1,667 karma · joined January 19, 2023
I've been meaning to set up Bazzite on an older desktop.
The unlock here is tmux-based session management for the teammates, with two-way communication using agent inbox. It works very well.
So much this! Nondeterministism in LLMs does not mean you simply "reroll" your prompt and hope for the best; the incremental reprompting is what helps.
Up-to-date comment tallies are hard, since the summaries are only updated a few times a day.
Look at MDN, the gold standard for web docs, on Grid: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Grid...
That's just the basic concepts!
Now look at how easy MUI's Grid is: https://mui.com/material-ui/react-grid/
Atomics vs Usability. Everyone needs CSS. No one needs to *write* CSS.
Complex legacy refactoring + Systems with poor documentation or unusual patterns + Architectural decisions requiring deep context: These go hand in hand. LLMs are really good at pulling these older systems apart, documenting, then refactoring them, tests and all. Exacerbated by poor documentation of domain expectations. Get your experts in a room weekly and record their rambling ideas and history of the system. Synthesize with an LLM against existing codebase. You'll get to 80% system comprehension in a matter of months.
Novel problem-solving with high stakes: This is the true bottleneck, and where engineers can shine. Risk assessment and recombination of ideas, with rapid prototyping.
Please allow me to rant to someone who can actually do something about this.
Vertex AI has been a nightmare to simply sign up, link a credit card, and start using Claude Sonnet (now available on Vertex AI).
The sheer number of steps required for this (failed) user journey is dizzying:
* AI Studio, get API key
* AI Studio, link payment method: Auto-creates GCP property, which is nice
* Punts to GCP to actually create the payment method and link to GCP property
* Try to use API key in Claude Code; need to find model name
* Look around to find actual model name, discover it is only deployed on some regions, thankfully, the property was created on the correct region
* Specify the new endpoint and API key, Claude Code throws API permissions errors
* Search around Vertex and find two different places where the model must be provisioned for the account
* Need to fill out a form to get approval to use Claude models on GCP
* Try Claude Code again, fails with API quota errors
* Check Vertex to find out the default quota for Sonnet 4.5 is 0 TPM (why is this a reasonable default?)
* Apply for quota increase to 10k tokens/minute (seemingly requires manual review)
* Get rejection email with no reasoning
* Apply for quota increase to 1 token/minute
* Get rejection email with no reasoning
* Give up
Then I went to Anthropic's own site, here's what that user journey looks like:
* console.anthropic.com, get API key
* Link credit card
* Launch Claude Code, specify API key
* Success
I don't think this is even a preferential thing with Claude Code, since the API key is working happily in OpenCode as well.
> SIMA 2 Reasoning:
> The user wants me to go to the ‘tomato house’. Based on the description ‘ripe tomato’, I identify the red house down the street.
You are better off asking it a write a script to invoke itself N times across the task list.
I used to think this, but no longer sure.
Large-scale tasks just grind to a halt with more modern LLMs because of this perception of impassable complexity.
And it's not that they need extensive planning, the LLM knows what needs to be done (it'll even tell you!), it's just more work than will fit within a "session" (arbitrary) and so it would rather refuse than get started.
So you're now looking at TODOs, and hierarchical plans, and all this unnecessary pre-work even when the task scales horizontally very well (if it just jumped into it).
You are better off allowing your overworked neural pathways some much-needed rest.