zingar

This post is a breath of pithy fresh air. A small point made with few words that adds something worthwhile to the conversation.

On topic: maybe I live in a bubble but I'm surprised how many people on LinkedIn expose far behind the curve they are by talking about MCP or RAG or even prompt engineering as if it's a suddenly-new discovery.

This must the most compelling look I’ve seen at how software might work with LLMs doing a ton of heavy lifting.

There’s something kind of amazing here in that having read about property based testing I’m pretty confident I could apply it if I had a good use case.

This is great advice that AI (successfully) tempts me into ignoring.

What happened that made you switch away from contracting?

Yep, this was an issue long before Trump. They’ve just amped up the scale and stopped bothering with the deceit that they know doesn’t bother Americans.

To be clear these projects made it way further than they could have without AI. But any blocker that takes me out of the flow can easily become the thing that ends it. Not even necessarily because it’s a difficult problem, but just because I’m no longer getting that AI high.

The “old normal” described in this article sounds hellish. This sounds like all the worst practices that need to be drummed out of people who arrive not knowing what effective engineering looks like.

There’s no loss if all of this changes dramatically, there’s plenty of real work to do.

But honest question: where is this normal?

I have multiple side projects that I would never have contemplated building before but whose utility now exceeds the much lower cost to build.

I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get.

In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain is still the practical option compared to the motivation and effort needed to maintain another dependency.

What’s the difference between a pattern and an abstraction?

The rugby player, absolutely not, I know the sport well. But interestingly this fictional player did play for my local team.

The neurologist I could believe exists somewhere in the world with the same last name.

I love a long form programming deep dive. I have questions, probably basic ones that belong in undergrad CS but it’s been … a while.

1. Can someone remind me why it was so important/intentional at the start of the language that every object has identity? 2. Why is it important that we not synchronize on these value objects?

I love the way this starts with using emacs badly since 2008. I start my own shorter emacs story similarly: “I’ve been using emacs for 10 years, so I’m only a beginner“.

Interesting. I started on spacemacs and never left. My spacemacs is super pimped for the things I want. It feels like if I rolled my own I would end up with something like spacemacs, but not as good.

So I guess you and others here have had the experience of building something that was your own that felt better than the distro?

Bahaha apparently only in their hallucinations. I’m not a professional rugby player or a neurologist.

It would matter a lot if there were 5 people reading/writing code or 100.

Is this “hacker news”-esque in terms of being a social bookmarking site? I don’t see much by way of the same topics, and don’t think the difference is only whether it’s Indy or not.

It’s reasonable to say that there are things like discovery and validation that are necessary for every startup (to succeed) and that some techniques for these can be automated.

That we can describe something like “validation” in the abstract and automate some part of it says nothing about whether it’s worthwhile. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that anyone pays for that doesn’t meet this description. Why should being a founder be special or different?

If this is true why am I hearing so much from “AI startups” about how they have big plans to hire?

100 feels low given I just saw dependabot do 8 in one hour. No AI required!

It matters a lot what size the PRs are, and this varies wildly from place to place. I spoke to someone who instituted a “no PRs over 500 lines” rule. I would refuse to even read something that big unless it was just a find and replace or boilerplate.

If I’m reading right you used to pay more for Claude but now deepseek has replaced that higher tier subscription. Do you mind my asking what you were paying before?

We just agreed on our team that we’re not posting AI-generated text into comms with humans.

Enjoyable list but I’m not sure the AlphaGo documentary counts as pop culture :).

It’s interesting how people talk about vi vs emacs, can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.

I agree with the main point but this misses something crucial:

> why wouldn’t you use it to deliver more value to your customers, faster? That should show up as MAU, conversion, revenue

Most roadmaps are full of garbage and would be better off being deleted. You get very few truly useful new features in a year.

To paraphrase ESR: the value to your customers is in them being able to know that can rely on your product still operating next year, not in those 20 new features.

Or to think about it another way, maybe block will be better off with fewer developers, but only if they produce sufficiently FEWER features so that they’re forced to prioritize.

I thought we were very close until recently but I’ve just seen a long string of very promising openings from myself and others turn into “yeh dunno, it doesn’t work, I gave up”.

The effort to start is way down and drives new demand for software (at least in my own portfolio of side projects) but the effort to keep going is still above this threshold.

It was obvious hyperbole. I can believe that there are many companies where the boss heard about MCP and put it on a roadmap before anthropic decided that it wasn’t a good idea… and now the team is implementing this in the name of “we need to do some AI”

GraphQL also allows the LLM to DOS your service

Can you not just install/ restrict the available CLIs in the same way you do with MCPs?

Or what else am I missing about why MCP is more secure than a CLI?

That sounds intuitively right but breaks down when you ask “inefficient at what?”. Are you efficient with CPU cycles or efficient with human working memory?

Edit: I lost the context that this is about building devtools where you can’t just throw more hardware at the problem. But perhaps my answer still explains the reality: anthropic builds Claude with Claude so Claude needs to be easy to build with Claude.

Easier to read for humans is easy to read for LLMs. A more expressive language will bring about fewer misunderstandings when you apply stochastic tools like LLMs.

Just be sure you don’t choose something heavier/slower that is not more expressive.

The post talks about LLM+human contributions being recognized in some different category from human-only. But is it possible to spot the difference between the two?