jes5199

sounds like uber is ripe for disruption by somebody who doesn’t need the accounts to balance yet

there’s a sweet spot in there, it’s not “as narrow as possible” - the most productive thing is to assign the largest possible tasks that are just short of the limit where the agents become stupid. this is hard to hit, and a moving target!

I guess what I mean is, I found the details sort of “mindless” before. Code that I could write in my sleep. Now I only have to do the thinky parts

I’ve tried a bunch of things but now I’m mostly using Cursor in agent mode with Claude Sonnet 4, doing small-ish pull-request-sized prompts. I don’t have to review code as carefully as I did with Claude 3.7

but I’m finding the bottleneck now is architecture design. I end up having these long discussions with chatGPT-o3 about design patterns, sometimes days of thinking, and then relatively quick implementation sessions with Cursor

I’ve been using Claude (via Cursor) on a greenfield project for the last couple months and my observation is:

1. I am much more productive/effective

2. It’s way more cognitively demanding than writing code the old-fashioned way

3. Even over this short timespan, the tools have improved significantly, amplifying both of the points above

great, let's also record all of the daily interactions of the C-suite and see if we can replicate their job functions in simulation

that’s so alien to me. for me, writing by hand is frustrating to the point of distraction. if I want to think clearly, my best bet is to do it silently, in my head.

“badly broken but doesn’t matter”?

Tony Seba did the maths: https://www.rethinkx.com/publications/understandingstellaren...

> A device with 96% market share in the developed and developing world

honestly that sounds ripe for disruption

I agree that “phone” is over but I think it’s possible that “device” is over as well

this is designed to appeal directly to a certain kind of self-mythologizing Bay Area techie, the kind that was common in the early 2010s. It’s meant to signal continuity, “we’re just like you, we loved Steve Jobs”

apparently it worked on some people: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io

solar and battery costs are falling so fast that emissions are likely to go down, even with growth in energy use

I think it’s hard to say that any one thing ruined the Hobbit. like, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

new MCP tool: make-curl-request, headers, payload

I had the idea that maybe it was actually a flytrap for large companies! force them to waste cycles chasing a moving target so they don’t even notice they’re being leapfrogged

they already did though. the late-2024 version and the early-2025 version have completely incompatible SSE rube goldberg machines

someone is going to write an MCP adaptor that lets Claude use OpenAPI and then we can forget that MCP was a thing

I recently wrote an MCP server, in node, after trying and failing to get the official javascript SDK to work. I agree with the criticisms — this is a stunningly bad specification, perhaps the worst I have seen in my career. I don’t think the authors have actually tried to use it.

Trying to fix “you must hold a single connection open to receive all responses and notifications” by replacing it with “you must hold open as many connections as you have long-running requests, plus one more for notifications” is downright unhinged, and from reading the spec I’m not even sure they know that’s what they are asking clients to do

“as they’re already likely to have written artifacts of decisions and conversations”

I wish this matched my experience at all. So much is transmitted only in one-on-one Zoom calls

I use an LLM to brainstorm for a creative writing project. Mostly I ignore its suggestions! but, somehow having the chatter helps me see what I am trying to say

well if the marginal value of labor goes to zero, only those with capital will be able to survive. we may need to think about what kinds of redistribution are socially acceptable.

Ward Cunningham (inventor of the Wiki) spent some time trying to invent a transclusion-first wiki, where everyone had their own wiki-space and used transclusion socially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Wiki

it never quite took off

kinda hope there won’t be and we all retire to leisure

huh. I’m aware of this author for other reasons - he’s popular among some carbon-capture enthusiasts. This… colors my opinion.

the MCP spec as it stands today is pretty half-baked. It’s pretty clear that the first edition was trying to emulate STDIO over HTTP, but that meant holding open a connection indefinitely. The new revision tries to solve this by letting you hold open as many connections as you want! but that makes it vague about message delivery ordering when you have multiple streams open. There even seems to be part of the spec that is logically impossible - people are wrestling with it in the GitHub issues.

which is to say: I’m not sure it actually wins, technically, over the OpenAI/OpenAPI idea from last year, which was at least easy to understand

we will not

I actually think we’ve passed peak urban density and people will de-densify to have better access to electrification

yes exactly, that is the kind of success that prevents you from believing that the next big thing is going to worse-is-better you out of the market

yes it was smart to keep a landline phone for a few years