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Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

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Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#71
post #11
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.

Salesman "recommends" you to continue wasting more tokens and on top of that, he "recommends" you to use only recursive loops with the latest and greatest models. Finally he also "recommends" that you do not look at the code, or even understand it. His "recommendations" are designed to get you to spend even more tokens and get you hooked on the Opus / Fable slot machine in order to extract as much money as possible f…

To be fair I think Cherny is high on his own supply, not cynically trying to sell us something. He is absolutely stoked that Claude Code is an overengineered piece of junk he doesn't understand.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#72
post #41
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.

There’s really not much to specialize in and differentiate yourself. All this harness customization is fleeting. Remember prompt engineering?

To be fair prompts is just English language intent abstracted for code. It is still am very much a thing. Why do you feel that harness customization is fleeting, enterprises care about them a lot for many reasons from compliance to security.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#73

There’s something missing in the discussion. Building software is about achieving outcomes, not about generating output, ie tokens. Yet, the ai business case is selling output, obviously. Not sure how to reconcile the two. Ideas?

Building bridges is about achieving outcomes and utility, but steel and cement suppliers are selling by ton.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#74

There’s something missing in the discussion. Building software is about achieving outcomes, not about generating output, ie tokens. Yet, the ai business case is selling output, obviously. Not sure how to reconcile the two. Ideas?

Building bridges is about achieving outcomes and utility, but steel and cement suppliers are selling by ton.

To extend this analogy, vibe coding can be defined as dumping steel and cement out of a helicopter into the water and calling the result a bridge because you can technically walk on it.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#75
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.

it was partially a marketing stunt

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#76
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.

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#77
post #57
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this but you have to pass a million long options like --disable-system-prompt --allowed-tools "" etc I have some wrappers but the only one I really use is a variant of that pinned to haiku for quick questions.

`claude --bare --system-prompt ""` is a good starting point!

Yep! Only (potential) downside to --bare is it runs in print mode; can't kick off an interactive session with it. The flags I listed above are a close approximation.

Anthropic had something about API-only in the description a couple months back, but they've been waking all those back for months since the fable access rollback fallout

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#78
post #12
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.

> because the new models can surprise you. Yes, they keep surprising me that they still keep doing all of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962703 with no improvement despite all the marketing assurances that "hey you don't need to read code anymore"

I do have to still remind codex to fetch large amounts of db records in batches otherwise it will always make a first false step of a naive select all style approach. Context wise naive can be ok for small datasets though so codex didn't know the naive approach was not viable. Context management the new code plumbing these days

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#79
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because the new models can surprise you. Yes, they keep surprising me that they still keep doing all of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962703 with no improvement despite all the marketing assurances that "hey you don't need to read code anymore"

I do have to still remind codex to fetch large amounts of db records in batches otherwise it will always make a first false step of a naive select all style approach. Context wise naive can be ok for small datasets though so codex didn't know the naive approach was not viable. Context management the new code plumbing these days

Context management doesn't help. I had this requirement explicitly in my AGENTS.md file. Just a minute or so into a coding session it (and Claude) would ignore/forget half of AGENTS.md (because the advertised 1M token context is nothing but marketing bullshit)

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#80
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salesman "recommends" you to continue wasting more tokens and on top of that, he "recommends" you to use only recursive loops with the latest and greatest models. Finally he also "recommends" that you do not look at the code, or even understand it. His "recommendations" are designed to get you to spend even more tokens and get you hooked on the Opus / Fable slot machine in order to extract as much money as possible f…

To be fair I think Cherny is high on his own supply, not cynically trying to sell us something. He is absolutely stoked that Claude Code is an overengineered piece of junk he doesn't understand.

Boris Cherny is most definitely the kind of guy who sniffs his own farts.

He can be informative to listen to, as long as you keep that in mind.

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