331–340 of 443 posts
AGI nowhere near
I know I'm replying to a shitpost. But I had a realisation, and I'm probably not the only one. If you can manage to keep structuring slightly intelligent tools so that they compound, seems like AGI is achievable. That's why the thing everyone is after right now is new ways to make those slight intelligences keep compounding. Just like repeated multiplication of 1.001 grows indefinitely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how often can you repeat the multiplication when the repetitions are unsustainable?
Yeah, sometimes it feels like we're just layering unintelligent things, with compounding unintelligence... But starting earlier this year, I've started to see glimpses of what seems like intelligence (to me) in the tools, so who knows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot mcp-everything! Yes, it's a mess, and there will be a lot of churn, you're not wrong, but there are foundational concepts underneath it all that you can learn and then it's easy to fit insert-new-feature into your mental model. (Or you can just ignore the new features, and roll your own tools. Some people here do that with a lot of success.) The foundational mental model to get the hang of is really just:…
You have a great way of demystifying things. Thanks for the insights here! Do you think a non-programmer could realistically build a full app using vibe coding? What fundamentals would you say are essential to understand first? For context, I’m in finance, but about 8 years ago I built a full app with Angular/Ionic (live on Play Store, under review on Apple Store at that time) after doing a Coursera specialization. T…
If your app has to do something useful, your app just exploded in complexity and corner cases that you will have to account for and debug. Also, if it does anything interesting that the LLM has not yet seen a hundred thousand times, you will hit the manual button quite quickly.
Claude especially (with all its deserved praise) fantasizes so much crap together while claiming absolute authority in corner cases, it can become annoying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know I'm replying to a shitpost. But I had a realisation, and I'm probably not the only one. If you can manage to keep structuring slightly intelligent tools so that they compound, seems like AGI is achievable. That's why the thing everyone is after right now is new ways to make those slight intelligences keep compounding. Just like repeated multiplication of 1.001 grows indefinitely.
I know I'm replying to a shitpost. Well enough said.
Just published this about skills: "Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
Finally a good replacement for MCP. MCP was a horrible idea executed even worse and they hide the complexity under a dangerous "just paste this one liner into your mcpServers config!" together with wasting tens of thousands of tokens.
I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev. Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.
I’m kind of in stitches over this. Claude’s “skills” are dependent upon developers writing competent documentation and keeping it up to date…which most seemingly can’t even do for actual code they write, nevermind a brute-force black box like an LLM. For those few who do write competent documentation and have well-organized file systems and the risk tolerance to allow LLMs to run roughshod over data, sure, there’s so…
That's ONE of the long games that are currently played, and is arguably their fallback strategy: The equivalent of vendor lock-in but for LLM providers.
I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev. Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.
MCP allows anybody to extend their own LLM application's context and capabilities using pre-built *third party* tools.
Agent Skills allows you to let the LLM enrich and narrow down it's own context based on the nature of the task it's doing.
I have been using a home grown version of Agent Skills for months now with Claude in VSCode, using skill files and extra tools in folders for the LLM to use. Once you have enough experience writing code with LLMs, you will realize this is a natural direction to take for engineering the context of LLMs. Very helpful in pruning unnecessary parts from "general instruction files" when working on specific tasks - all orchestrated by the LLM itself. And external tools for specific tasks (such as finding out which cell in a jupyter notebook contains the code that the LLM is trying to edit, for example) make LLMs a lot more accurate and efficient, efficient because they are not burning through precious tokens to do the same and accurate because the tools are not stochastic.
With Claude Skills now I don't need to maintain my home grown contraption. This is a welcome addition!
I fear the conceptual churn we're going to endure in the coming years will rival frontend dev. Across ChatGPT and Claude we now have tools, functions, skills, agents, subagents, commands, and apps, and there's a metastasizing complex of vibe frameworks feeding on this mess.
You forgot mcp-everything! Yes, it's a mess, and there will be a lot of churn, you're not wrong, but there are foundational concepts underneath it all that you can learn and then it's easy to fit insert-new-feature into your mental model. (Or you can just ignore the new features, and roll your own tools. Some people here do that with a lot of success.) The foundational mental model to get the hang of is really just:…
One great thing about the MCP craze, is it has given vendors a motivation to expose APIs which they didn’t offer before - real example, Notion’s public REST API lacks support for duplicating pages.. yes their web UI can do it, calling their private REST API, but their private APIs are complex, undocumented, and could stop working at any time with no notice. Then they added it to their MCP server - and MCP is just a JSON-RPC API, you aren’t limited to only invoking it from an LLM agent, you can also invoke it from your favourite scripting language with no LLM involved at all
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a great way of demystifying things. Thanks for the insights here! Do you think a non-programmer could realistically build a full app using vibe coding? What fundamentals would you say are essential to understand first? For context, I’m in finance, but about 8 years ago I built a full app with Angular/Ionic (live on Play Store, under review on Apple Store at that time) after doing a Coursera specialization. T…
If your app has to display stuff, you have no code kits available that can help you out. No vibe coding needed. If your app has to do something useful, your app just exploded in complexity and corner cases that you will have to account for and debug. Also, if it does anything interesting that the LLM has not yet seen a hundred thousand times, you will hit the manual button quite quickly. Claude especially (with all i…
For now, my MVP is pretty simple: a small app for people to listen to soundscapes for focus and relaxation. Even if no one uses, at least it's going to be useful to me and it will be a fun experiment!
I’m thinking of starting with React + Supabase (through Lovable), that should cover most of what I need early on. Once it’s out of the survival stage, I’ll look into adding more complex functionality.
Curious, in your experience, what’s the best way to keep things reliable when starting simple like this? And are there any good resources you can point to?