21–30 of 230 posts
Well, nope. There are three real moats left in software: Distribution, Data (Proprietary) and Iteration Speed. Very successful companies have all three: Stripe, Meta, Google, Amazon.
Data and iteration speed aren't moats. I don't know what you mean by "distribution".
> One of the most useful things about AI is also one of the most humbling: it reveals how clear your own judgment actually is. If your critique stays vague, your taste is still underdeveloped. If your critique becomes precise, your judgment is stronger than the model output. You can then use the model well instead of being led by it. Something I find that teams get wrong with agentic coding: they start by reverse eng…
> Instead, the right train of thought is: "what would perfect code look like?" and then meticulously describe to the LLM what "perfect" is to shape every line that gets generated. I think this goes against what a lot of developers want AI to be (not me, to be clear).
With the right docs, I can lift every developer of every skill level up to a minimum "floor" and influence every line of code that gets committed to move it closer to "perfect".
I'm not writing every prompt so there is still some variation, but this approach has given us very high quality PRs with very minimal overhead by getting the initial generation passes as close to "perfect" as reasonably possible.
> One of the most useful things about AI is also one of the most humbling: it reveals how clear your own judgment actually is. If your critique stays vague, your taste is still underdeveloped. If your critique becomes precise, your judgment is stronger than the model output. You can then use the model well instead of being led by it. Something I find that teams get wrong with agentic coding: they start by reverse eng…
> Instead, the right train of thought is: "what would perfect code look like?" and then meticulously describe to the LLM what "perfect" is to shape every line that gets generated. I think this goes against what a lot of developers want AI to be (not me, to be clear).
If you're properly bitter-lesson-pilled then why wouldn't better models continue to develop and improve taste and discernment when it comes to design, development, and just better thinking overall?
At least in part because some of Taste is fashion.
https://x.com/netcapgirl/status/2024140332963705342?s=46 evergreen.
Rick Rubin said it best. https://youtu.be/jg1WUOxY6Cg?si=0ajVvgKnyuSz0e2Y
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> One of the most useful things about AI is also one of the most humbling: it reveals how clear your own judgment actually is. If your critique stays vague, your taste is still underdeveloped. If your critique becomes precise, your judgment is stronger than the model output. You can then use the model well instead of being led by it. Something I find that teams get wrong with agentic coding: they start by reverse eng…
That's the classic 2nd-system effect - "let's rewrite it from scratch, now that we know what we want". And you throw away all the hard-learned lessons.