prescriptivist

What boundaries does this 8GB etcd limit cut across? We've been using Tekton for years now but each pipeline exists in its own namespace and that namespace is deleted after each build. Presumably that kind of wholesale cleanup process keeps the DB size in check, because we've never had a problem with Etcd size...

We have multiple hundreds of resources allocated for each build and do hundreds of builds a day. The current cluster has been doing this for a couple of years now.

Most guides to wringing productivity out of these higher level Claude code abstractions suffer from conceptual and wall-of-text overload. Maybe it's unavoidable but it's tough to really dig into these things.

One of the things that bugs me about AI-first software development is it seems to have swung the pendulum of "software engineering is riddled with terrible documentation" to "software engineering is riddled with overly verbose, borderline prolix, documentation" and I've found that to be true of blog and reddit posts about using claude code. Examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1oivjvm/claude_co...

and

https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2025/10/26/claude-skills...

These are thoughtful posts, they just are too damn long and I suspect that's _because_ of AI. And I say this as someone who is hungry to learn as much as I can about these Claude code patterns. There is something weirdly inhumane about the way these walls of text posts or READMEs just pummel you with documentation.

MCPs as a thin layer over existing APIs has lost utility. Custom MCPs for teams that reduces redundant thinking/token consumption and provides more useful context for the agent and decreases mean time to decision making is where MCPs shine.

Something as simple as correlating a git SHA to a CI build takes 10s of seconds and some number of tokens if Claude is utilizing skills (making API calls to the CI server and GitHub itself). If you have an MCP server that Claude feeds a SHA into and gets back a bespoke, organized payload that adds relevant context to its decision making process (such as a unified view of CI, diffs, et. al), then MCP is a win.

MCP shines as a bespoke context engine and fails as a thin API translation layer, basically. And the beauty/elegance is you can use AI to build these context engines.

It's fairly straightforward to build resilient, affordable and scalable pipelines with DAG orchestrators like tekton running in kubernetes. Tekton in particular has the benefit of being low level enough that it can just be plugged into the CI tool above it (jenkins, argo, github actions, whatever) and is relatively portable.

I get the feeling that most people commenting here have only surface level experience with deploying k8s applications. I don't care for helm myself but it's less bad than a lot of other approaches like hand rolling manifests with tools like envsubst and sed.

Kustomize also seems like hell when a deployment reaches a certain level of complexity.

It's a sneaky supply chain threat for docker images. I'm not sure standard container registry tools actively scan for this. Of course you shouldn't be running random untrusted docker images that you find on the internet but it happens all the time in dev envs and in sloppy production environments.

> It isn't? What is stopping companies from building on GPT-OSS or other local models for cheaper? The AI services have no moat.

Right now there is an efficiency/hardware moat. That's why the Stargate in Abilene and corresponding build outs in Louisiana and elsewhere are some of the most intense capex projects from the private sector ever. Hardware and electric production is the name of the game right now. This Odd Lots podcast is really fresh and relevant to this conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqn2XJDcwM

Local models, local agents, local everything and the commodification of LLMs, at least for software eng is inevitable IMO, but there is a lot of tooling that hasn't yet been built for that commodified experience yet. For companies rapidly looking to pivot to AI force multiplication, the superscalers are the answer for now. I think it's a highly inefficient approach for technical orgs, but time will create efficiency. For your joe on the street feeding data into an LLM, then I don't think any of those orgs (think your local city hall, or state DMV) are going to run local models. So there is a captured market to some degree for the the current superscalars.

OpenAI's (and other superscalers) revenue isn't really up for debate, nor is the long term value of their mission/product. The issue (somewhat articulated in this article) is that the superscalers (both public and private) have generated such a massive, unprecedented amount of speculative investment as well as capital expenditure that has left the rest of the economy in the dust (aka minting a mag 7 in less than a decade) that we have a distorted view of the world.

