davidpapermill

I'm not sure it's completely dead.

We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective.

So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude.

I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.

Don't do a lot of technical work nowadays, but tailwind is still my go-to. Vanilla CSS just doesn't have nice ergonomics.

With AI I guess you could skip it, but I like to understand the code.

This isn’t true. Women have regular smear tests and there’s also the midlife MOT every 5 years, to give but two examples.

When someone is moved to Chair at their startup it’s usually a gentle way to change leadership.

I’d guess Google’s execs are unhappy with the way they’ve been left behind in LLMs.

The position at Anthropic seemed to be that LLMs were not the way forward.

They may prove to be correct over the long term, but commercially that view is “wrong”.

It’s a divide between a research oriented and commercial point of view.

For DeepMind, this is what happens when you take the money. Very rational to do so at the time, but it does have inevitable long term consequences.

For Google, it’s repeating the same mistake they made before: they should be taking the long view and looking beyond the tech we have today to leapfrog their competitors. But tbh I’m not sure such a behemoth can do that (I have no idea how Steve Jobs managed to do that). They’d have been better to reallocate some of the capex to letting Demis do his thing.

Another way of putting it: this is the opposite of “founder mode.”

I think what you’re missing is the long term trend.

Google’s cloud business looks great. I’ve always thought they should have completely focused on cloud - a company full of excellent engineers would always win there.

But its main income stream is advertising, and AI is an existential threat. Google is far behind Anthropic and OpenAI, so right now their advertising business is “default dead”, so to speak.

The company won’t die, but without a radical change in velocity it will be a shadow of its former self.

I’m not so sure - architecture matters, efficiency matters, extensibility matters, and all are impacted by language choice.

If we had developed our tech in Python we’d be a world of hurt now as we scale.

I’m very suspicious of this objection, because when Claude first landed the same people now saying “code is not the bottleneck” were saying “the generated code doesn’t work.” Smacks of moving goalposts.

The only solid objection to “AI is going replace developers” is “AI is an accelerant.” It helps developers move faster. I haven’t seen anywhere it has fully replaced developers.

Whether this leads to a large number of job losses depends on whether you think we can increase software output by the same factor as the acceleration and still be profitable. I think we can, latent software demand is extremely high. I also think we’re nearing the limit of capability with current models.

Situation could change if more advanced models emerge, but some of the more foreseeable advances probably have compute requirements beyond today’s hardware.

Not so much due to length of time, but because of the Opus shockwave than fell within that period.

Yes, it can.

Yes, Manchester has a good collection but the exhibits are sadly lacking on technical details, be warned.

For this reason, I always point out that toolmaking was an essential and often forgotten part of Manchester’s Industrial Revolution.

Thanks, that's really helpful.

What do you think happens in terms of testing/reviewing going forward? I'd really appreciate your thoughts on that.

I'm afraid law and morality are two separate concepts. You make a good point.

I've heard something along the lines of "Claude is like a compiler: source code is the new object code, you don't look at that anymore" many times.

And I don't really think this is true. Compilers are usually deterministic, and whilst we can find edge cases, it's nothing like an AI agent writing all the code for you.

I think you have two choices, given the Claude is a code generator and not a compiler: (a) you review most or all of code to make sure it makes sense, or (b) you trust but verify via a strong test suite, potentially also created by Claude.

The problem with (a) is that you lose a lot of the speed-up. The problem with (b) is that you have no human oversight and the code may be incomplete, badly designed, or plain wrong.

Currently we review all code because correctness is extremely important to what we do, but that comes at a cost.

I don't know what the answer is here, in general. Does trust build over time? Do the models just get so good we can trust them to make zero mistakes?

Keynote has probably the best UX of any software I’ve ever used.

Yes I agree, they’re an alien kind of intelligence.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t reason.

Can you give me one example that works on Claude right now?

I'm never sure whether this indicates "no reasoning present" or you've just hit an odd behaviour in the AI such that its reasoning fails. For example, you present a problem in a way that's dissimilar to the way problems are presented in its training set. That doesn't mean it's not reasoning, just it can only reason correctly in some circumstances.

> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning.

What would a frontier API have to be able to do to satisfy you?

I think a big question is whether any of these labs can produce a model that is _ahead_ of Anthropic and OpenAI.

A related question is how much they're dependent on the APIs of Anthropic and OpenAI to achieve their results - whether through distillation or other uses.

If these models are derivative of Anthropic/OpenAI I would expect performance to be more narrow and progress to be limited.

We use US models for everything in practice, but we are looking at open-source models right now. So it may just be a turn of phrase hiding the reality. I can't imagine anywhere near 80% are relying on open-source as their primary models.

I don’t agree. I think businesses including SaaS are not primarily their tech, but are mostly composed of other functions: sales, marketing, customer success, product management, strategy etc. The value is actually more in these other components than in the code.

That AI number is a gross underestimate. It’s nearly that for this year alone. Wildly off.

Hadn't heard of it! Site here: https://rubyllm.com/

This looks really nice. Snippet from site:

chat = Chat.create! model: "claude-sonnet-4"

chat.ask "What's in this file?", with: "report.pdf"

Thanks, would really like to read the blog post.

Are you using any of the major agentic frameworks (Mastra, LangSmith etc)? Or is the AI harness etc entirely custom-built?

Upvote for you.

I think "Your Art" tagline is confusing - I thought it was for selling paintings.

Nice, which frameworks are you using? What did you learn from customers?

I'd consider a different name to avoid issues with supabase should you take off.

I wonder if AI agents could developed their own open-source ecosystem.

Some kind of knowledge-sharing seems inevitable, but the question is what shape and form will that take? We've seen wiki's, discussion forums, AI's posting to GitHub.

I feel like knowledge bases for AI will look somewhat different from our past experience.

How will you encourage sharing of solutions? I don't think "social proof for models" will be enough.

Papermill - the document engine for AI. Turn AI content into polished documents using a new document/templating language called Press [1]

It's essentially a high-quality alternative to the HTML-PDF route so many people take for document generation. It's designed as a tool for AI agents.

Something cool we've released - an MCP server makes it possible for models like Claude to design fully-featured documents. We use this internally and some of our customers now use it to quickly build new templates.

Just launched self-serve a few weeks ago. Continuing to develop the typesetter and language behind it.

Press is the language, docs are open [2].

Would love any feedback from folks that have worked on document generation, or people with experience doing HTML->PDF.

[1] https://papermill.io/

[2] https://docs.papermill.io/

This is well-written.

I always thought that the "answer" to programming would be that one day everyone would use Lisp and with awesome tooling and libraries things would be wonderful. In fact, my plan for retirement was to build high-quality libraries for a Lisp language to accelerate this process.

Does the rise of AI bring an end to this dream? Is that, once again, we have solved the problem by adding more cruft? Rather than a superintelligent AI writing in the best programming language available, we're going to just spam lots of Python code until it works?

Does this matter? I don't know, I just wanted a world of elegance.

Love this, thank you. Are you building the mobile app? If you don't, others will.

This is classic NYT puzzle territory.