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Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

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Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#3
The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#4
post #3

The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.

CHANGELOG: surprise me

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#5
post #3

The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.

Even for older models I was (and am) of the opinion that a lot of the context-overstuffing cruft people have been wrapping around their LLM usage is more of an RNG-impacting (but not always for the better) lucky charm rather than it being universally helpful.

And a lot of people latched on to it as a form of self-soothing.

"I may not write much code anymore, but I can still be an expert prompt engineer!"

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#6
I don't get why Anthropic keeps saying how cool it is that they were able to rewrite bun in rust, I feel like if the model is really that good you wouldn't need a rewrite, you'd be able to create the runtime from scratch.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#7
post #3

The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.

All of these harnesses should support pinning config files and tools to specific models or families of models.

It's really tiring to have to tweak everything with each model release and then watch those changes mess up cheaper models in the process.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#8
post #6

I don't get why Anthropic keeps saying how cool it is that they were able to rewrite bun in rust, I feel like if the model is really that good you wouldn't need a rewrite, you'd be able to create the runtime from scratch.

I like this, it will be a really exciting benchmark to refer back to in a few years

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#9
post #6

I don't get why Anthropic keeps saying how cool it is that they were able to rewrite bun in rust, I feel like if the model is really that good you wouldn't need a rewrite, you'd be able to create the runtime from scratch.

Productivity theatre is when activity becomes celebrated over outcomes. It's absolutely everywhere in US tech culture.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#10
I feel like the Big Insight with Claude Code was 'give the AI access to tools, in fact to your actual laptop'. And of course 1.5 years later 'a harness to enable an agent to use my computer' has turned into the flagship product we expect from frontier labs

However. I don't think all the other 'Ideas' these harness-building guys have are all that universally applicable. Heck they are naysaying their own gearhead stack of skills.md and claude.md lately including in this video. But also I'm suspicious of this whole thing of spawning agents. For example "find every function in this codebase" is probably better done deterministically using a script that extracts function names rather than by spawning 20 agents to 'read' chunks of the code in token space. But it certainly racks up the token usage which is good for the person selling you inference...

And there is a lot missing in the actual harnesses frankly that isn't about more parallel agent ninjutsu. Like why isn't there a 'move this function from this file to this file' tool (copy/paste char range) and we have to see Claude/Codex/etc flail around rewriting huge chunks of code in token space

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