The fear of an AI bubble isn't that AI companies will fail, it's that a downturn in the AI "bubble" will lay bare the underlying bear market that their growth is occluding. What happens then? Nobody knows. Probably nothing good. Personally I think much of the stock market growth in the last few years that seems disconnected with previous trends (see parallel growth betwen gold and equities) is based on retail volume and unorthodox retail patterns (Robinhood, WSB, et. al) that I think conventional historical market analysis is completely unprepared for. At this point everything may go to the moon forever, or it may collapse completely. Either way, we live in a time of little precedence.

This is such a strange take. Ruby Central, for better or worse, is the steward of Rubygems/Bundler. If Mike Perham wants to withdraw his funding because he thinks DHH is a white supremacist, then that's fine. But DHH didn't do that, Perham did.

Arko is not a completely innocent, non-self-interested character here. He has announced a project to end-run the existing rubygems, bundler, etc infrastructure before all this, in the name of "better tooling", but his tooling is solely owned by him and a handful of people that really, really don't like DHH. Controlling this aspect of the ruby toolchain ecosystem is in their own self-interest and overlaps with their deep disdain for the politics and corporate nature of the existing stewards of the ruby toolchain ecosystem. Maybe their approach and stewardship of this fork of the toolchain is more just, secure and equitable, but make no mistake -- they are fighting the same war that DHH and Shopify are, which is who controls the keys to the toolchain. Do you think if Arko, Perham, et. al. had control they would somehow be completely neutral, apolitical stewards of the ecosystem? No! They have made it clear with their money and machinations that they do not want to operate in the same ecosystem as DHH and their politics and ethics are intertwined with their relationship to the ruby community. They are no different than him.

Meanwhile those of us who just want stability are stuck between two factions who claim righteousness and ownership. I wish they all could be deposed and some more mature non-individual foundation could take over.

I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the commercials I think was from Facebook (IIRC, it could have been Google...). It was directed toward students, so I'm pretty sure it was an organic ad, but there were several aspects to it that felt fairly personalized to me (bicycling and outdoor related) that I actually wondered if it was generated on the fly using an LLM.

FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good.

My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.

Are you saying that a company like Colossal has nothing to offer to the field of genetic biocontrol or are you saying there is nothing of interest in the field?

> Realizing this, these types will give up on re-introducing the original organism and instead create a bioengineered version that can survive in the changed world. I fear this path will not end well for us.

Developing and injecting genetic resiliency into existing populations isn't the worst thing in the world. Additionally adding animals that can only reproduce sterile offspring would be an amazing tool for dealing with invasives. That kind of practical work very easily follows from this R&D.

Like the average observer who says the current conditions are really just the old conditions born anew, you are conveniently ignoring rate of change and its destabilizing effects.

Exactly, if you are doing copilot driven dev, then you are in a feedback loop with the agent and it's easier to have multiplexed ongoing "conversations" with the agent across discrete checkouts of the same codebase than it is to ask an agent to make a change, commit, checkout another branch, wait for the context to update/become aware, ask for a change, agree to it, commit, then switch back to another context.

It's the kind of thing git worktrees was made for.

Guess what: This has all changed with LLMs. The impact of the average developer is proportional to the amount of code they ship in a world of copilots (key word is "ship", not write) and that's why some of the staff engineers I work with have 3 concurrent Cursor projects for the same codebase in flight at the same time. These are some of the best engineers I've ever worked with and they have drank the cool-aid of volume over quality.

I'm keen to this because I maintain our CI systems and have become acutely aware of the overhead of hallucinations breaking our CI tooling in pathological ways that draw me in to diagnose. A year ago I would have to log into our CI Kubernetes cluster to diagnose a busted build that doesn't self-report failure maybe... once a month. These days it's a couple times a week. LLM based dev is both amazing in the legit force multiplier it adds to writing code as well as the way it introduces some of the most incoherent and silly ways it breaks existing conventions.

I guess the headline is correct in that we are not hired to write code anymore, instead we are hired to shepherd code now, and a lot of it. And a lot of this code we shepherd is good enough but some amount of it is bad enough to break existing processes, but that is secondary to the volume and velocity we perceive from LLM code gen.

