Viewing profile — trjordan

If we define taste as the intuitive act of saying "no, again," then I fully disagree with this whole article. Every AI-frustrated (but LLM-written, sigh) blog post about the loss o…

I like the idea of devtools being open source. I also like them to work, and that's what I value more that philosophical purity. Take his side project, Meat. I've been chewing on t…

Man, it's wild how I have no original thoughts. I've been pulling on this thought this morning, complete with checking in on how CodeSpeak and Tessl are doing. I'll add this link t…

> Claude wasn’t just a compiler here. I never handed off a task and let an agent make a bunch of decisions in order to reduce it to practice. > I’d say that, in all the ways that m…

> Breed: mixed That's a corgi. > Pushinka subsequently became irascible, and "a little nippy" according to Caroline Kennedy, which she attributed to her upbringing in a scientific …

So, we tried feeding the logs back to the LLM, and it mostly produced slop. Lots of decisions nobody cared about. The biggest things that moved the needle were: - Baseline it. We m…

100% important. But what decisions do you care about seeing? The whole point of the agent is to make decisions for you. If you want to make every little detailed decision, just wri…

> "cleanupPeriodDays": 99999 Throw that in ~/.claude/settings.json

The agent will always fill in the gaps in your understanding. It's not a compiler. It's categorically different from any of the other ways we've built software. I'm not sure readin…

I am no fan of Zuck. But this is his whole deal. Instagram was a purchase. Facebook wasn't his idea. Threads is a copy. The 1 thing that Zuck understands better than anybody is tha…

lmao hi Matt I agree, though maybe the middle ground is something more like: the constraints of our environments shape us. It's easy to say that big companies are a weird and uniqu…

Most startups fail. Most big company projects are kind of worthless. These are two sides of the same coin. Producing something novel and valuable is HARD. Unbelievably hard. The id…

AI is so miserable for this. It's so focused on doing what you ask, it forgets that there's stuff worth doing that you didn't ask for, like defining reasonable abstractions. Gettin…

I was heading to dinner with a friend who worked in infra. Google maps said we could bike across town in 20 minutes. He suggested we leave 40 minutes ahead of time and grab a drink…

It's because it mostly doesn't matter what you are trying to get the code to do. What matters is what the code does. Session logs can absolutely be useful, but not when building fu…

100%. The problem with them isn't making sure they're doing the right thing, it's making sure they're not making bad assumptions. IMHO this is where code review goes until we fix t…

This is RL, right? Like, this is exactly why models have mostly converged around obvious style, because we train them literally on thumbs-up/thumbs-down data of what good behavior …

You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer …

If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it? This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from floo…

I think there's 2 important, but separate, ideas in this post: - Models are not good at or getting better at creating strong invariants, which his fundamental to good software - It…

The worst thing that can happen at an early company is that it sort of works. I like the deal where I roll the dice and don't have to work again if I win. I'm fine with the deal wh…

The core of the problem is that there are a million tools that make AI better, and no ways to measure whether AI is working better. Big companies with popular products have it. The…

Would love to chat -- ping me tr at tern dot sh

I think it's worse than that. At least if I dumped 5k LoC on somebody in 2021, you knew I spent the time to write it, so it's "fair" to ask you to read it. But I didn't write it in…