81–90 of 168 posts
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I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rat…
> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiven…
Isn’t this just a form of the bitter lesson? Our attempts to make engineered context and agents will simply be made obsolete with bigger and better models. Those transcripts are probably extremely useful for lesser capable models, and near unnecessary for frontier ones, maybe?
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Of course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive. Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.
Sounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow. Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"
Or are you saying the industry is (because it is)
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Especially a layer that is largely out of band in a project (i.e. ~/.claude/…). In any project where I’ve needed memory I just add a line to AGENTS.md telling it to use MEMORY.md to save memories or STATUS.md to track progress.
I've been enjoying having a little todo file the agent updates as it goes along, because then I can keep track of progress without scrolling through aeons of "Combobulating..." Also if context runs out you can just do "cat todo.md | agent" and you're off to the races again.
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I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.
I am now in the process of fixing code I wrote using AI. I have come to the realization that AI can't really write software and I am annoyed that it took me that long (months) to realize that.
Isn’t this just a form of the bitter lesson? Our attempts to make engineered context and agents will simply be made obsolete with bigger and better models. Those transcripts are probably extremely useful for lesser capable models, and near unnecessary for frontier ones, maybe?
Yeah, the question is whether this applies to all of context management. I've been using a custom harness based on https://minimal-agent.com/ (itself based on swe-mini-agent), which is like 50 lines for the core logic. Bash is all you need. For small tasks, I find it's about 8x faster (and uses 8x fewer tokens) than the standard harness for each model. For bigger tasks I haven't tested it much. It seems to work too b…
I can't see how it would diminish unless you are literally working on public domain stuff. Unless stuffing context becomes cost effective and will not affect AI reasoning (this will be much harder), I don't see why context engineering is here to stay until we have close to AGI.
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> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiven…
It doesn’t matter what materials or techniques you use to build a house. 99.99% of construction exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot more than using the right materials or techniques. Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fa…
This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right? At least you achieved the business outcome!
This mentality is so infuriating. This is why I need to buy new shoes every year. Or why my washer/dryer motherboard craps out in 2 years instead of 10. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore, this is why society is crumbling around us. Profit driven incentive for fast/cheap over everything else. And now I need to spend my day prompting an AI to fix AI slop code to keep the business hobbling along another day. What a fucking joke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive. Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.
Sounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow. Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"