As an aside, I believe Nikola was at one time one of the more significant commercial users of the Crystal programming language. I wonder if they were/still major contributors to that ecosystem.

> Yet the coast of Maine is mostly parceled off to old money.

I live half a mile from the Maine coast and when I look around I don’t see any old money in my neighborhood. If you are talking about literally a house overlooking the ocean, that’s always been prized real estate.

In Maine I believe postings need to be no more than 100ft apart but a painted purple stripe will suffice, not sure if that rule is in VT.

Maine is changing and every year more land is posted but in the inland areas people still look down on those who post. I can’t imagine the institutional and corporate owned tracts ever being posted. I hunt on some land trust land which requires some perfunctory, automated permissions. I spend a lot of time in western Maine and the North Maine Woods and they are truly my favorite places.

I understand for people like the parent who come from the west where they have BLM lands and all the attendant freedoms looking down on all that private land in the northeast and as someone who lives in Maine, that’s perfectly fine with me as I know what it’s really like here.

I'm glad no one heeded this for techno-viking.

Dudes on a cycle with big red swollen faces and gynecomastia aren't going to run 8 minute miles. HGH maybe but that's a different class of PED for different reasons.

Watching this video is a reminder that if we could just enforce a minimum level of cardiovascular health via something like a three mile run time limitation or something like that the police force would naturally weed out people with poor impulse control and probably be overall a more humane and decent force.

Packrafting as it exists now was basically developed in Alaska for this very scenario (downriver floats that you might have to hike in or take a bush plane in to start). High quality packrafts are battle tested and there is a lot of great competition in the industry that has benefitted the consumer.

Do you actually care about what happens on this website or is this just a good chance for you to emerge randomly and make some arch point about how stupid everyone is for falling for this garbage?

Also to clarify Mainers have to reserve and pay for camping spots in Baxter, it just costs less for us. Day use is free. It's a very popular and beautiful place. In my opinion Baxter is the crown jewel of Maine and I'm happy for all of the tourists to fight it out over Acadia.

ahepp is correct, there is Baxter State Park which -- is actually not quite a state park and is instead administered as a quasi-independent concern that adheres to the goals of the original land grant to the state, which is to provide an accessible wilderness area to the people of Maine -- and there is katahdin woods and waters national monument which falls under the purview of the national park service. The katahdin woods and waters national monument is the result of the founder of Burts Bees buying up swaths of privately owned land over the years via a corporation and then ultimately donating that land to the national park service. While this seems like a good thing in general it's complicated by Mainers somewhat unique relationship to recreation on private land and the concept up here of "traditional use" versus a kind of chain reaction of regulated formal use practices that were triggered by the national monument designation.

The two parks border each other in areas and share some waterways.

I'm glad it works for you but man I am peeved that they instituted it in the katahdin woods and waters national monument area of the east branch of the penobscot in maine. People have been just heading down that waterway on trips since time immemorial and it's generally not a problem finding a site, but if it's particularly busy you would pull up and ask someone if they don't mind sharing. I've never turned a person down and I never will, but also I've never paid for a campsite on a river. I feel like paying to book a site just changes the dynamic of a shared waterway so much.

My experience with recreation.gov reservations has been as soon as registration is available for the coming season people will reserve every weekend speculatively and just eat the reservation or cancellation cost if they decide not to go. It really sucks as you have to basically play the game yourself even if you are opposed to it.

> AMA.

Were you aware of YC before attending Lambda (ie, did the association lend credibility to Lambda) or did you find YC after attending?

Agreed. And if you have a rigid tests-are-necessary-to-merge regime you end up finding that the simplest way to write quality tests are simple approaches to implementations.

> Actually doing so breaks the covenant of Data, but an enforced prohibition breaks the language.

Fortunately in my almost 20 years of ruby, dark magic does not survive a reasonable amount of sunlight. Most of the time someone (including me) has written impolite ruby, they know what they are doing and why (laziness 90% of the time) and respond appropriately to a gentle prod to be more polite.