faizshah

I think when I saw word2vec I realized that semantic meaning can be encoded in machines just from prediction. So then when seq2seq etc came around I saw that this encoding could be used to make increasingly more convincing imitations of thought and language.

I think what wasnt obvious was when Transformers came around it wasn’t obvious that generating text could get comparable results to thinking. So when Chain of Thought etc came around it was really surprising but ReAct arch made it obvious that some control loops would be the next stage.

I think now working with big multi agent systems with Opus 5.5 its clear once we develop the right mainframe-y sorta infra (virtual filesystems, deeper tool permissions, file locking, agent metrics, etc) there is a clear path emerging to what the future of the industry will look like (imo).

It's not just obscurity, it's increasingly difficult to trust the governance and quality of code of any outside library. A lot of deps in code are unnecessary you use maybe 1-10% of the api surface. But since building and maintaining software can be cheaper now it can be better to maintain a 1-5k LOC vibe coded version that meets your security bar than to trust an external party's governance & quality. This has the additional benefit of reconsidering if you even need the dep or if you can reuse something you already have (since you may not want to maintain the lib).

In new software I write these days I limit the number of external dependencies and mostly vibe code anything I need besides the most critical foundational libraries (increasingly I am replacing these as well).

I think this, the supply chain attacks and binary reverse engineering will cause us to go back to thin clients, html over the wire and vibe coded libs instead of external open source deps.

Basically everyone has a sandbox of some sort to run agents inside. Everyone has a registry of some sort for tools. Everyone has a way of running agents inside a sandbox and giving it some tools.

Now the stuff people are coming up with is: how do you do authorization in this model? do you need a full sandbox all the time or can it be a workflow? how do you specify an agent is it a prompt or does it have some kind of control flow structure? How do you coordinate among many running agents?

I would say thats where we are now is there’s loads of people all solving the same problems a bit like when CoreOS, Kube etc. were all competing.

I think I missed why is this faster? What I’m reading here is it’s similar to constrained decoding but I’m not seeing the explanation of why it’s able to get those results.

This thread should be on the first page of every book on microservices.

My take on this is they are a tool to help speed up your work they are not meant to produce finished work. Humans produce finished work. LLM will never be deterministic cause their entire value is that they are generalizable.

This or you just repeat the initial prompt every 200k tokens

I think Elder Scrolls Oblivion was like 80 person core team and 4 years of development and New Vegas was like 70 person dev team and 2 years of development.

But starfield, which was widely criticized by fans, was over 100 people and 8 years development. With the most common criticism from former devs being about the additional management structure and difficulty of communication.

I can’t help but feel there is a lesson there for tech companies where engineering orgs for products are 200+ people when a 20-30 person startup is your top competitor in the vertical.

My favorite is 20th Century Food Court in Last Call BBS. Some of the other games remind me too much of work (I’ve bought all of them including the coincidence card games but I have only beaten this one), whereas this one reminds me of fun times I had making synths in Logic and VCV Rack for fun. Highly recommend!

I always wished they would make a management or simulation game, I think 90% of all programmers play Paradox games or Tycoon games etc. and I know their take on it would be amazing.

Not really if it takes you 15 minutes to write a 50 line function but it takes the AI 90 seconds then you already are at a 10x speedup just for this task.

This (non-yolo mode AI coding) is actually how we used to code in the old days (2023).

As someone who has used multiple vibe coded internal tools: you will care when you use these tools and encounter strange bugs and missing features.

The human touch is visible in the way your features work just like in vibe coded art and games it lacks intention.

Scale to zero is very useful.

When people say “you’re holding it wrong” it tells me they can’t even conceive of a better way of doing it.

The models produce the same slop for everybody, you don’t have a special way of doing it you lack taste and an opinion on your problem domain from lack of research and studying prior work.

If anyone else couldn’t find the working paper link (the readme and conf link didn’t work for me) it’s this one here: https://github.com/antoinezambelli/forge/blob/main/docs/forg...

It won't be an LLM that does it, the entire feature of an LLM is it produces generalizable reasonably "correct" text in response to a context.

The system that makes it have an opinion about good vs bad architecture or engineering sensibilities will be something on top of the transformer and probably something more deterministic than a prompt.

I experimented with vibe coding (not looking at the code myself) and it produced around 10k LOC even after refactors etc.

I rewrote the same program using my own brain and just using ChatGPT as google and autocomplete (my normal workflow), I produced the same thing in 1500 LOC.

The effort difference was not that significant either tbh although my hand coded approach probably benefited from designing the vibe coded one so I had already though of what I wanted to build.

