadership could be (at best) confused about why you would spend time on it.
Yeah Bazel is a PITA to do yourself. I haven't tried but I'm confident Claude et al. would handle it just fine. By similar logic I recently adopted NixOS for a lot of my servers; Claude is perfectly happy to slog through the pain of Nix configs for me.
If the goal is to simply undercut the incumbent with roughly the same product than it doesn't really matter if the incumbent starts using LLMs too as their cost structure, margin expectations, etc. are already relatively set.
Having been on a bigco team that underwent the same sort of headcount growth in a very short time I have to imagine that "more than tripling our headcount in that first year" was likely more a driver of the inability to keep up than a solution. That's not a knock on the talents of anyone hired; it's just exceedingly difficult to simultaneously grow a team that fast and maintain any kind of velocity regardless of the complexity of the problems you're trying to tackle. The culture and knowledge that enabled the previous team's velocity just gets completely diluted.
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
No wonder our grandparents generation were good with mechanical things. If they were looking at materials like that all the time - I feel like you'd build an intuitive sense of how common household devices work pretty easily if it were so clear and accessible.
It's not just that; being a very small undifferentiated supplier in a volatile commodities market with very high fixed capital costs, unpredictable/uncontrollable production capacity and long production lead times is a very difficult business, regardless of the industry.
Minden is a very popular place for gliders; with the right conditions the Sierras trigger serious mountain wave that you can ride for a long, long way.
We haven't had a major conflict in 80 years. Little skirmishes all over the place, sure, but we've forgotten that significant wars between major powers used to be both terrible for everyone involved and also common. Our grandparents after WW2 decided to go a different path and created a largely rules- and trade- based international order that has largely kept the peace. We don't realize how good we've had it.