So, what great new products or startups have these amazing coding agents helped create so far (and not on the AI supply side).
Anywhere to check?
Readit News0xpgm commented on What makes Claude Code so damn good minusx.ai/blog/decoding-c... · Posted by u/samuelstros
0xpgm commented on I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me grell.dev/blog/ai_rejecti... · Posted by u/serhack_
I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.
Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]
[1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...
0xpgm commented on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers fortune.com/2025/08/03/ai... · Posted by u/robtherobber
> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that—we’re seeing the opposite.”
That is quite rich coming from Braintrust. The founder should spend less time doing press interviews and more time listening to feedback from his own community. I was from the outside intrigued by the unique way of working and signed up to learn more about it.
The thing that immediately jumped out is community members complaining about failing the initial screening without any feedback at all. This initial screening is apparently an AI interview. If the AI is so great, it should be trivial to get it to explain why it rejected interviewees. Unless it has serious shortcomings that would be risky to publicize.
Alternatively, this could be a sneaky way of collecting training data for the AI by preying on unsuspecting humans.
This is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome.
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
I hope you might have some better suggestions.
> The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.
The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
> What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like?
Depends on what one means by that.
Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.
A full OS? That’s more likely, but only just. If it had some way to run Windows, macOS or Linux programs (maybe just emulation?) then it might have a chance.
As a program? Arguably Emacs is a Lisp Machine for 2025.
Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp? I think that it probably has to be a language like Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth or Tcl. It’s hard to put into words what these very different languages share that languages such as C, Java and Python lack, but I think that maybe it reduces down to elegant dynamism?
> Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.
Since we're now building specialized hardware for AI, emergence of languages like Mojo that take advantage of hardware architecture and what I interpret as a renewed interest in FPGAs perhaps specialized hardware is making a comeback.
If I understand computing history correctly, chip manufacturers like Intel optimized their chips for C language compilers to take advantage of economies of scale created by C/Unix popularity. This came with the cost of killing off lisp/smalltalk specialized hardware that gave these high level languages decent performance.
Alan Kay famously said that people who are serious about their software should make their own hardware.
Your comment is quite subjective, and Python's popularity both in teaching and in industry would suggest otherwise.
0xpgm commented on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine cnn.com/2025/05/30/busine... · Posted by u/lwo32k
Interns and new grads have always been a net-negative productivity-wise in my experience, it's just that eventually (after a small number of months/years) they turn into extremely productive more-senior employees. And interns and new grads can use AI too. This feels like asking "Why hire junior programmers now that we have compilers? We don't need people to write boring assembly anymore." If AI was genuinely a big productivity enhancer, we would just convert that into more software/features/optimizations/etc, just like people have been doing with productivity improvements in computers and software for the last 75 years.
Isn't that every new employee? The first few months you are not expected to be firing on all cylinders as you catch up and adjust to company norms
An intern is much more valuable than AI in the sense that everyone makes micro decisions that contribute to the business. An Intern can remember what they heard in a meeting a month ago or some important water-cooler conversation and incorporate that in their work. AI cannot do that
0xpgm commented on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine cnn.com/2025/05/30/busine... · Posted by u/lwo32k
No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.
It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend
0xpgm commented on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine cnn.com/2025/05/30/busine... · Posted by u/lwo32k
The labor protections are basically ignored (you will be expected to work off the clock hours in any white collar role), and the free healthcare portion gets paid out of employer's pockets via taxes so it comes out the same as a $70-80k base (and associated taxes) would in much of the US.
There's a reason you don't see new grad hiring in France (where they actually try to enforce work hours), and they have a subsequently high youth unemployment rate.
Though even these new grad roles are at risk to move to CEE, where their administrations are giving massive tax holidays on the tune of $10-20k per employee if you invest enough.
And the skills gap I mentioned about CS in the US exists in Weatern Europe as well. CEE, Israel, and India are the only large tech hubs that still treat CS as an engineering disciple instead of as only a form of applied math.
What is the difference between treating CS as an engineering discipline vs a branch of applied math?
I and a few others still remember the site fondly, and it had the best UX of any social media service I've used since.