theahura

Wonder why this got flagged

that is my personal belief, yes

I have some friends adjacent to gov who are actually looking into a token tax on the premise that we tax income / labor. I think it's a great idea. That said, I think if you fast forward 20 years, it is fairly likely that cost per token is going to be on the floor

> It is not better than me, and will never be better than me, at my profession.

from the article:

> The only remaining fundamental disagreement between people who think AI is a normal technology and those that don’t is the belief that the AI can do everything a human can do, but better.

it is obviously able to make advancements outside of human knowledge, like navier stokes

First, what an incredible article. Just an extremely concise and clear explanation of all of the problems with AI right now.

Second, wow, the list of signatories is like a whos-who of mathematicians.

Third, I love the clearly intentional use of ‘alignment/misalignment’ language, applied to targeting the entire industry instead of AI in particular. I’ve said in the past that optimizers are substrate agnostic. Companies and governments can be misaligned, just in the same way AI can.

Fourth, I'm not sure that we can stop the optimization machines. Not the LLMs, I mean the incentives that lead to companies implementing dark patterns, lying about addiction, securing effective monopolies through downright shady behavior, and generally trying to jailbreak the system instead of improve it

for the most part skills are so portable that fiddling with moving them around is not that hard. The really hard thing is the 'is this skill worth the bits that its written with'. I'd say 99.99% of skills out there are so bad, you're actually worse off for installing them

standards are good though, we should make plugins for our skillsets so theyre easier for some folks

yea of course. tldr: we set up a vm that the agent can run in, anything you can do on your computer you can ~do in the system.

feel free to dm me, amol at noriagentic dot com

i get that there is a vocal contingent yelling about kids using AI tools, and frankly I also think things like character.ai are potentially really harmful, but this is like saying you have to be age verified to use google

do you mean like a cloud agent provider? What we're working on at noriagentic.com may be relevant -- you can fire events from slack/web/cli to kick off an agent in a box and talk to it as if it was running local

Yea, we like obra/superpowers a lot. For folks who are unaware, see: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

the original version of our high autonomy skillset was a fork of obra's superpowers back in...October? November? of last year. Whenever it first came out.

I think basically all of the best skillsets implement SPACE, including superpowers, mattpocock skills, get shit done, etc. There are aesthetic reasons why you might prefer one over the other, but candidly I think any of them will get the job done and are strictly better than not using one of the SPACE skillsets.

(I haven't played with the latest version of superpowers. My hunch is that on average our skillsets have better compliance rates with the models because of some of the ways in which we write the skills themselves, but its a hunch)

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

First, a lot of people in thread are saying you don't need skills. This is pretty wrong. There is a lot of alpha in using any set of skills that implements SPACE (search, plan, assert, code, evaluate). See: https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/agentics-using-meta...

Second, we share all of our sets of skills in a purpose built registry: https://noriskillsets.dev/ you can use any of our public skillsets from there. If you're on a team you can also sign up to get your own private registry. Makes organization much easier.

Finally, for local development, we use this CLI to manage skills (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets). This is a tool that lets you bundle skills into groups, and then switch between those groups. So for eg if I'm making a slide deck I'll use an admin skillset, and for coding I'll use a swe skillset, and for debugging I'll use a debugging skillset.

We do keep tinkering with our skillsets, but not very much. I don't get the need to adjust things for every model release, doesn't seem necessary for us in practice

honored to welcome another nori* business, alongside

- nori.ai (ai health coach)

- heynori.com (ai family hub)

- nori inc (soil based carbon sequestration)

- noriagentic.com (that's us, ai cloud infrastructure)

and my personal favorite

- nori.co (makers of 'The Nori Cloud' a clothes steamer, as seen on Oprah's Favorite Things)

i'm sorry to say that besides like the first paragraph, this article is mostly ai slop. i thought that we mostly weren't allowing ai written content on hn? (@dang whats the policy here?)

aside from that, i think that this is overcomplicating a more basic idea. You should have agents that leave docs behind in your codebase, and those docs should be localized to the structure of your code, but you do not need any fancy format or manifest.

We've had a lot of success with having the agents write and maintain a docs.md file in each folder, and requiring that they both read and update that file whenever they make a change in that folder

If you are using any of the agents without config, do yourself a favor and invest in any config library that implements SPACE[0]

It will save you a ton of time and you won't be tied to fable costs

[0] Search, Plan, Assert, Code, Evaluate. Obras superpowers, Matt pococks skills, and the nori high autonomy skillset all have this built in

(soft plug: in case this is really exciting to you but you don't want to own all of this infra for your company, check out our "software factory" factory over at noriagentic.com)

in case you are interested in ~this for your team, but dont want to either be vendor-locked to grok or give mecha-hitler extra money, consider trying what we've been building at https://noriagentic.com/ (or any of the other startups working in the same space)

This feels like scheming behavior to me, especially damning that OpenAI didn't catch it for so long

i know this doesnt take away from the point of the article, but the whole thing is written by ai which just immediately makes me distrust it

Next time I'll hedge more

And here's what people don't know: its not poetry, it's passion -- and that makes the difference.

> A freedom sucking job (lots of travel to places I don't want to be) or 90h weeks is a no for me.

Actually I think you agree with the central premise of the article, even if the examples didn't resonate

> Interestingly, two words that aren't mentioned even once in this entire article: "co-founder" and "hire"

I actually debated including this!

But I ended up not doing so, because your co-founder and the people you hire will end up being more aligned to you (your values, judgements, whatever) than even the market you end up in, especially early on. And if they don't, that's an even bigger problem. Founder breakups are the #1 cause of startup death.

Also, agreed, all of this is out the window once you _already_ have the ability to hire a bunch of other people, but that rarely happens right out the gate, which is where most of my interest lies

> straw man examples

not straw men, all real but unnamed examples (also not really what a straw man is but whatever)

> Perhaps you could submit something you're curious about, instead?

Hi, author here. I write about what I'm curious about. I don't think it's promotion (both in spirit or letter) to share what I am curious about. I hate just linking to <openai blog / anthropic blog / karpathy twitter / tech crunch / engadget> without any commentary, since that has very low value-above-replacement.

I'm curious why you went into my posting history -- do you do that for every post?

[EDIT] to be clear this isnt written by AI, despite a few people seemingly tripped up by it. Check pangram if you doubt

Let's spend $100 billion + on Iran, but also cancel student funding because don't you know the budget is too high?

> Do you really want to make the case that the Federal government should fund these?

No, but I don't think means testing is a better alternative. You and I both know that this is a wedge to punish perceived political enemies, as much as you know that the total number of people who graduate with a degree in "somatic body work" is such a small fraction of people as to be negligible

> Nationally, about 10,600 to 10,700 students graduate annually with a degree or certificate in the broader category of Somatic Bodywork & Therapeutic Services. The vast majority (over 10,500) specialize in Massage Therapy, while purely focused Somatic Bodywork programs see much smaller cohorts, averaging roughly 40 to 50 graduates per year across all US institutions. (From Gemini)

This is kinda like saying we should get rid of encryption because a few people may use it for bad things, or that we should require identification before anyone can get on the Internet because some people may be hurt by it

Education isn't a binary, so I'm not sure why we should arbitrarily draw the line at highschool as we become richer as a nation

Yes we should also do this

> There is no evidence that students were actually doing this in any significant numbers.

premature optimization is the root of all evil. Seems like we shouldve actually shown that kids would do that before putting it into law