Brian Armstrong is an unabashed ahole and here he's doing more ahole things. Nothing surprising.

I recognize that uv is very popular but it still feels faddish.

I don't want my package manager to format anything.

I don't want my package manager to lint anything.

I don't want my package manager to `run` anything.

I don't want my package manager to even manage environments (yes yes this one is a bit extreme).

I want to have single purpose tools that work together well.

This way I can have a flexible, composable toolchain that can both adapt to me and my specific project.

For example, I like conda, pip, ruff, mypy, flake8. Someone else might like venv, pip, black, pyright, flake8.

This is the heart of the Unix Philosophy and I feel like it's a philosophy each software community has to reject, suffer due to that rejection, and re-adopt on a regular basis. I'd rather we skip the suffering bit.

Any time you encounter a self help piece ask yourself, "Does this advice assume I have significant motivation, concentration, and persistence?" If so, drop it right in the trash. If you had that 9/10 you'd be doing something pretty effective already.

Another win for sheep! If you've never encountered the wonder substance known as lanolin let me bring you some good news. This other sheeps wool extract is an oil that is absurdly good at healing dry and irritated skin. It's also fantastic for hair, producing manageable and silky locks. I know I sound like a commercial, sorry! It's usually marketed as nipple cream, which I think has unfairly limited its other uses. If you're a parent you may know about it, otherwise try it yourself!

I tried the following prompt and other than producing a four panel comic that was black and white it completely ignored every other instruction. This was with 4 ultra. Maybe someone else will have better luck but the failure seemed stable.

''' A four panel comic strip. Simple black on white. Stick figures for characters. In the first panel there is a stick figure man and a stick figure bird eating bird seed at his feet. He is slightly hunched over to show he is looking at the bird. In the second panel. He is more hunched over looking more closely at the bird. In the third panel he is even more hunched over practically with his head to the bird, he is crouched down, knees bent, hands on thighs. In the upper left of the third panel the tip of an enormous beak can be seen, but it's only a few lines so could be anything. In the final panel the beak has gobbled up the man and his arms and legs are flailing outside of the beak while the small bird continues to eat birdseed on the ground. '''

My wife caught a glimpse of this over my shoulder, "What an ugly truck." she said immediately. Pretty much sums it up.

How is this kind of analogy helpful? You can frame any optimization problem as RL if you try hard enough. RL is a method of optimization which calls the optimum "reward maximization". You can craft the reward function any which way you want.

The key point about RL is that it is a sequential decision making process. If you don't have something (an agent) making multiple decisions over time while interacting with an environment, then why bother calling it RL?

The most interesting and divergent part of this post is this bit:

"Don’t use agents or things like editor with integrated coding agents."

He argues that the copy/paste back and forth with the web UI is essential for maintaining control and providing the correct context.

"Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.

That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”

So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state."

I'm a big fan of this line of thinking. I've been arguing for years that RL should be based in homeostasis and this seems right along those lines. I wish I could have talked with him!