kristianc

This hasn't been my experience. I'm finding that I'm spending less time on maintenance precisely because it's less tedious to maintain as I go now, and because the "make a small change across 400 files" type thing which would have seemed impossible before can be chewed through by an agent in a couple of hours.

The future might have more outages then.

... or by textbooks, Stack Overflow, senior engineers, code review. How many engineers today got their start by building Minecraft mods or even MySpace?

I do think that these pieces sometimes smuggle in a nostalgic picture of how engineers "really" learn which has only ever been partly true.

To think we'd have known about this in advance if they'd just have open sourced Claude Code, rather than them being forced into this embarrassing post mortem. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The article literally draws that distinction in the first paragraph.

Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore. That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the same.

Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival.

The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.

>AI models are not really effected by that at all.

I don't know about that. More usage means more support, which means more docs and open source projects, wrappers, harnesses built around them etc.

Way less demand to build tooling around open weight models if they remain hobbyist.

If it goes as well as the 'open' / federated social network alternatives of the 2010s, I wouldn't count on it.

We've officially come full circle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Draconian law gets introduced, public outcry ensues. Oh okay we will make it six months then. This is how civil liberties get eroded.

Theo's t3code does a lot of this for free I think. Interested to know if it uses the same trick for accessing Claude without violating their TOS.

https://t3.codes

Yeah, definitely not the "straight in" one...

> One of our first customers is a staffing firm that searched for a scheduling solution for almost eight years. Their coordinators manage hundreds of candidate-client interviews where each side needs separate email threads, separate Zoom accounts to avoid double-booking links, and calendar invites connecting parties who never directly communicate. A client reschedules one interview and it cascades into four others. A candidate responds on SMS to a thread that started on email. Vela solved this in just 10 minutes of onboarding.

My very strong advice would be to pick one of these use cases and niche hard. Multi channel, multi party scheduling isnt a problem anyone thinks they have (even if they actually do). They wake up thinking they have 40 truck driver shifts to fill tomorrow.

Deputy cleaned up by going after rota scheduling for independent coffee shops. Logistics sounds like a great shout. Each have messy edge cases which you can develop a strong solution around but you'll get crushed trying to go horizontal in this space. Best of luck!

In an ideal world it would work something like that. In reality in the UK the pattern more often is:

1. New power introduced after crisis or scandal, justified as exceptional and targeted

2. Enforcement is patchy or politically difficult. Police either lack resources or big tech platforms don't want to or can't play ball

3. Failure or abuse case becomes public and reported in chattering classes tabloid press

4. Response is not "use existing powers better" but expand powers, broaden scope, lower initial 'targeted' thresholds

5. Cycle repeats

Issue is compounded because you have politicians who will either not understand things or pretend not to understand things.

Sure, but it comes down to framing.

If you asked 'Would you support weakening encryption in messaging apps if it helped catch some criminals, even though it could make it easier for hackers to read your messages and steal your passwords, bank details, or personal photos?' I'd bet a large proportion of the general population would say no.

But that side never gets explored, or there's an assumption that there's some way of only letting the good guys access the information.

It's never been controversial, it's the BBC. doing it's usual job of laundering the arguments the establishment want you to hear for domestic consumption.

I always assume people have lost the argument when they resort to giving people comedy names, regardless of what else they've said.

OP is right. Surely we will all go back to on premise any day now.

MySpace never had close to a billion users.

> Once you have multiple agents across multiple sessions generating code in production, you hit the same observability problems every other distributed system hits: tracing, attribution, debugging failures across runs.

This has been the story for every trend empowering developers since year dot. Look back and you can find exactly the same said about CD, public cloud, containers, the works. The 'orchestration' (read compliance) layers always get routed around. Always.

The thing that keeps on getting glided past in most discussions of this is the distinction between systems of record and systems of workflow.

If you're SAP, Workday, Procore, maybe even HubSpot, you have a shout. Growth won't be fast, but you're okay for now and might even be able to position yourself as an integrator.

If you've raised large rounds and you're just a system of workflow that won't trigger a years long political fight to get you out - a document review startup, good luck.

No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.

Every one of them individually seems like a weird place to draw the line. Social fabric and the ties that bond matter.

"Does Britain really need?" has been responsible for the gutting of so much of what used to make Britain a nice place to live over the last 20 years. You can say she same about public libraries, local bus routes, civic architecture, arts funding, youth services, maintenance budgets. The damage has been incalculable.

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” - Christopher Hitchens

Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.

The value of any traditional RSU is to treat it as a nice bonus if you get it, so not so much different from any other stock or option package.

I find it funny that we see complaints about why software quality has got worse alongside people advocating to choose objectively risky AWS regions for career risk and blame minimisation reasons.

And who cleans up the mess when OTAs miss emails, get passenger details wrong, display outdated prices or add markup through algorithmic pricing? Ludicrously one sided take.