nvader

Although this isn't my own article, I wanted to share it because we refer to it often at Imbue because we have an internal system inspired by it. One remarkable side-effect I've discovered of a ratchet system is the increased code quality you get from agents, once you build your workflow to respect them.

I have no qualms about adding patterns like 'interior mutability' in Rust to a ratchet, and forbidding front-line coding agents from incrementing the counter. Then when a feature truly requires it, they can request their parent coordinator agent to bump the count, which gives it a chance to approve or deny the request.

This also gives us the ability to run clean-up agents on the codebase in the background. They are tasked with finding unreasonable instances of the failing ratchets (our ratchet tool spits out file and line numbers), and attempting to fix them.

An early iteration I was mostly amused (and slightly frustrated) to see a cleanup agent stuck in a loop as it tried to clean up `expect()` calls by converting them into `unwrap()`s, which were also forbidden. Then we would see the `unwrap()`s and attempt to fix them by converting them into `expect()`s.

At a previous org, Boolean arguments could be toggled with the [no] prefix. The default for dry-run could be set to True, and then you had to type:

``` --nodry-run ```

Cut to, a new engineer asking me "Who is Nodry?"

Greenspun's tenth rule in action!

Thank you for this comment.

I'm starting my rusty journey and I'm only a few months in. With the rise of autogenerated code, it's paradoxically much harder to go slow and understand the fundamentals.

Your comment is reassuring to read.

Every programmer who I know works with AI has accumulated a CLAUDE.md file full of lines starting with:

> You MUST NOT use interior mutability. > NEVER name variables after my ex > (Extremely important) UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES must you EVER EVER DO THE VERY NAUGHTY BAD THING.

Most of us are disappointed when eventually the LLM suffers from context rot, or comes up with a trace like,

"THE VERY NAUGHTY BAD THING is already done, it wasn't added by me in this iteration" (Narrator: It was) "So I'll just commit and hope no-one notices".

What do you provide in the way of evidence that your particular bag of "never evers" is actually working?

This is a very intriguing experiment!

I'll be following along, and I'm curious what kind of harness you'll put on TOP of Claude code to avoid it stalling out on "We have planted 16/20 fields so far, and irrigated 9/16. Would you like me to continue?"

I'd also like to know what your own "constitution" is regarding human oversight and intervention. Presumably you wouldn't want your investment to go down the drain if Claude gets stuck in a loop, or succumbs to a prompt injection attack to pay a contractor 100% of it's funds, or decides to water the fields with Brawndo.

How much are you allowing yourself to step in, and how will you document those interventions?

The source code is available here: https://github.com/danverbraganza/hex-do-cube

What if we all Venmo'd Tim Apple 5 bucks so he wouldn't be forced to do this?

Paragraph two of the article is:

> This means the only differentiator between organic results and the promoted ad is the presence of the small ‘Ad’ banner next to the app icon.

If it's that easy to fail to notice a paragraph, how much easier would it be to miss just the word 'Ad'?

Now, this makes me think of a thing I never knew I wanted: Plasma Pong, but in the terminal.

I share your sense that there is an unsettling in the balance of the world order at present. However, I completely disagree that non-violence has no place in the absence, and I enter into evidence the Satyaagraha movement in British India in the interwar period, especially the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.

For just one example, see his response to the Massacre of Jallianwalla Bagh, which happened around the time of the end of WWI.

https://www.mkgandhi.org/storyofg/chap18.php

Non-violence formed a backbone of the Indian independence movement until independence was achieved at the close of WWII in 1947.

Haha, but in all seriousness Adamantium poisoning is no joke...

Just make sure you return interfrastically.

It's already become a veritable Times Square of advertising. We have a windows PC in the office to play DDR, and the "Live Home Screen" or whatever used to be the Desktop looks like MSN! Live or the Yahoo Homepage.

Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.

And your suggestion is that they go to 4chan or reddit, over, say Googling for advice? Or even talking to the librarian?

A Danver Braganza Extravaganza -

https://danverbraganza.com/

Yes. With youth comes a lot of zeal along with a lack of respect for the established ways of doing things. Having convinced myself that Markdown was "better" than ReST, I couldn't see why anyone would disagree with me.

Learning is a process.

I think this is definitely a step in the right direction, and is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. Thank you!

`llm` gives my tool a standard bin to call to invoke completions, and configuring and managing it is the user's responsibility.

If more tools started expecting something like this, it could become a defacto standard. Then maybe the OS would begin to provide it.

At the start of the game, qRook - king - kRook all store the location e1.

If the king moves (say we're playing the Bongcloud), qR and kR get set back to their original squares, a1 and h1. Now if the King slides back, castling is off the board.

It's not a typical day for me, but I sent 0 emails (Gmail is my standard) but edited 2 Docs with Markdown.

I think there is another article waiting to be written, why ReStructured Text lost.

I know that in my younger years I would get a lot of flak for converting .rst files into .md when I joined projects.

(As I got older I just stopped seeing .rst that much)

Seconded. @tomraberbach, today in conversation someone mentioned Paul Buchheit's invention of Gmail as a 20% project. The next time, I'll mention you!

I'm curious which startup, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

For reciprocity, I work at Imbue, and we can also attest to the real work complexities of this domain.

Disclosure, I do work for Josh, and I can tell you that he's thought quite deeply about the negative implications of the agents that are coming. Among enumerating the ways in which AI agents will transform knowledge work, this points out the ways which we might come to regret.

> Even if this plays out over 20 or 30 years instead of 10 years, what kind of world are we leaving for our descendants?

> What should we be doing today to prepare for (or prevent) this future?

Is there a Linux-y standard brewing?

Previous discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368797

I will take the bait and selectively flame the use of "f. ex" for "for example", when the standard e.g. is available.

Thought-provoking article, nonetheless!

Answering my own question after a brief wiki walk from most (referenced in another comment) -> pagers -> Terminal Pager.

`emacs -nw -e "(view-mode)"`

One thing I find myself wanting is an emacs-lite alternative to less/more. Something that would let me page though a file, but use my emacs bindings to search, filter, browse etc. I've already built up my muscle memory, so it would be great if I could reuse it for this purpose.

Thought I'd tag along to this submission and see if anyone has a recommendation?