The problem we had with Arcs (and Root) is that we didn’t find the strategy as deep as Dune Imperium. If you think about Dune Imperium, when you make a turn, and even between turns, you are constantly considering reveal power vs card powers vs war power vs resources, and you are making long term strategic decisions vs short term tactical ones vs deck building vs even the order of operations within a turn and round. Every time an opponent makes a move, because the game is so zero sum, you constantly have to pivot your plan if a space is taken, if a war shifts, etc.

When we played Arcs, we found it was much more about making short term tactical decisions, and there wasn’t as much room for that kind of deep long term planning, so the experience felt less competitive and less tense for us.

So we are looking for something that gives a similar player experience of constantly balancing short and long term strategy like that, but without going all the way to something with very very complex rules like Twilight Imperium.

Does that make sense?

I tried a few, the only one that really meshed with me in terms of competitiveness, strategy, constant pivoting and wide decision space is Dune Imperium Uprising. My group started with wingspan which was fun but we ended up hating how much it became just pure chance.

Dune was basically the opposite you have an element of RNG from deckbuilding, you have multi-step planning and if someone else takes your move you have to recalibrate your plan, you can pull off crazy combos and hidden plans with intrigues.

I highly recommend Dune Imperium Uprising for engineers.

Would love if anyone can recommend any game of similar depth. We tried Arcs, root, and some others but couldn’t find anything similarly competitive and deep while not being one of those way too complicated games like twilight imperium or something.

Theres also spellfix1 which is an extension you can enable to get fuzzy search.

And ON CONFLICT which can help dedupe among other things in a simple and performant way.

Personally, if I feel like you vibe coded your SaaS I’m probably not gonna pay for it. You can obviously tell when a project is vibe coded just based on the way it looks, the weird bugs you see and the poor documentation.

There’s definitely a market for good looking UI that actually works and stands out from the vibe coded junk. Artisanal corn fed UI I guess.

Dairy in the UK also tastes far better than in the US. British people often comment how hard it is to deal with the dairy in the US which tastes like water in comparison.

Rails 8.1 and ruby 3 are also very surprisingly fast, and coming back to an “omakase” framework is honestly a breath of fresh air especially now that with AI tools you can implement a lot of stuff from scratch instead of using deps.

I heard that the environment there is 996 with high turnover. So you might be paid double in comparison to a FAANG job but you work double as well. (This was about dev positions not researchers)

Anyone know if that’s true? I only heard it second hand.

One really useful usecase for Garage for me has been data engineering scripts. I can just use the S3 integration that every tool has to dump to garage and then I can more easily scale up to cloud later.

The parallel agent model is better for when you know the high level task you want to accomplish but the coding might take a long time. You can split it up in your head “we need to add this api to the api spec” “we need to add this thing to the controller layer” etc. and then you use parallel agents to edit just the specific files you’re working on.

So instead of interactively making one agent do a large task you make small agents do the coding while you focus on the design.

Not to be overly negative but I’m kinda disappointed with this and I have been a JetBrains shill for many years.

I already use this workflow myself, just multiple terminals with Claude on different directories. There’s like 100 of these “Claude with worktrees in parallel” UIs now, would have expected some of the common jetbrains value adds like some deep debugger integration or some fancy test runner view etc. The only one I see called out is Local History and I don’t see any fancy diff or find in files deep integration to diff or search between the agent work trees and I don’t see the jetbrains commit, shelf, etc. git integration that we like.

I do like the cursor-like highlight and add to context thing and the kanban board sort of view of the agent statuses, but this is nothing new. I would have expected at the least that jetbrains would provide some fancier UI that lets you select which directories or scopes should be auto approved for edit or other fancy fine grained auto-approve permissions for the agent.

In summary it looks like just another parallel Claude UI rather than a Jetbrains take on it. It also seems like it’s a separate IDE rather than built on the IntelliJ platform so they probably won’t turn it into a plugin in the future either.

I agree, for me it’s my current weekend project to try to figure out a dirt cheap and high performance self hosted cloud for hosting stuff.

So I’m still sticking with Route53 cause it’s the least annoying registrar and DNS api, for CDN I’m going with bunny and for dirt cheap object storage I’m going with b2.

Then the fun part is the actual self hosting: I’m going with Garage for my normal self hosted S3 api (b2 is for backups etc.), Scylla for DDB, Spin for super fast Wasm FaaS…

Then this weekend I got deep into trying to build my cloudwatch alternative I think I’m going with dumping logs with vector into b2 and then using quickwit for searching the logs.

Just a fun homelab challenge really.

FYI if you want an s3 + CF analogue setup, b2 is integrated with bunny and allows private buckets: https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-bunny...

I haven’t yet worked out the best cheap VPS/dedicated provider though, project for next weekend.