291–300 of 532 posts
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Nothing; but PHP, in experienced hands, will be waaay more productive for small-to-medium things. One issue is that experienced hands are increasingly hard to come by. Truly big, complicated things, built by large teams or numbers of teams, teams with a lot of average brains or AIs trained on average brains, will be better off in something like Typescript/React. And everyone wants to work on the big complicated stuff…
I worked at a startup, they built their API in PHP because it was easy and fast. Now they're successful, app doesn't scale, high latency etc. What does their php code do? 95% of it is calling a DB. You're telling me today with LLM power multiplier it's THAT much faster to write in PHP compared to something that can actually have a future?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at a startup, they built their API in PHP because it was easy and fast. Now they're successful, app doesn't scale, high latency etc. What does their php code do? 95% of it is calling a DB. You're telling me today with LLM power multiplier it's THAT much faster to write in PHP compared to something that can actually have a future?
If 95% of what app does is calling a DB, then the bottleneck is in the DB, not with the PHP. You can use persistent DB connections, and app server such as FrankenPHP to persist state between requests, but that still wouldn't help if DB is the bottleneck.
rows = select all accounts
for each row in rows:
update row
One thing I've been wrestling with building persistent agents is memory quality. Most frameworks treat memory as a vector store — everything goes in, nothing gets resolved. Over time the agent is recalling contradictory facts with equal confidence. The architecture we landed on: ingest goes through a certainty scoring layer before storage. Contradictions get flagged rather than silently stacked. Memories that get rec…
How do you imokement the scoring layer and when and how is it invoked?
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> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.
It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.
This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…
I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…
I think of it more as "locking" the behavior to whatever it currently is.
Either you do the red-green-with-multiple-adversarial-sub-agents -thing or just do the feature, poke the feature manually and if it looks good then you have the LLM write tests that confirm it keeps doing what it's supposed to do.
The #1 reason TDD failed is because writing tests is BOORIIIING. It's a bunch of repetition with slight variations of input parameters, a ton of boilerplate or helper functions that cover 80% of the cases, but the last 20% is even harder because you need to get around said helpers. Eventually everyone starts copy-pasting crap and then you get more mistakes into the tests.
LLMs will write 20 test cases with zero complaints in two minutes. Of course they're not perfect, but human made bulk tests rarely are either.
This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…
I can't believe we're back to advocating for TDD. It was a failed paradigm that last few times we tried it. This time isn't any different because the fundamental flaw has always been the same: tests aren't proofs, they don't have complete coverage. Before anyone gets too confused, I love tests. They're great. They help a lot. But to believe they prove correctness is absolutely laughable. Even the most general tests a…
The price you pay for tests is that they need to be written and maintained. Writing and maintaining code is much more expensive than people think.
Or at least it used to be. Writing code with claude code is essentially free. But the defect rate has gone up. This makes TDD a better value proposition than ever.
TDD is also great because claude can fix bugs autonomously when it has a clear failing test case. A few weeks ago I used claude code and experts to write a big 300+ conformance test suite for JMAP. (JMAP is a protocol for email). For fun, I asked claude to implement a simple JMAP-only mail server in rust. Then I ran the test suite against claude's output. Something like 100 of the tests failed. Then I asked claude to fix all the bugs found by the test suite. It took about 45 minutes, but now the conformance test suite fully passes. I didn't need to prompt claude at all during that time. This style of TDD is a very human-time efficient way to work with an LLM.
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Why read code when you are getting results fast ? See https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... I am not kidding. People don't seem to understand what's actually happening in our industry. See https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johubbard_github-eleutherailm...
Why is everyone obsessed with Mac Minis. They're awesome but for the work that these people are attempting to do? Just seems... nonsensical. Renting a server is cheaper and still just as "local" as any of this (they want "self hosted", I don't think anyone cares about local. Like are people air gapping networks? lol) And a senior director of Nvidia? He had several Mac Minis? I really gotta imagine a Spark is better..…
This _all_ (waves hands around) sounds like alot of work and expense for something that is meant to make programming easier and cheaper. Writing _all_ (waves hands around various llm wrapper git repos) these frameworks and harnesses, built on top of ever changing models sure doesn't feel sensible. I don't know what the best way of using these things is, but from my personal experience, the defaults get me a looong wa…